It must
have been around the year 2001 when my brother and I visited the largest game
expo of the region, the now extinct Spielmesse St.Gallen. We were mainly there
to catch up with Magic the Gathering and get ourselves some new decks. However,
one booth caught our attention. It had really cool little figures, space
knights, orcs and men in fancy trousers. These figures were pushed around
scenic boards and were drawn in simply by how cool the whole thing appeared. My
brother got a demo game and later told me all about how you move your figures
six inches, then you shoot and hit on a 3+, then you wound on a 5+ and then
your opponent can roll an armour save… These simple concepts of miniature
combat fascinated us and we spent our holidays that year by imitating the
system with our army men collection. Later my brother would get the Warhammer
40,000 starter box which he split with
me, he got the Space Marines and I got the Dark Eldar.
Then came
the Lord of the Rings Strategy Battle Game, I had read the books the year
before, before everybody read them (yes, yes I am such a hipster…), I also saw
the film and the whole thing was somewhat of an epiphany for me. In the years
following, my early teenage years, I was absolutely absorbed in the world of
wargaming. This addiction was fed by a local gaming shop where you could not
only buy miniatures but get help painting them and play games with the really
friendly owner, who went on to become my next door neighbour. Sadly the shop
closed in 2004, afterwards things weren’t that cool anymore. Even though my
area has a really good gaming club, the absence of a decent shop as well as me
growing older and being interested in other things led to me dropping out of
wargaming around 2006.
So I
finished high school and went to Uni in Britain. In the last year of my
undergraduate course I got into roleplaying, fist DnD, then Pathfinder and
finally Call of Cthulhu. Through roleplaying I became interested in miniatures
and tabletop wargaming again. In 2014 I bought myself a force of Dark Eldar to
play Warhammer with my brother again, but the brisk introduction of 7th
edition as well as the general feel of the game did not satisfy me. Having
played rpg’s for the last two years I found, that an overtly competitive play style
did not suit me anymore. Also I found the prices of GW products and rules way
too much to stomach.
Through
internet reading I found, that the gaming world was by far not as monolithic
anymore as it used to be in my teens. There wasn’t just GW, there was now a
whole plethora of different games to choose from, dozens of miniature
manufacturers with more affordable goods and a new generation of games that
were more involving than anything we played back in the day. Some even call it
the golden age of gaming, and frankly it is a good time to be around. So I am
slowly coming back to the very first things that drew me into miniatures
wargaming: cool figures and simple rules.
