Tabletop Wargaming – About Your First Army Love
Every one one of us one day picked up wargaming. No one forced us, it was a conscious decision. Today I want us to talk about our stories and what choices we made with our first wobbly steps into miniature bliss.
The toy that started it all. I was 8.
Some of us started in on our hobby as an extension of other more simplistic toy systems from youth. It was LEGOs for me, then Star Fleet Battle minis (*ugg, winces in shame*). Some of us came into the hobby very young with wide eyes, while others approached it later in life with an excitement tempered by years of gaming, scale modeling, of some other background.
Yes, humble miniature beginnings.
In any case we all walked into a store, looked around and picked out our first set of miniatures. I want to hear your stories of what you choose and why? What spoke to you as a fledgling gamer, and did you make a good choice looking back on it years later? There is no wrong answer to this question, and different people are attracted to very different things.
I’ll Go First…
My first miniatures army I collected from start to finish formally (as opposed to just painting a handful of random models), was a Blood Angels army based on a box of venerable RTB-1s back in 1989. At the time, they were the first plastic boxed set of minis Games Workshop came out with, so there wasn’t a lot of competiton in the plastic department. I loved the look of the beakie helmets and the studded exagerated shoulderpads. It always reminded me of the brutal looking knights from the 1981 film Excalibur, one of my favorite movies at the time. I dove into the insane sci-fi mixing pot of Rogue Trader and never looked back.
Mk.I Thunder Warriors clearly…
Twenty-nine years later, those same warriors of the Imperium are still duking it out on the tabletop (most recently under Stable Abe’s command on our Twitch channel). With ever updated rules and codexes under their belts and many new minis added to thier ranks over years, I think I made a good choice and hobby investment. There aren’t many things I bought 29 years ago that I still own or even remember.
Now if only I could stop…
~How about you, tell us your story and your first army love?
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