Retrospective and Future plans
We dedicate our 100th post to a very special occasion: 10 years of Miniature Wargaming! (insert sound of excited clapping and champagne bottles opening)
Yes, A Gentlemanly Sport turned 10 this year!
That’s 10 years of regularly pushing toy soldiers is worthy of a proper 100th post on our blog.
Following, we’d like to tell you where we’ve come from, how we’ll celebrate, and what you might see in the future.
Unfortunately, we couldn’t find all the epic pictures we took during all these years. But we hope to convey some of the greatness from the last decade of A Gentlemanly Sport.
Background
We met in May 2013, on a bus chartered by the SFFS Luxembourg to the Roleplay Convention in Cologne (Germany). By pure chance, we discovered that we had a common hobby: miniature wargaming.
We started wargaming, known to us in the 1990s as the “Warhammer Hobby”, each to our own during our high school years. The wargaming community in Luxembourg, always being very small, was an even smaller circle in the 1990s (the pre-social media age). People mostly played in their same small circle of friends.
Anyway, fast forward to 2013…
While strolling around the convention, we came across a booth selling Infinity by Corvus Belli, today a very well known futuristic sci-fi skirmish game, to us…utterly unknown.
It looked all shiny, modern, and slick… We both agreed: why not? Let’s try this shit! We each bought an army box, got home to paint as good as we could, and very soon had our very first game.
From there on, one game followed the next. Infinty, being too rules-heavy for our taste, slowly got replaced by A Song of Blades and Heroes and Kings of War 2nd edition, which Eric kick-started at the time (his first ever kickstarter backing). And since we were still sitting on our old Warhammer miniatures, we managed to field large armies quite quickly.
From here on, we tried out one game after the other, always enjoying the huge variety of play styles and settings.
By the way, what was essentially the name of our WhatsApp group, quickly became our self proclaimed Miniature Wargaming Club: A Gentlemanly Sport!
What we’ve done these 10 years
Gaming
Over the years, we played plenty of different games. Very soon, we went down the rabbit hole of collecting rulebooks. David went even further and avidly hoarded rulebooks, like a dragon does with his precious gems.
We tried many of these rules ets, looking for those we could use in a fantasy, sci-fi or historical settings. Obviously, there were some rule sets we liked and some that were not to our liking.
Eventually, some games would become a fixed staple. Games like Frostgrave, One Page Rules, Gaslands, and Kings of War (fantasy and historical) are regularly served on our gaming tables. Even some small indie games like Brawl Arcane 28 Full Thrust, and Space Weirdos are quite often on the menu.
We played some games extensively in the past. Take Rangers of Shadowdeep, for instance. We played the main campaign and several expansions in cooperative mode of up to three players, as well as solo. Furthermore, we used to play lots of Infinity in the beginning before moving on to other games.
Speaking of solo play, Nurgle’s blessing, also known as COVID-19, had us playing lots of solo games as well. Sometimes, we would play Rangers of Shadowdeep, Frostgrave, One Page Rules, or Sellswords & Spellslingers each at the comfort of his home, but being connected via Discord. We used webcams and a microphone to “broadcast” our respective games “live” to each other, ask for counsel in our respective predicaments or sharing tactics and tips. All in all, it worked incredibly well and it’s a valuable experience for those days in adult life, when a regular gaming schedule is simply too complicated.
Ultimately, we play plenty of different games as we like to test them in the hopes of finding a new favorite game. As you might have noticed, games like Warhammer 40K and Age of Sigmar are not on our list. We did, however, test play them. Even though our humble beginnings lie in the naive yet grim, 1990s Warhammer Fantasy world, we took our distance to Games Workshop. Their constant rule changes, the specter of codex creep, their pricing model, and a somewhat toxic fan ghoul community pushed us away. We preferred to slumber in our Warhammer Fantasy 4th edition nostalgia rather than jump aboard the hype train.
We favor miniature agnostic games that allow us to field the models we like and cherish. Miniature wargames, in our opinion, should be accessible to everyone, regardless of income, time, and space.
Painting and crafting
We still have fond memories of our cardboard terrain pieces we used in our Infinity and A Song of Blades and Heroes games. Up to this day, we still use them occasionally, as well as some terrain pieces we built in the 1990ies. Eric even built a fancy 3 x 3 double-sided game board for our Fantasy and Sci-Fi games! Being too attached to it, to throw it away, it’s now taking up real estate in Eric’s small garage … . One day we’ll showcase it on this blog.
Since then, however, we’ve come a long way. We built insane quantities of wargaming terrain, filled plenty of boxes with it, and learned a lot about terrain crafting in the process. There’s an impressive development of skill to be seen in the finished projects.
Miniatures from 2013 and 2023
The same can be said for our miniature painting skills. Eric and David vividly remember painting their miniatures for Infinity, using those ancient techniques they developed in the 1990s: paints applied directly from the pots. One thick coat to rule them all!
Over time, and many hours of painting later, both of us got better and faster (at least David) at painting. We are by no means masters of the craft, but that’s not our ambition. It’s the fun, the relaxation and the creativity that are our main drivers. And of course we like to play with painted minis.
Technology
Over the course of time, we learned new techniques and how to use different tools as we’re open to try out new things if they add value to our hobby.
Nowadays, we both use 3D printers to print miniatures, terrain bits, and other gaming gadgets. That said, we still buy regular plastic and metal miniatures, if we appreciate the design, the creator, or the price.
We have a dedicated setup for our weekly online hobby sessions simply called #motivationthursday (or just #). We use a webcam and our Discord server for this. Eric even built a setup in his man cave, with multiple cameras, a dedicated microphone, all controlled by the OBS streaming software.
As we took on blogging a couple of years ago, we also got into web design, SEO, and social media (follow us on instagram here 😉 ).
Drinking, smoking and political uncorrectness
During game sessions, we like having a fine drink or two. There’s usually whisky, rum, or brandy involved. (Most of them are too expensive to develop an unhealthy drinking habit).
Occasionally, we even pair it with a pipe or a cigar. And yet another “skill” we leveled up …
All while leaving politically correct speech and censorship on the other side of the gaming room door.
Excursions
In the last 10 years, we’ve been to some conventions as well, like for example RPC, Spiel, Crisis, and LuxCon.
Besides some gaming sessions with our partners, we organized some events as well. Eric hosted a Cthulhu RPG Halloween dinner, whereas David invited to a Frostgrave Christmas dinner mega game event, and we went to a classical music concert with the wives.
Blogging
In 2021, we decided to share our memories and ideas with you, our reader. Admittedly, it took some convincing to push David, our very own wargaming hermit.
What started out as a photo dump of our tabletop battles turned into a proper blog. Documenting our games and our crafting and painting projects made us more aware of how we’re approaching things in our beloved hobby.
Social Media
Since May 2022, we’re on Instagram. There, we post pictures of projects in progress, finished and unfinished miniatures, etc.. At the time of publishing this article, we’ve got 195 followers.
2023
So what’s planned for the remaining year? Old age is waiting for no one, and we look forward to boring our children and grandchildren with stories and pictures of our martial feats. One thing we want to do is a proper photo book for ourselves. We made already one in the past, but that was already some years ago. Eric is already deep diving the AGS archives.
Orktober will have some ork themed posts over on Instagram again, since Eric is (slowly) making progress on his 2000 points ork army for Kings of War 3rd Edition.
Yesterday we took the club treasure chest and our wives to our local Italian restaurant to properly celebrate 10 years of genius and madness.
There will, of course, be lots of new posts, following this one.
Eric, for example, will soon publish an article about his experience with the fantasy genre in his youth. It’s all about old school, nostalgia, and escapism. We’re sure some of you might relate to this. David’s got some interesting stuff planned as well.
So feel free to visit our blog from time to time.
Future plans
But more important than 2023, is how we want to shape the future of A Gentlemanly Sport. Adult life, the bane of many wargamers, lurks behind every corner. We might approach our hobby at a slower pace, but we definitively won’t abandon it.
In that context we still have some short and long term projects up our sleeves.
Maughthrond passion project
We are still looking forward to launching our passion/vanity project someday and playing the battle of Maughthrond pass scenario from the Warhammer Fantasy 4th edition starter box. Currently, Eric’s green skins are still undergoing (very slow) painting.
Frostgrave – The Wildwoods Campaign
With the release of Joe McCullough’s latest Frostgrave expansions, we are looking forward to run a proper Wildwoods campaign. The plan was to mount rival expeditions that aim to map out the wilderness around frosty Felstad.
Battletech
By mere fancy, we recently ran a game of Battletech, which was covering dust in our shelves. And were instantly hooked!
We intend to paint more mechs and to delve deeper into the lore and the finer details of hex fields and heat levels.
Scenarios
Convinced that storytelling is an important part of the wargaming hobby, we always try to have an interesting scenario or story in our games. In a way, our games became part of a larger story. We’d like to come up with scenarios and make them available to our readers.
Das Schwarze Auge
An enterprise we really want to finish is our running Das Schwarze Auge campaign. Our games came to a (hopefully short) hiatus. Aforementioned adult life struck again. But we are positively optimistic, that we may manage to get the group together again. We might use an online platform for that though. During COVID-19 we had a game of Basic Fantasy RPG over on Roll20. That worked quite well.
Reviews
Reviewing (niche) products we like, quickly became a thing on our blog. There are certain games and hobby products we really cherish and we’d like to continue reviewing them for you.
Gaming, painting, crafting and blogging
Of course, we continue gaming, painting and crafting, and blogging about it. We try to keep our topics varied and relevant, but probably not super regular. Since we haven’t got any particular publishing plan, we post new articles whenever we’ve got something ready. It’s not a job after all.
We are sure, we’ll come up with loads of ideas in the future.
And finally…
Wargaming is more than just a hobby to us. It’s a lifestyle! It is a passion, an escape of the mundane, a vent for creative energies and, last but not least, a way to connect with friends in these crazy times!
Happy Anniversary and Happy Gaming!
David and Eric
One comment