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I know many posters on here, like me, are teenagers who aren't old enough or have enough time with school to get a real job. So my question to you guys is, how do you play the game? I operate off of $17 a month, and only about $10 of that is money I can put towards 40k. I still manage to build armies though by working summer jobs, selling off old models, heavy conversions, etc. My 2000 point Daemon army was built for roughly $100. I also built up a Necron army over time for $200, painted it, played with it for a while, and sold it for $225. So how do you guys do it?

When i was your age i did work for my parents, My mom wanted to teach me the value of a $ so she paid me for housework. My advice, work for family, they are always generous and always need work, like if you have young infants in the family offer to sit for them

I had three jobs when I was at school. Paper round in the mornings, trapper at a clay shoot on Saturdays and washing cars on Sundays. I had loads of money for gaming but no time to play. Go figure.

I've had a job since I was legal. 14 in my states case. I never really had an allowance from my parents per say. So I typically worked hard and saved my money to buy stuff. Before I had a job I'd do yard work for neighbors.

I also had 3 jobs, 2 paper rounds and a gardening job. Like notprop though I had little time to play.

Worked at my fathers welding shop at saved up for a purchase. Did that for about 5 years, then with the experience I went out and got a job. All you have to do is save and be smart.

 Ultrafool wrote:
Worked at my fathers welding shop at saved up for a purchase. Did that for about 5 years, then with the experience I went out and got a job. All you have to do is save and be smart.

Hey, that's just the plot from Flashdance...is this you?

hotsauceman1 wrote:When i was your age i did work for my parents, My mom wanted to teach me the value of a $ so she paid me for housework. My advice, work for family, they are always generous and always need work, like if you have young infants in the family offer to sit for them

That's what I get paid $17 a month for; washing dishes twice a day, sweeping the house every other day, walking the dog, various other jobs, etc.

notprop wrote:I had three jobs when I was at school. Paper round in the mornings, trapper at a clay shoot on Saturdays and washing cars on Sundays. I had loads of money for gaming but no time to play. Go figure.

During the school year, I have no time to play even without a job I just turned 14, age I can legally work, and got a job for a few weeks this summer but that's about all I can do.

 DarkCorsair wrote:
My 2000 point Daemon army was built for roughly $100

Resourceful and smart. Well done.

In high school I babysat in the mornings getting children ready for school. They were nightmares, and because the two previous babysitters quit, I was able to get $20 an hour. This was back in the late 1990s when I could get a 10 man 40ks squad for $25 and you needed a third of the models to play. A tactical squad could be 350-400 points after upgrades and you could customize the sergeant with wargear options to a greater degree than even the HQ choices have in the codex today.

I don't know how kids do it now with current prices-- I have a feeling a lot of it involves birthday and Xmas presents.

I didn't get into wargaming until I was in my mid-twenties, so I just made the supreme sacrifice and cut back on my alcohol consumption. It was hard, but I did it. Though I have also traded an unwanted army for another more than once. I don't know how kids do it, unless they have really generous parents. Lots of the teenagers at my FLGS have no more than a starter set and a couple of additional units and/or vehicles, so they have to team up. I can usually field 3,000+ points fairly easy, so a will on occasion play a 2v1, or even a 3v1, though that can take forever once they start arguing about who gets to do what and who is supposed to "take one for the team".

Cool idea for a thread
Back in the day there wasnt any Ebay or second hand online stuff really :(
Kinda picked up what you could or found little indie shops that sold "that weird warhammer 40k game" for a few quid less.
Or bought loads of Space Crusade/Hulk packs for Tyranids! hehe
Wow, thats a flashback!

 warpcrafter wrote:
I didn't get into wargaming until I was in my mid-twenties, so I just made the supreme sacrifice and cut back on my alcohol consumption. It was hard, but I did it. Though I have also traded an unwanted army for another more than once. I don't know how kids do it, unless they have really generous parents. Lots of the teenagers at my FLGS have no more than a starter set and a couple of additional units and/or vehicles, so they have to team up. I can usually field 3,000+ points fairly easy, so a will on occasion play a 2v1, or even a 3v1, though that can take forever once they start arguing about who gets to do what and who is supposed to "take one for the team".

That's what I did when I first started. I had an eldar falcon I found on ebay for about $15, an old metal warlock, 8 storm guardians (less than a legal squad), some dire avengers, and an autarch after a few months of collecting. Thought I had a huge army, turns out it was just under 500 points I played lots of team games against swarms of tyranids and regiments of guard though, was loads of fun.

well I worked 4 years at a water park, 2 of those as a supervisor and pumped gas on the weekends during the school year, saved up enough for a few warmachine armies plus college with no loans

vedreag wrote:
well I worked 4 years at a water park, 2 of those as a supervisor and pumped gas on the weekends during the school year, saved up enough for a few warmachine armies plus college with no loans

Sounds cool! This thread's more aimed towards being about 13-15 year olds though, where you aren't really old enough to have a real job yet.

Edit: I'm assuming by the fact that your profile says you started wargaming in 2011, that if you're currently in college you probably weren't playing at that age. Although I could be wrong

I sell scratch built titans and tanks on ebay. I also buy armies for cheap and flip them after I clean them up a bit. I make pretty good money too.

Chancetragedy wrote:
I've had a job since I was legal. 14 in my states case. I never really had an allowance from my parents per say. So I typically worked hard and saved my money to buy stuff. Before I had a job I'd do yard work for neighbors.

Me too. My first job was scrubbing toilets and mowing lawns at the state park for 4.25$ an hour. Did it for 3 summers and for weekends during spring and fall.

When I was a wargamer at that age, I would paint models for others to augment my buying power. I would tell them to give me what they wanted painted and when done, pay me in a box of models I wanted. That allowed people to use store credit, prizes, ebay, shelfwarming, bitzbox, whatever to pay me in product. Also, I would try to participate in my local GW and paint the store models as back then, they often let me keep the models after they got used for 6 months or so. I got Ghaz and 10 metal MANZ that way 15 years ago and I still play those models today.

it does get better eventually! don't neglect your studies!

I received $20 a month for house work, I generally saved over a long period of time to build an army or used money received on my birthday or Christmas. I did extra jobs around the house for extra money, like washing cars, cleaning the basement (Pretty big task in a house over 100 years old with an unfinished basement), etc. I also bought some of my IG stuff second hand to save money.

In the past 2 years, however, I found out what a gold mine I had in my old Star Wars Lego sets. I was lucky that I had been very careful in keeping my sets together as a kid, and I have now made over $600 (not accounting for original costs) from selling them on EBay. I have sold almost all for well over the new price, and sold some for over 200% of it.

 DarkCorsair wrote:
I know many posters on here, like me, are teenagers who aren't old enough or have enough time with school to get a real job. So my question to you guys is, how do you play the game? I operate off of $17 a month, and only about $10 of that is money I can put towards 40k. I still manage to build armies though by working summer jobs, selling off old models, heavy conversions, etc. My 2000 point Daemon army was built for roughly $100. I also built up a Necron army over time for $200, painted it, played with it for a while, and sold it for $225. So how do you guys do it?

Anymore?

I moved on from GW and played other games. Same as I did before them, same as I will after them.

My "Operating cost" is a bit higher then 17 bucks, though. You have the ideas in there though- Save money, and buy deals. Use some armies to fund others, sell higher and buy lower then you bought it.

Search and swap between your pals, and anything else that helps.

The game is at a pretty bad price now. People are sophising the pricing, wishing for better days, waxing nastalgic on the "Good Old Days". But look around at these other threads.

People are at or going to the breaking point, especially in this economy. They still want to play, but.... Finecast at over 50 bucks for 5 of the SAME MODELS?

I'm good, thanks. I do not like the finecast, and I do not like the current vibe that GW gives off. Not when there are plenty of up and comers rising past them in quality and quantity.

Back in the day, a box of 16- 20 guys cost you around 20 bucks. You could get two, and have enough to do stuff with extra.

Now? You have E bay, The Swap Shops, FLGS discount bins, other sellers that provide discounts, and even going into a game with some friends, and everyone chip in for some of the stuff, ALA kickstarter.

Its a bad time to be a new player, the poor things don't know what they're in for.

Over here you get about $160 a month throughout "high school". So during that time I could do some monthly spending on "The Games Workshop Hobby".

The cost of GW has increased so much in relative terms that I don't know how kids without parents having very deep pockets afford it. GW has always been on the expensive side, but their prices today are wild. I could buy whole units with birthday money, £10 in a card would buy a whole regiment. Now, even £20 won't buy you a Marine squad, and I don't think aunts and uncles the country over are sticking more than that in a birthday card. Jeeze, even a lot of character figures are £13-15 a pop in Finecast which is just sad, to think I thought that Abaddon the Despoiler was hugely expensive at £7 back in the day. Which he was, being about the most highly priced 40K single foot figure they did at one time, IIRC.

I used to go to a lot of wargames shows and pick up a lot of stuff second hand, this is why I have so much Rogue Trader stuff. My dad was buying most of it, ostensibly for himself, but I think we knew I'd be the only one with time to make and paint it all. That's changing now he's retired though. But to share collections and attend smaller wargames shows you really need parents that are interested in the hobby too.

It says something that GW prices are now so high that I can't justify paying them even though I work full time and have more disposable income than ever. Even the second hand market is a bit salty, though I have picked up bargains. This is basically why I gave up doing armies and do skirmish and character scale games/figures.

This is another fairly common thread for gamers.

For many of us, money was always an issue, but if you were fortunate and didn't have to assist your family with your income (the case for me) it was possible to gather together an army on your own.

I was lucky in the sense that I had someone in my life that was a history buff and wargamer and I got a lot of hand-me-downs. When that person made the switch to 40k I happened to get a small Space Marine army that he had dropped in favor for some Tyranids (many, many moons ago now!)

That was my first army, full of proxies and badly painted... I still have it.

While I'm 20, I still can sympathize with you greatly. When you get older, and into college age, you arguably have LESS free money than you do as a teenager. As such, I had to get a bit creative to get my IG army going. My financial difficulties are also why I barely have 500points of orks.

I bought a TON of used stuff, from tanks, to infantry, to bitz that I used to build units and vehicles from scratch. It's a pain, and I feel bad for rarely buying stuff from my FLGS, but when you're going with an army that typically has over 120 infantry models and 3 to 6 tanks at higher point levels, you have to do something. Luckily, my main 2 stores both have things I can afford. Battleforge has an awesome bitz bin that is very well stocked, and I make a habit of buying something from there everytime I'm in. The Rusty Scabbard has a ton of OLD metal heroes, many of them IG and Orks, and I've bought tons of them to personalize my army, and for cheaper than the crummy finecast heroes they have out now.

My other thing I've started doing is buying 3rd party. Other companies sell models for so much cheaper, it's stupid to not augment your forces in some way with them, especially for an army like IG, where you can use almost anything. As long as you're not playing at an official GW store, most people don't mind, and since I'll never go to the huge tournaments as a serious competitor, I'm not obsessed with how much of the model is "official" or not. Just make sure you check with the guys you play with to make sure they're cool with it.

I'm amazed to see younger kids in this hobby. I have no idea where they're getting the money from, but all the power to them. Enjoy your disposable income now I guess

Honestly, when I was younger (keep in mind living in a fairly rural part of america) I would help out a family friend by either: hucking the hay onto the trailer, or cleaning out horse stalls, not glorious work, but its money. As a kid you could always do some extra housework, may not be much money at the time, but it does add up.

One word. Nepotism. It has been the driving force behind 2 of the 3 jobs I have held in my life.

Chore money saved from massive amounts of house maintenance (vacuuming and mopping all 3 floors plus basement), grocery shopping for my parents while they're still working, and for a time, doing my grandfather's laundry because he couldn't physically get into the basement.

I helped teach a martial arts class. Was only 13/14 at the time, and made $50 a month with it. This was in the mid 90's though, so models were much more affordable then.

helped teach a martial arts class. Was only 13/14 at the time, and made $50 a month with it. This was in the mid 90's though, so models were much more affordable then.

Same. Also used to umpire local football matches, and depending on the grade was paid $20-$40/game.

Got way fit, front row seats to games, and paid to be there?

Winning.

I'm currently 17, and three factors allow me to maintain 40k. Note that I live in Australia, where the prices are even more exorbitant than the rest of the world.

1. Buy EVERYTHING online. If I want to actually play the game, I can't support my local gaming stores, because the pricing is prohibitively expensive.

2. Convert as much as possible. Pretty obvious, but once again necessary.

3. Be conservative with money. I have to make money through household chores, and tutoring work. Oh, and birthdays help once in a while.

But the reality is, it's really not all that viable. I have a decent-sized Nid, DE and Ork army, all of which was purchased cheaply, but with prices the way they are ATM, expanding is not really viable...

To conclude, I know that ridiculous prices kill off a lot of the younger support for the hobby, especially when video games appear to offer far more bang for your buck.

Personally i had to save up the pocket money my parents gave me, and buy/sell 2nd hand models until i got what i needed.

Now i cant believe when im in GW and 3 kids (the same 3 kids.....) are in their every day that ive been in. If im playing a game, they walk in with their mum and decide taht day they each want stuff (were talking baneblades, stompas, land raiders, not just a small blister) and theyre mum doesnt even bat an eyelid.

K3 wrote:
Now i cant believe when im in GW and 3 kids (the same 3 kids.....) are in their every day that ive been in. If im playing a game, they walk in with their mum and decide taht day they each want stuff (were talking baneblades, stompas, land raiders, not just a small blister) and theyre mum doesnt even bat an eyelid.

But look on the bright side, they will probably go off it once they discover Xboxes and PS3s etc and hopefully sell it all on eBay or something!