Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

A topic on the boards seems to be about starting communities of wargamers.

Before you try to start a community or gamign space, it is a good idea to have an idea of why people even start the hobby to begin with. Hopefully, this thread can help answer that question.

I was on the typical late 80's nerd path. I played D&D and one day I saw a nice four color ad i Dragon magazine featuring Warhammer 40K some lore bits and glossy, cool painted Rogue Trader era models, all metal. They caught my eye and I showed it to various people in my school and gaming group to get a like minded group of people together to try it. I ventured to the local FLGS a long, long way from my home and picked up some used, pre-painted Eldar Pirate minis.

The reasons I did this were:
1. The visual elements of wargaming, the spectacle, really appealed to my tween brain!
2. It was a tangible hobby in a way D&D was not. You could touch it and feel it, rather than just imagine it.
3. It tapped into my historical and sci-fi brain in a new and interesting way. I liked the abusdism, pastiche and dystopia of it all.
4. It was clearly made by gamers and for gamers back then, with an evolving world with plenty of space for you to build your own corner of it. It was therefore a bit punk and rebellious.
5. It was early days so there was still a lot of DIY, Toy-bashing, and Make-Believe that I enjoyed a lot.

How about you?

I grew up on a steady diet of ww2 spy/commando movies, and when I saw the Schaeffer's Last Chancers box that would allow me to play with a small crew versus an army I fell in love with the idea.

I had no idea what warhammer was, or how it was played, I just knew this would be fun.

D&D was seen as a very anti-christian activity (and the only RPGs I was allowed to play were West End's Star Wars and a superhero game whose name I can't remember).

I remember having to avoid certain details like Daemons, Chaos, and things like that at home.

I think that's why I eventually just kept playing the heroes* of the 40k universe like the Holy Inquisition (Witch Hunters, Daemonhunters, etc) or Imperial Guard tanks... glorious tanks!

I was never interested in Warhammer Fantasy until I discovered two things.

There were very interesting creatures at the game store: women... and they only played Warhammer Fantasy.

My hormone driven brain told me that if I played Fantasy, that I could hang out with the near mythical "girl gamer."

Thus, Bretonnians.



*

Alll the GIRLS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
but seriously, i cant remember, i think i saw a friend in HS with a warhammer book and thought it was cool

I was born into it. My dad and uncle are miniature wargamers. I remember their 6' x 8' table in our attic with modern fat the time) microarmor. My dad even made a battlefield from cardboard for my younger brother and me. It had a square grid and terrain drawn on it. He made up some simple rules for us to fight battles with 1/72 scale ACW figures.

We later got Battlemasters and into Warzone 1st ed.

I’ve been literally playing D&D as long as I can remember. My dad read The Hobbit to me and my brother when we were small as a bedtime story.

My gaming group when we moved to KY were primarily wargamers, who also did some RPGs. Pushing paper chits around in Car Wars, Ogre, or SFB, tokens in Axis, cardboard standies in Battletech.

My friend Dave was the first one to bring in actual minis, for D&D. This opened the door, and I started painting them as well. At this point we were not miniature wargaming, but wargaming with minis. Still hexmaps and chits for things we didn’t own minis for.

Around this time we started in with GW, but it was RT as an RPG, or games like spacehulk.

At some point in the late 80s, early 90s some of these games came out with full min rules ditching the hex maps. At that point I’d say we were fully mini wargaming.

In college I got caught in the start of CCGs with M:tG and others. My FLGS branched out into WHFB 5th, and later 3rd ed 40k. I was a core regular at that point and helped grow the community.

My gaming group at the time were mostly roleplayers, not wargamers, although most halfheartedly put an army together, with various levels of skill.

Most of my games were pick ups at the store, or once that shut down a few times a year with my friend Phil and his cousins, 40k or Silent Death.

These days I try to occasionally get in pick up games at the local GW, but am not a regular anywhere.

LotR, simple as.

 Inquisitor Gideon wrote:
LotR, simple as.

This. My best friend got the D'agostini magazines with lotr minis in them, we played a couple of rounds and I was hooked.

A good question, since if you saw me IRL I'd probably not fit the wargamer stereotype very well.

Truth is, it was almost all my older brother. He's 2 years older and we have no other siblings, so I ended up following along with him in a lot of what he did.

He was the one who got the 2004 & 2005 Games Workshop catalogues. He got the ball rolling. He was the one who painted, and sort of just dragged me along.

He quit Warhammer at some point around age 18, and I began drifting off too (though not before introducing Warhammer to the nerd circle in school). Then years passed without any wargaming.

Back in Jan 2021 I decided to finally return to Warhammer, and it's been good times since.

My wargaming has not solely been Warhammer, mind you. In the last few years a friend has tried to get me into Battletech with mixed results, for example. But I suppose GW got their talons in me deep.

This is an interesting question.
As I was writing my initial response, I realized how all my influences and choices led me to wargaming and miniatures well before I discovered Warhammer existed!

Fantasy & Mythology fascinated me very early.
I was reading Norse mythology books when I was around 8yo.
One of my earliest reading memories is the Book of Three by Lloyd Alexander. Indian in the Cupboard hooked me as well.
Also around this time, my Dad introduced me to the plastic model cars & aircraft hobby.
I had the big army men set with green & gray soldiers from the Sears catalog.
This inspired me to make castles with LEGO. But this was the 80's so the Castle kits didn't exist yet.
We had free HBO because the neighbor beat up the cable box outside and I guess that worked. I watched things like Conan the Barbarian, Sword & the Sorcerer, Beastmaster and more.
Around 10, I "graduated" to a full train set layout in my bedroom. It was a 4'x8' sheet of plywood with the green felt stapled on.
Dad loved slot cars, so it was a natural progression from that.
Nearly simultaneously, my mom gave me the Hobbit/LotR box set paperbacks and the D&D Red Box.

So there I was with an extremely active imagination, the massive lore-sink that is LotR, newly exposed to D&D, and the skills to make & paint models.

It wasn't until around Freshman year that I learned of the existence of plastic model soldiers and that there were game rules for such things.
Looking back now, my descent into wargaming was inevitable.

A few friends & I split the Space Marine box RBT01 around 1992. I got 5 marines from it.
I painted them with Testor's gloss paints.
We discovered the Rogue Trader book & played some of that before stepping into it fully when the 2nd edition box set came out.

For me, it kind of wraps up a lot of my interests in a single place.

I was definitely a toy kid and collecting figures and learning about their story has always had a lot of appeal. Not really an artist, but I like to draw and color. Board games were also something I enjoyed, but I was definitely more into videogames of all types, but in particular I've always loved fighting games in the arcade which for me minis scratch a similar itch.

In terms of getting in, I actually tried Battletech after playing a whole lot of Mechwarrior 2 but found myself in over my head. I did definitely see the appeal and the idea of something like a physical version of Final Fantasy Tactics was hugely on my radar.

I actually started with Heroscape after college. I was looking to change jobs and move to a new town and had some friends that insisted we spend a few months on something tabletop. Heroscape just provided what I was looking for out of the box. Loved the game and got some friends playing after I moved, but as it started to die off I looked to other pre-paints like MonPoc and WoW before realizing that the whole style of game wasn't viable anymore.

Locally, the board game renaissance was really kicking off and a lot of my friends were very into it. I still tended towards stuff with minis and one of my friends got me a little set of craft paints to spruce up my games. Later that turned into giving the MonPoc devs OTHER game a try and we dove into Warmachine right as Mk2 was building steam.

So yeah, it really kind of ties a lot of interests into one place. My wife was really the one to point out that what's driven it over a lot of those other things is that videogames in particularly have gotten ironically a lot less social as they've gotten increasingly online. I never really thought of it that way, but videogames were always something I played with friends on the couch or in arcades or something. Even single player stuff passing the controller and the like. It's really the friends and community that have pushed it to the top of my hobby pile.

Not much to tell. I got Heroquest as a young'in when it was released, then someone brought a Citadel Catalog to school. I wanted to play pretend with the little lizard people and daemons.

I had Heroquest, Dragonstrike (the one with the terribly kickass VHS) Battletech and Battlemasters as a kid in the 90s but kinda fell out of it through my teens and college years, it wasn't until I was married and realizing that my wife was a late sleeper on weekends and I liked to get up at dawn and I found myself with a a good 5-6 hours of quiet alone time and decided I needed some kind of hobby. I was vaguely aware of warhammer fantasy and 40k because of heroquest and the dawn of war games but had never played but thought it would be fun to paint a handful of figures now and then. I walked in to my local game store that I had never actually been in before and bought the battle for skull pass starter box and ive never really stopped since.

My parents made the mistake of giving me 2 WHFB goblin bolt throwers as a birthday present when I was 10.

Not really sure why but it sure cost them when I wanted the rest of the army.

All my friends were doing it.

I didn't like miniatures. I played with army men when I was little, and on one memorable Christmas, told all grandparents and divorced parents I wanted army men, and there was some consternation when I got so many, but that was by design. I wanted battalion-level battles!

Then I discovered tabletop wargames, with hex sheets and stuff. That was what I liked. I had zero interest in miniatures which were fussy and needed painting. Why fight a mere battle when one could contend for continents?

The problem was finding players, and by the mid-1990s boardgames were in a bad way, but miniatures were taking off. GW was hitting its stride and if I wanted to play, I had to adapt, and so I did, first with WHFB, and then 40k.

And so here I am.

It's fun. 'Nough said.