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I'm allowing multiple choices, because a person's introduction to the hobby can take a combination of forms. E.g., maybe a friend of yours introduced you to a 40k video game, which led to you eventually playing the board game. I'm also curious about the role of video games in increasing the discoverability of GW games... I imagine that nowadays, more people go from playing 40k video games to playing the board game than the other way around, since video games have a much low barrier of entry.

For my part, I learned about Warhammer from two classmates who had the computer next to me in computer class, circa 2004, and who wanted to get into the hobby. They were not my friends yet, though we became friends when we started collecting and playing. I never asked how they, themselves, heard of it.

EDIT: Kinda surprised to have only one "other media" answer so far, given the popularity of Warhammer video games. Perhaps DakkaDakka has an age range that skews older.

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My very first GW experience was the Battle Masters board game. Not 100% GW but made in collaboration with them. I bought it because it seemed like a cool board game, didn't even think about painting the miniatures or anything like that.

I got into "the hobby" proper when a fellow 13 year old moved to my school. He was into 40K and Fantasy and got a couple of us into it too. That's when I really took the red pill.

I was at a comic book shop looking for an old issue of Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos when Steve, one of the guys who worked at the shop, said, "Look at these guys."

He handed me the box of Colonel Schaeffer's Last Chancers. I couldn't afford a full 40k army for a while, but you could play 40k with just those guys.

I rarely won, but it was the most fun I ever had in wargaming.

That's why I believe I always pick extremely tiny armies in an attempt to recapture that joy.

Are we talking board games or tabletop? Cause my family had a ton of board games, which included Talisman and Hero Quest.

Board games? Never.

Tabletop? Store on the Royal Mile with my grandmother and cousins during the Edinburgh Fringe.

Like many of my undisclosed vintage? HeroQuest.

Saw it on a TV ad, and got it for my 9th Birthday. Then, like Gert, discovered the GW Store on the Royal Mile, and that was that.

36 years later this May, and I’m still hopelessly, irrevocably hooked.

 Gert wrote:
Board games? Never.

Tabletop?

I must admit this is my first encounter of this specific kind of terminological pedantry.

-Guardsman- wrote:

 Gert wrote:
Board games? Never.

Tabletop?

I must admit this is my first encounter of this specific kind of terminological pedantry.

I was a little puzzled by the OP, too because I didn't know whether it refered to GW's Board games or actual wargames. Because my first Wargame was lotr in 2002, my first GW board game was... "Attack of the necrons" about 15 years later.

I had played Battle Masters (Still have that in my closest) and Hero Quest, but what really got me into it was when me and my buddy were riding bikes, and we went really far from home and came upon a strip mall. In that mall was a game store and we walked in and that was that, 30+ years later I am still playing the game.

I'm not sure if I heard about Dawn of War or the WHFB video games first (Shadow of the Horned Rat?), but DoW was the only one I played which led me to trying out 40K and then WHFB.

Hero Quest and Battle Masters were also my early experiences, but for proper tabletop wargaming, there used to be a site called Mania.com or something like that, that was mostly comic-related. They had an article about 40k, and I remember the Blood Angel in errant armor from the thumbnail. I'm talking early days of web, too, probably around when dakka was just starting.

-Guardsman- wrote:

 Gert wrote:
Board games? Never.

Tabletop?

I must admit this is my first encounter of this specific kind of terminological pedantry.

Well it's pretty important that you learn & understand the difference.

The Space Crusade commerical was the most awesome thing in the world to a 10 year old kid, crazy about anything like Star Wars or Aliens. Then on my birthday, during the New Years Eve scramble, my parents took me to an Index shop and it was the coolest birthday present I ever received. My brother and I - both thinking "omg this is just like Aliens!!!" - enjoyed that evening.

A while later I came across this magazine in WH Smiths called "White Dwarf", and thought "wait a minute - thats a Space Marine from Space Crusade? The Blood Angels? What is THIS?", I said in a rather Rockwell fashion...

Now Space Marines were cool, but seeing that Blood Angel Terminator - with the assault cannon - was mind blowing. And Marines also had DREADNOUGHTS??? A BIG-ASS GENESTEALER ON A GOLDEN CHAIR???

Honestly I do not recall at all. Not one single blip of a memory as to what I saw first; where, when, why how or anything. I do recall that I was into making models of ships (not expertly either at my young age) and Warhammer was more model stuff, but way different.


All I recall is I saw this:



And I wanted THAT! Titanic warmachines striding to battle over legions of tanks and infantry. My Titan Legions though sadly saw very little play time since no one played it locally. Thus I was half pressured into experimenting with that 40K stuff with the bigger models where tanks were stupidly insanely expensive and back then the rhino wasn't all that exciting. Tyranids though - those were "proper aliens" so I tried them out in a tiny way.

Interesting question. For me personally, probably lost in the mists of time, but I suspect school friends talking about cool stuff they had seen at our local FLGS. In those days, it was a science fiction bookshop in the Southside of Edinburgh which was eventually bought out by Forbidden Planet. It stocked books, comics, magazines, RPGs, and lots of board games.

Back when GW published a multitude of game systems from all sorts of universes.

Stuff like this:-

I was already into Battletech, and running a little group in the RPG club at school in 8th grade. Through there I made my best lifelong friends, and one of those guys slowly introduced me to 40k, which we all took up maybe a year or two later. White Dwarf 192(?) sold me on Space Marines because of the Boxnaught and a battle report featuring some UM Terminators.

Yeah I was another victim to the awesome Hero Quest and Space Crusade TV ads!

-Guardsman- wrote:

I must admit this is my first encounter of this specific kind of terminological pedantry.

Well GW sells actual board games in non-GW stores and has done for some time.

Its not pedantic because someone getting into Warhammer when they went to a GW or FLGS is different to someone getting into Warhammer when they got Space Marine Adventures in Barnes & Noble.

Both are valid entry ways but the thread reads as if you're trying to gauge if there's a lot of pickup for Warhammer from non-GW or FLGS sources.

I think I walked past the shop window of the Games Workshop in Watford at some point in the /mid-90s and thought the models looked cool.

I think my dad felt painting models was healthier than playing on the megadrive so got me one of the starter paint sets. The one with a space marine and maybe a chaos warrior in.

Got Adeptus Titanicus with all my school trip money in a sale in a large department store in Germany (around 1989/90). It looked great. Got white dwarf. Got blood bowl 2nd ed.

I had a neighbour who had Heroquest. It blew my mind as a kid and I was so excited by it.

It was years later that I saw Warhammer models in the local toy shop and thought they looked like the same sort of thing.

Then a friend of my brother's loaned us the rulebook, codex imperialis and wargear when we went on holidays and I read, re-read and re-read them over and over and stared at the pictures and got the 2e starter for christmas that year.

When I was a kid, my parents had Hero Quest, and I was obsessed with that game (only learning decades later that it was related to WH Fantasy). My first proper introduction was my friend in 4th grade brought his 3rd edition Catachan codex to school one day and I was instantly hooked.