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Who got you into Warhammer 40,000, or GW games in general? What year or edition was it?
What was your first army? Do you still have it?

I got started via a group of high school acquaintances (who became my friends thanks to the game). It must have been around 2004, at the dawn of the 4th edition.

My first army was Dark Eldar (odd choice for a beginner, I know). I never bothered to paint them. I also collected Bretonnians when we switched to Warhammer Fantasy, and I did paint most of them. After high school, I quit the hobby for about 10 years, and my first two armies ended up in the trash following a move.


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My friends were into 40k which I mocked them mercilessly for playing with "dolls". Then I saw them playing dawn of war which they explained was the pc version of what they played.
Well I had many an afternoon at my friends place eating hot chips and playing dark crusade.
That got me interested enough to go along to a painting and modelling session. Assembled my first (and only) space marine. Enjoyed the socialising but not enough to get into the hobby.

Then Soulstorm came out and I thought the SoB on the cover was hot. Suddenly there was a whole army of women for me to play (that sounds wrong) and this amazing pipe organ tank that I instantly fell in love with.
Few weeks later, friend took me into my first GW store and bought my first box of Sisters.
Been with the girls ever since.

I got into 40k with Dawn of war 1. although I actually got into the table top in 5th edition, I picked up ABR and played space marines, my inital army was ultramarines but I;ve seen gone blood ravens to give myself a bit more flexability witbh chapter tactics.... well that was the idea *looks at the upcoming white dwarf*

BrianDavion wrote:
I got into 40k with Dawn of war 1. although I actually got into the table top in 5th edition, I picked up ABR and played space marines, my inital army was ultramarines but I;ve seen gone blood ravens to give myself a bit more flexability witbh chapter tactics.... well that was the idea *looks at the upcoming white dwarf*

Eh, doesn't matter. Still can pick any tactic.

There was this small shop which sold comics, trading cards and miniatures on my way to school. One day I stumbled in, saw the Lizardmen and -being the dinosaur nerd I was back in that day- immediatly fell in love.

I think I was something like 11 or 12 years old and it was right before the 3rd Edition 40k was released. It took me ages to save up for the warhammer fantasy core box, but I loved my lizards Sadly I sold everything a few years ago, only to reenter into the hobby after 2 years of abstinence

Cousin. 4th edition Orkz.
Not sure on the date.

After that i went Chaos. Well full chaos, CSM and then R&H.

 Sir Heckington wrote:

BrianDavion wrote:
I got into 40k with Dawn of war 1. although I actually got into the table top in 5th edition, I picked up ABR and played space marines, my inital army was ultramarines but I;ve seen gone blood ravens to give myself a bit more flexability witbh chapter tactics.... well that was the idea *looks at the upcoming white dwarf*

Eh, doesn't matter. Still can pick any tactic.

yeah my real reason was I wanted to do something other then blue, and thought I'd do a homage to the video game that brought me to 40k.

AoBR, 5th ed, $50USD yielded 10tac, 5 terms, dread, cpt, 20 boys, 5 nobs, boss and 3 deffcopters.

1987 Rogue Trader. A friend of ours got the rulebook and two boxes of the RTB-01 marines we split up (6 of us, so a squad of marines apiece). Somehow, in the end I ended up with all of them and still have them.

Most of my friends dropped out when 3E came out; I was primarily into D&D at the time and mostly just collected a few models here and there and after a bad experience in 2E, just collected for a while. Didn't play again until the tail end of 5E, when my eldest son started to show interest after playing the original DoW games (that I had bought ages ago and played only a little of myself).

A school friend showed me his Chaos Space Marines back in 2009 as well as Dark Crusade on PC and I decided to bite the bullet and pick up Tyranids with the battleforce and codex. I was enamoured with the Alien movies at the time and thought Tyranids would be a good fit there for Alien terrors.

Then the 5th edition codex came out and invalidated my Carnifexes and I will never forgive GW for that. Switched to Eldar and now I pretty much only play space elves.

Way back in '88/89 we played a lot of D&D and Battletech.
This led us to finding a local hobby shop that stocked both. They also carried GW stuff & had WHFB games on Sat afternoons. This led two of us to starting up WHFB (3rd ed) armies. He went Orcs/Goblins, I did dwarves. Though technically the 1st army we both played was Chaos (because we had a lot of D&D minis that fit that theme well enough) while we were learning the rules & building up those initial lists of O/G & dwarves.
Yes, I still have my original dwarves (plus many nany more).

Flash forward about two years & the gaming group had added a guy that was really interested in this sci-fi version of WH called Rogue Trader. And it was rapidly gaining a following at the local shop.
Being a college student on a limited budget, I wasn't really looing to add yet another minis game at the time. Plus I vastly preferred WHFB to the sci-fi stuff (and really still do). But now & then I'd run a few squads of a friends Squat army. So I knew how to play.

My actual entry into 40k came very late in RT when the Space Wolves were but a list in the pages of WD.
Every spring the local shop would host a tourney for each of the games that got regularly played/sold there. And this one guy Dan just wouldn't shut up about how awesome he was at 40k, how his Eldar were going to dominate everybody who entered, etc etc etc. Thing was? The tourney was in mid-April. And it was only Jan when he started this crap.
Come late March, after I'd grown quite sick of hearing him go on, I decided it was time Dan received a proper beat down WH style.
So I went to considerable effort to assemble the most broken SW list of as many cyclone/assault cannon SW termies as the points would allow. This was not easy as I had to scour every shop within about a two hour drive radius to lay hands on enough packs of cyclone & assault cannon termies. In a few cases, working through the list of retailers in the WD pages, I found shops that would mail order to me. (I looked at direct from GW, but the shipping time was too long).
But it was worth it.
I played Dan in round 1/3. Most of his "awesome" army was Banshees. What's that saying about not bringing a knife to a gun fight?
So the 1st turn consisted of me simply letting him advance. Turn 2 he's now in optimal range of my guns. On the bottom of turn 2 I open fire & wipe about 90% of his army off the table as I launch every missile in each of the cyclone. (in those days the more missiles launched, the bigger the blast radius. and cyclones only had x shots each) ) And then I mowed the shattered remnants down with the following fire from the assault cannons. There was no turn 3. And there were no SW casualties.
Dan & I are friends to this day & he still remembers this particular loss.

Shortly after this tourney WH40k 2nd ed came out & I rebuilt my SW into a proper 2e army.

And yes, I still have those early RT/2e SWs.
Most of the termies now reside in my "1st Co" SM force (and are somewhere in storage).
The rest of the SWs, save for a few bitz (weapons/packs/shoulder pads/bases) + drop pods, are the exact same army I built at the dawn of 2e. They are one of 3 armies I currently play (SW, all SM dreadnoughts, Khorne demons) . Exact same models/squads, different century. Oh, and a better paint job.

Saw it being played at a con back in 1987 or so.

Was more into battletech at the time. Bought a box of RTB001s and the rulebook and had a few games with some mates. Using 1/72 scale or so mecha for the "walkers" (Dougram and Crusher Joe for the most part. The BT Battlemaster, Thunderbolt, Griffin and a few others are from the first one, the original "locust" was a CJ design).

My first "army" for the game was eldar. There weren't "lists" as you know them today when we first started. They came along a bit later.

So Yriels eldritch raiders was my first "army".
Space marines was my second army.

Got a box of eldar from a guy for 40$ to paint around the end of 2nd, Did not really play untill 3rd edition as i am more a Hobby RPG person.

Had Fantasy figures for other games beforehand. Really still have a love for the old fantasy more than 40k. But i started playing 40k itself first.

A local hobby shop that covered everything from trains and airfix kits to historical figures also had a small selection of GW models, this was around the late 1980's. I picked up a few blisters of space marines, took them home and painted them humbrol gloss red. Within a few months I was using my friends space orks against his own space wolves (he was far more affluent than me)
Not long after that I'd purchased my first Space marine strike force and we were playing Rogue Trader regularly. But it was epic that really took off for us and became our most played game, I used marines and he Eldar

Was walking past the GW store, looked at the models through the window and remembered how much i loved the look of the game when i was a child going to the GW shop and seeing all the armies and the people painting / playing the game. So like alot of people my age in the 90's we got it because it looked so cool especially on the box, but in the end it was too complicated if you wanted to learn how to actually play / paint properly like the older / experienced people or paint some thing that looked good. So it was a short time in the game, was only in it for maybe a year like alot of people my age, but i always loved the idea of it and really enjoyed my short time in it, but ended over time forgetting about the hobby completely. Any way, now i'm in my late 20's, and as i said, i was walking and walked past GW shop, saw the models in the window, and suddenly my fascination and love for it all started to slowly come back to me, and i thought that, now i am older i might actually be able to paint reasonably ok and understand how to actually play the game and really be able to fully get in to it , and from there i bought some pre owned models off the Internet, learnt about stripping and stripped them, tried painting them with out primer, realized you needed primer so stripped again, and then painted them sort of correctly-ish. And yeah its been great so far, best thing ever!.

I mean Stormatious, that seems to show that you got the Talent for the painting and building part of the hobby for sure!

Bought second edition starter and Angels of Death codex around 1996-1997. Just saw the starter and felt something epic about it. The artwork, the models, just everything was looking awesome. Started with Blood Angels but since it was hard to get metal models in Iceland I gave up and started collecting Craftworlds as I loved the look of all the jetbikes and skimmers. I also loved the lore of an advanced dying race fighting back against the encroaching darkness.

Then I quit for a time(due to unavailability of models) until around 1999 when I was travelling through London and saw a Ravenwing bundle deal in White Dwarf. So without much further ado I ordered it and had it sent back home, and suddenly I was knee deep in Craftworlds and Dark Angels.

Still have the armies to this day and both are about 10.000 points each by now.

First army was Sisters, but my first model was something from the initial release of Battle for Macragge back in fourth edition-- before then I was a fan of the lore but never really had the confidence to model and paint. I learned to paint from the ultramarines in that box, though I sold all but one of them (for nostalgia purposes, kept the first ever one I painted, a tactical with flamer), plus the tyranid sprues. After that I picked up some Sisters, though of them, I only still have a single squad of retributors and my canoness-- kept them out of nostalgia, while I sold the rest to pay for college textbooks.

Not Online, thank you so much, that's very very kind.

Have a great night and day.

Heroquest.

Though now I think about it, I do have a very, very dim memory of visiting my Great Gran Rhonda in Oxford. Just bimbling about the shops, and one had a display of 28mm lead dwarfs.

Absolutely no idea if they were Citadel or what have you. I couldn't have been much more than 7 or 8, absolute tops (Heroquest came when I was 9). Heck, I couldn't even tell you if the memory is real, or some weird head trick on the shard of a dream.

I do remember my Mum not letting me have any though. So could well have been real!

I started with gorkamorka, I think it was something like -98 or -99. And soon I was collecting ultramarines, undead, bretonnians. Alot of good memories from childhood, when we played with my brother. I still have some of those miniatures.

Space Crusade.

It was photocopied pages from adeptus titanicus that got me into the store though. Had rogue trader and a few books but played epic/space hulk until the release of 2nd ed.

First army was a mix of beakies and old metal figures, the 'official' whirlwind conversion, and a whole bunch of random odds and ends.

Necromunda took over from 40k back then though. Wasn't until late 4th/early 5th I got back into it with a few daemonhunters and a bucket load of ebayed sisters (they were really cheap back then)

My friends old Warhammer fantasy kit. But this was also when AoS blew up the old world and it was that weird point where nothing had rules and nobody knew what was happening with armies

So because of that we started 40k, I played marines he played dark eldar.

was at the end of 4th. I had several friends who played it a lot. I was doing a weekly board game night with them and an RPG night a different day each week. one day they asked if I wanted to go to the FLGS to try out another game they played. I played a game as tyranids vs imperial guard. After that game I researched the armies and settled on orks. I bought several infantry boxes and built battlewagons and kannons out of knex (at the correct size and scale) played small games until the assault on blackreach box came otu then really expanded from there buying 3-4 of them, one every few months. That is where I started my space marines to as I had 15 termies, 3 dreds, 3 captains, and 30 tac marines.

I started just at the beginning of 3rd edition. A friend of mine had started Orks. He showed his guys to me, and I thought they looked cool. I went into the local hobby store, and saw that there was an alien race of entirely organic monsters. Starcraft had come out the same year, and I loved the Zerg, so this felt the most "right" to me and I started them. Another friend started Space Marines (Black Templar, I guess because they were on the cover of the rulebook).

We had lots of battles together. Both of those friends exited the hobby long ago. Eventually I started branching out into other armies. By the time I started Space Marines, I started to commit to painting better and having fully painted miniatures on the table. Eventually I gave away my Tyranids and Necrons, partially because I didn't enjoy playing with them as much, and partially because I was embarrassed of my old paint jobs. I've given up the Space Marines too, but that was because I have a friend that re-entered the hobby and wanted to play Space Marines, so they're still "mine", but they're really his now.

I currently have Chaos Space Marines (2nd attempt, but this time it stuck), Orks, Eldar/Harlequins, Tyranids (restarted, hilariously got sold some of my old models through a person that I guess was given them), and Genestealer Cult.

I got an random white dwarf from the local newsagents when I was 13 and after reading it I was hooked, I'm not going to lie my family was piss poor so for months I just got WD until xmas when I got space crusade..

Then the local computer game shop which was a GW retailer sold the original BL novels off on the cheap when they went out of production. Followed quickly by me getting the original 40k rulebook and imperial marines boxer for half price because 2nd edition was coming.

After that I got a paper round and built up a massive Blood Angel's army of 2 tac squads,a dev squad,3 Rhinos a Capatain and a terminator squad. With a couple of jet bikes and a land speedier.

Those were the days

A schoolfriend of mine brought in Bloodbowl for the end of year games day, showed me his Blood Angel army and then I bought a model and 3 paints with my pocket money to paint.

My college roommate played the Lord of the Rings Battle Strategy game. For about 3 years we'd collect and play each other.
Then I moved and the local games store I found had ZERO LotR players. So in 2006 I started my first 40K army (Nids) and I've been hooked on 40K as my exclusive gaming experience ever since

-

It was the early 90s and my family and I were on vacation to Ocean City in Maryland. We often spent whole summers there between school. So we show up and had our fishing gear and were walking to the fish and tackle store we always use only to find out it was closed and replaced with, what we thought, was a comic book store called Games Workshop. We thought this because they had no real posters up but there were tons of 'white dwarfs' in the windows.

So we went in... and had a short game and introduction to the hobby. As we left the store gave us a dozen copies of various white dwarfs they had on hand and each of them was in a plastic bag with a model space marine. So my brothers and I put them together that evening and the next day went back for more. We ended up buying the second edition box set with like 20 models and as many cardboard cut out models it seemed, as well as Space Hulk since my brother instantly fell in love with Tyranids and it came with a ton of models.

And the rest is history. Probably threw away 5k between the 2 of us over the past what, 20-25 years and we played religiously through the end of 2nd edition through about 6th I suppose. My brother still plays and somehow managed to stay with Tyranid the whole time. I've dabbled in probably every army to some extent but I'm mostly in it for the hobby these days. Still enjoy putting together the odd model and painting it. But not too many as there are so many better models easily available on the market.

But I still buy a model or 3 every year or so. If they ever get the rules in a place where I can pick up a game and count on it actually being finished in an hour or so I'd probably play again.

Second Edition was out, three of us were getting tired of Magic the Gathering already. We found 40K. All three of us picked a Space Marine faction, because we had to be the good guys.

One guy picked DA, one picked BA, and I was pushed into UM - who at that time were the red headed step children of the Imperium.

Back them they still had psychology, and Azrael caused Terror, Dante caused Terror. Calgar caused... fear.

So today when I see people whine about Ultramarines, I smile a little bigger on the inside and sing a little song in my head.
But I also agree no chapter should be a favorite son.