Wot ho folks and welcome to 'The GT Files' which will be a blog about my antics in miniature wargaming and associated things. Hopefully it’ll be regularly updated as well!
So I suppose some background about me and the hobby. Firstly I’ve been involved in the hobby now for over 15 years. I can’t remember the exact number but it did start with Hero Quest but I didn’t get into things properly until a few lads I knew at school introduced me to 40k and since then I’ve been a fan of GW and their toys. I play all kinds of games and I’ve had a go at lots of different systems but I always wander back to GW. Like a lot of people who get older and other commitments (My Wife, House and two Cats), I seem to be playing less and less and painting less and less, and I want to change that. So using this blog as a platform to kick myself in my bottom and get started doing more stuff. I’m also using this as an opportunity to change how I approach the hobby and my gaming.
So what am I blabbering on about when I say changing my approach then? Well like a lot of people who enjoy wargames and the social aspects of the hobby, I like tournaments. I’m not a massive goer to these kinds of events but when I do get chance to go I do enjoy them, and of course I tend to approach the gaming side of things from a tournament point of view. Unfortunately this view point can give you a very blinkered view of the hobby and it leaves you combing through army books looking things to exploit or telling people that the army they have spend the last six months painting is rubbish due to them including Unit X. So with my blinkers on, I plodded away with the hobby and I found all the fun slowly draining away from it and it wasn’t until myself and a friend were thinking about going to a GW WFB GT that I saw what was happening.
Now the story is as follows – Myself and my mate decided to go to a GW WFB GT and we wanted to qualify. For those folks who live under rocks, a GW GT is where anything goes and you often find some of the strongest/cheesiest lists in existence running amok. So as normal I’m dithering about what race to take while my friend has decided to take Dark Elves and a Shade Deathstar style army and the more both of us think about going to the event, the more both of us seem to be coming to the same conclusion. The conclusion is that we would both not find the event that much fun because we would be trying too hard to qualify to get into the Final (by painting up one dimensional armies) and we would much rather go to the indie events around the UK to get a more enjoyable set of games for a lot less money. It’s not a terribly exciting story but it is a big one for me as it shows that for all those years I was thinking about the best combo for my Lord/HQ or jumping from bandwagon to bandwagon, I could have been rolling dice and having a laugh. I’m not saying that tournament gaming is a bad thing but I am saying that my approach to it was because I over analysed things and never got anything done or painted. So hopefully I can chill out a bit now and have fun playing with my toys rather than worrying about how to beat that Daemons of Chaos army or how to slim down my 40k force because I have too many kill points.
On a different note, I popped into my local GW store for the first time in ages yesterday, and the new Planetstike stuff looks really, really nice. The new terrain is some of the best that GW has ever produced and the best thing is that it doesn’t cost the earth to have. I’m a big fan of Cities of Death and it’s nice to see GW coming out with similar stuff rather than another Army Codex. They just need to do something similar for WFB now! Anyway I’m going to sign off now as I’ve written a lot of words and my brain is fizzling. If you’ve been affected by TB (or Tournament Blinkers) or quite simply think I’m talking a load of tosh, drop a comment on here.
See you all soon ;)
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