Cut it open and see if it swallowed any gems.

July 11th, 2007 by Brack

And so begins my new, long, meandering project. Talking about tabletop games. Most will be RPGs, but there will be a few wargames and boardgames on the way. Like this wargame - the one that started this whole hobby for me:

When I was 12 and in the second year of secondary school, Friday afternoon was set aside for “hobbies”. I picked “Wargames” having been enamoured by the small metal dwarves I had seen on sale in the local toy shop “Little People”. This shop was part of a shop called “JT White’s”, it mostly sold porcelain figures downstairs, but upstairs had toys and models. And also hairdressers. In my olfactory memory I will associate Citadel Miniatures and TSR games with the smell of perming chemicals.

Anyway myself and a few friends started playing this game after I purchased a second hand copy of the second edition from some older boys. It would have been 1987, so the 3rd edition had just come out making this redundant somewhat. I can’t recall us ever having that many miniatures for this game. I had a couple of dwarf single figures (back when they cost 60p each and had lead in them), a box set of metal “Dwarf Lords” and the box of plastic skeletons. I really can’t remember what my friends had. In fact that whole year seems a vague blur. I remember getting my first issue of White Dwarf (issue 100) in April 1988, and a year later I lending it to a kid called Lenny Oliver and I never got it back.

I remember my parents (read:mum) being a little wary about this whole endeavour as there was the fantasy RPGs = satanism thing going on at the time. Somehow I think it being a wargame and being British-made reassured them I wasn’t going to be a satanist. Of course within a year I had become more enamoured with RPGs than wargames. Albeit one that definitely wasn’t being turned into a scapegoat.

It turned out that was the last year the school had “hobbies”, but by the summer of 1988, my friends and I were meeting every Sunday afternoon for spikey chaos thrills and I was the proud owner of a subscription to White Dwarf, which came with a free game that changed my life.

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