After our days of playing with our Star Wars figures waned (No, I don’t still get them out, honest) and we were heavily into computers, we also fell into AD&D. A really complex ruleset and characters that improve over time in a pretend world, it was awesome. But the more we played, the more we had bigger and bigger battles.
Stormbolter told me about something called Warhammer that was quite new. We couldn’t afford it so we sat down and wrote a set of rules imaginatively titled Battle Axe instead. We had more fun putting the rules together than actually playing it. Then something called Rogue Trader (Warhammer 40,000) hit the scenes. A sci-fi Warhammer! Get in!
And that’s how it started. I chose Eldar, Stormbolter went for the Blood Angels chapter of the Space marines. Stormbolter then set the one rule that I hated at the time but was absolutely the right decision. We could only play with painted models, none of this unpainted models on the battlefield rubbish. Needless to say, Stormbolter is far better than me at handling a paintbrush. I’m just glag that newer style tabletop miniature games like X-Wing come pre-painted as both our outsights are not as good as they were.
Our first games Stormbolter loved as he trounced me every time. I got so fed up I tied a totally different army – Dark Eldar. The main issue was this though – we had completely misread the rules and played the game end ways on – His marines just sat back and blasted the crap out of me whilst I tried to get near him.
Anyway, once we learned how to play properly and every single itteration of the rules later, we still love it. Even though some of the versions of the rules have quite literally been stupid. The latest set though (7) is pretty damn good. I didn’t stay with DE long and went to Chaos Space Marines and Chaos Daemons which are still my mainstay, although I’ve now got a Tau Army which is a completely different experience.
Stormbolter has stuck with the Blood Angels all these years, although he also has quite a sizable Tyrannid army now and tried out the Necrons.
Epic was great fun for a while and gave an extra dimension to the WH40K universe and we played it for a few years. We also tried out the Middle Earth Strategy game but never quite got fully into it.
Warhammer 40K will forever be the tabletop warfield we will return to, it’s just that after 25 years of playing it, we have longish breaks away from it, like at the moment.
Veteran Gamers UK 