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The poll says it all, but please do post with how you got into it and what got you started.

Could be that you started making terrain or models; painting models; playing with your parents models; parents introduced you; got into reading the lore. It's also good to say if it was only a rough estimation of age as some of us might well just not remember how old we were when we got into the hobby.


Note for this I'm going to say lets stick to tabletop and lore and leave computer games aside. Not that they are not a fantastic introduction into the hobby, but they are somewhat to one side as its worth being its own hobby (computer games) unto itself.



Myself I got into it through Titan Legions and I was - going by the Wiki - around 8 and 11ish (based on it coming out in 1994 and Epic 40K being a lot lot later in 1997). Kind of surprised as I thought I was older! Granted back then I was much more just enjoying the collecting of models and building of them. Actual games were far and few between.

I was 21 or 22 when I got started. While I was working at Blockbuster I ended up becoming friends with one of the regular customers, and we've been best buds for 10 years and to this day we play tabletop games every week. He and his brother were talking about 40K one day in the store, and I started asking some questions and thought it sounded really cool. I went over to their house after a shift and watched them play a game, and from there I was hooked. Picked up Assault on Black Reach shortly afterward, but the lure of tanks quickly drew me towards Imperial Guard and they became my very first army back in 5th edition.

I would of been 16 at the time in 1983.Before then I played D&D and collected the miniatures. It was a natural progression at the time for people like myself who wanted to fight bigger battles and still be able to develop a few good characters and hero's.

Played D&D for as long as I can recall (6-10 for the poll) but didn’t start minis wargaming until my early teens.

Was introduced in 2001 - 2002 so I'd be 7 or 8 by my uncle (Rest his soul) who got me into space marines and eldar. He gave me old school space marines and eldar.

I think i was ten? Memory is tricky.

But i was into non-miniature wargaming long before that. Kriegspiel and tactics II were some of the first games I played with my dad, when i was probably five or six.

Wait, unless we're counting hero quest as miniature wargaming?

I probably started buying minis around about 10 or 11 having already had a few years building arifix kits,

and actually using them a year or two later for 12 or 13 when I got hold of a second had copy of Warhammer & the McDeath scenario pack

I was first introduced to the hobby by an older neighbour while I was still in Primary school (in the UK, that's from 5-10 years old). That was when I bought my first White Dwarfs and played around with my neighbour's odd models - about Rogue Trader era, but I didn't really collect or paint or anything. I have a really vivid memory of reading WD158 (Tyrion and Teclis on the cover?) in the playground of my Primary school.

When I started Secondary school in 1992, 40k 2ed came out and I got involved in wargaming 'properly' with a group of schoolfriends. We would play at an afterschool games club (some of the older kids played D&D) and later around our houses at the weekend from about age 11-15.

I started secondary school in 1990 and joined the after school wargaming club. That's where I was first exposed to WH40K, Space Hulk, Blood Bowl and Epic. I got into WH40K and Space Hulk and played RT from age 13 to age 16 before going to sixth form where there was no community. I came back to the hobby earlier this year...

I was 22 and engaged to my now wife when I found out about the metal ACTA Babylon 5 minis. I wanted to buy them to flesh out my micromachines collection, so I don't consider that to be my entrance to the hobby. However, while searching through hobby stores in Oakland, I came across a table set up for Battlefleet Gothic and I was intrigued.

Over the next few months I searched online (I think Google was new then, or not even around, so searching was far more laborious) and came across some sites that didn't impress me. A year later, in Westminster I found a D and D store and asked about BFg on a whim. The clerk pointed me to the LA Battlebunker. After some brief yet extreme sticker shock, I bought a Dauntless cruiser and some painting supplies. My wife and I painted up the Babylon 5 ships (now that we knew painting miniatures was a thing) and I suppose either that counts as my entrance to the hobby or it was when I received the BFG starter for Christmas. I got my brother and my friends into the game, found out that BL published some BFG novels (Execution Hour and Shadow Point) and gradually slithered deeper into the hobby from there.

Sometime around 82/83 Warlock of Firetop Mountain lead to White Dwarf which lead to D&D and WHFRP, then onto WHFB (2nd Ed I think, was in a box) and then 40k

Also a WW2 board game, North Africa with model tanks around epic scale had a fancy (for the 80's) gadget that calculated battle results that was a big influence

Blood Bowl, aged 9 or 10.

Airfix 6-10. First printed rules (still Airfix) 15 at local wargames club. 40K 29 - bought starter box with son, then 6.

6-10, I grew up in a super geeky house and minis and plastic models had always been on display but that was when I started doing models of my own. Around 9-10 was when I painted my first and second minis from reaper at a convention and it was all downhill from there. My first has since been repainted but the second is still in her original colors with NO additional work.

In Primary 6, in 1989, a schoolfriend showed me some of his miniatures - an original Great Unclean One, a couple of plastic Titans, and some other odds and ends - and lent me some White Dwarfs. The first games I played were Blood Bowl 2nd edition, Adeptus Titanicus, Space Hulk and Advanced Heroquest.

The first things I got were White Dwarf 130
and the newly-released Space Wolves Captain miniature (I had the painting guide booklet and asked for a Terminator so I could copy the Space Wolves Terminator step-by-step instructions)
I looked at the Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 books, but they looked a little too complicated, so I got Space Marine for Christmas in 1990. I got into 40k with a box of RTB01 Marines, and eventually also had the box of 36 plastic Orks, as well as a few metal models. I started a High Elf army a few months before 4th edition Warhammer came out, and a Space Wolves army when the 1st edition army list came out.

Between 8-9 when Hero Quest launched. While I had played toy soldiers a ton (fortunate that my father was into models and toy soldiers for Christmas was always a win!).

I actually started dabbling in game design and modifications at the same time! I converted hero cards for Ral Partha miniatures I had purchased at a local hobby store.

Following Hero Quest was Battlemasters so that was my first entry into "gaming" in a battlefield scale. Those Battlemasters figures ended up serving as alternate bad guys when I first picked up some 40K minis on a lark. Even at the age of 10-12 I figured out that Games Workshop was behind Hero Quest, Battlemasters and these new sci-fi guys I'd picked up from some game called "Warhammer 40K". I chopped up Battlemasters figures and glued bolt guns and space marine backpacks onto them in order to mimic playing stuff I'd seen in White Dwarf.

Leaving middle school I more or less had a small 40K army and then realized it was its own game, and started into 2nd edition proper with some friends. The rest, is history. So, from playing soldiers when I was old enough to realize what they were...till now.

I was about 19-20 when I got into miniature wargaming. But, to be fair, I was already into boardgames, cardboard-counter-based wargames (RIP Avalon Hill), and RPGs as early as 10 years old.

I started with Airfix 1/72 planes when I was about 14 as a hobby, but that didn't go any further than painting a plane every month or 2 (and very badly). In high school around 15 years old I discovered Dawn of War through LAN games with friends, and that got me interested. I spent many a weekend browsing GWs website looking at models, and trawling through the 40k wikis to get in as much as I could. Christmas that year, 2013, I got given Dark Vengeance for the Dark Angels, and that was the beginning. Played GW games until pretty much bang on 2 years ago, and then moved on to a lot more other games

Around 18 (post school - I turned 18 late in my final year of school and gaming started for me early in the next year. I'd been building modelkits for a decade or so by that point, though.

I went to a local games convention to meet a friend and was amazed by the variety of stuff that was around. There were no GW stores anywhere at that point (and sydney had 2 independents in the cbd, one of which ran that convention at a local college campus (now part of the UTS campus).)


I started with "Modern" period (80s cold war) and ww2 - both in HO scale in 1987. Roco Minitanks were the bomb.
Moved onto 40k and Battletech later in 1987. Then swapped BT for something else and daisy chained my way through gaming to today.
40k had 25 years of my life, but it was never my ONLY game.

10... or 11.

I voted 10.

I'd been playing D&D since I was 10, my first wargame was Aerotech (because someone bought the Battletech copy just before I arrived at the store), when I was 17 (almost 18) - back in 1988.

Summer of 1988. I was 11.

Got into things with the Tyranid Attack boardgame, back in the days of 2nd edition, and we would use the rules in the back for fielding alternate forces like terminators and marines to play out small skirmishes with additional models bought seperately. Battlemasters was my first true wargame, technically, and then onto true second edition.

 AegisGrimm wrote:
Got into things with the Tyranid Attack boardgame, back in the days of 2nd edition...

Tyranid Attack was the first thing I got from GW.

Honestlly, "technically" I had a few models from blister packs before that and had fiddled around with painting them with my dad's model railroad paints and brushes, but the Scouts and Termis vs. Tyranids and Genestealers from TA were my first true tabletop "forces" that I attempted to paint in a cohesive way, and then my buddy and I would just use all the "spaces" measurements for shooting and movement converted into inches and just pitted the forces against each other with no real "balancing" mechanism, which then prompted the first instances of homemade terrain (as storebought terrain really did not exist back then).

It was one of those instances of lightning in a bottle, which has been hard to replicate since then. I am hoping in a couple of years I can do the same thing with my son, either with the actual copy of Tyranid Attack I still have (with all the minis, actually), or maybe with a set of simple rules and the figures from a copy of Sedition Wars I have that's still unopened in the basement, as that would pretty interestingly be a 21st century update of my gaming history with those particular models.

Would have been 13/14ish. It was the LoTR:SBG part-works that introduced me to the hobby. So it would have been '03 or '04 I think.

14 or so

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

 AegisGrimm wrote:
Got into things with the Tyranid Attack boardgame, back in the days of 2nd edition...

Tyranid Attack was the first thing I got from GW.

I had Advanced Space Crusade, myself - did that come before Tyranid Attack?

I believe so. I think the physical parts of the game (boards, minis) were made into Tyranid Attack? Really was a fun game.

Blue box Holmes Basic D&D in 1980. That was the beginning of the "gaming" side of my hobby life. The modelling and toy soldiers side was there earlier, since I was 5 or 6 or whenever I got bought my first Britains toy soldiers for Christmas.

It was a couple of years after that miniatures brought the two streams together for me (couldn't afford them as a 12 year-old!), but it was definitely Holmes Basic D&D that was the beginning of this whole "gaming thing" became a hobby instead of just a few toys I was playing with.