If you, like me, have a backlog of Warhammer 40k and other miniatures so big it’s threatening to crush you in an avalanche of grey plastic, you should check out Pile of Potential. This free online tool lets you record and track your hobby projects so you can keep on top of your backlog, see how much progress you’ve made, and share your list with friends so you can keep each other honest.
I had a lot of Warhammer 40k even before reviewing tabletop games was my job, and despite my best efforts, I have a mess of miniatures in every stage of completion. I also have ADHD, which comes with a free serving of ‘terrible memory’: if I can’t see something, it might as well not exist. Note taking apps like Pile of Potential are an invaluable tool that make my backlog visible without needing to pore through piles of plastic.
You can use a spreadsheet or even a paper notebook to do the same thing, of course, but Pile of Potential has been designed specifically to keep track of painting miniatures for miniature wargames. There are definitely other apps out there that do similar things – I’ve just stumbled into this one and I really like it.
Because POP is hosted online, you can set projects to be private or public, letting you can share your progress (or lack of it) with friends or the internet at large. Knowing that other people will see my backlog grow if I buy a new unit instead of painting an old one is a great motivator to stay honest. Speaking of which: here’s my Pile of Potential. At time of writing I’ve only just begun to populate it, but it will catch up to the cluttered reality soon enough.
You can track all the important information for each unit you’re working on: how many models are in the unit, whether you’ve built, primed, painted, or based it yet, and how many points it’s worth. If you’re planning a project in advance you can also record the unit’s cost and whether or not you’ve purchased it yet.
Units are organised into big tables of data called ‘projects’. I’m using each project to represent one Warhammer 40k faction, Horus Heresy army, season of Kill Team, and so on, but you could cut things up as fine as you like. You can toggle on or off each data column in a project, so if you’re a painter who doesn’t care how many points your Space Marine chapter is worth, you can ignore that column.
Each project provides handy progress summaries, showing you what percentage of your miniatures are fully painted, and how many points in total are finished. This is a big motivator for me: I can see that my completion percentage for my Imperial Fists project will go up quite healthily if I just base a couple of the units I’ve already painted.
And seeing how much progress you’ve made is really neat. I hadn’t twigged that I’d painted nearly a full 2,000 points of Deathguard, and built another 500, until I entered everything into the app. That feels genuinely great.
If you want some tips or tricks on getting more painting projects finished faster, check out this guide I wrote at the start of the year. To see the latest thing I’ve been painting, check back tomorrow…
Source: Wargamer
