A short introduction and a glimpse into the future

After the post by the usual suspects Eric and David, as well as the ones by Dan and Gerard, it is now my turn to make a modest contribution in honour of this blog’s 5^th anniversary.

My name is Olivier, I just turned 46 and I’ve been sporadically gaming with the Eric and David for 2 or 3 years now, if I remember correctly. Family life, and the fact that I live a good 35 minutes’ drive away from the other guys means I only get a couple evenings a year rolling dice—and drinking the occasional whisky—with them.

My relationship with wargaming started in the mid-90s as a pimply teen and budding metalhead with an interest in history and warfare, as well as fantasy literature. I had owned and played Heroquest, and through the classmates of my older sister I came into touch with RPGs like AD&D and Shadowrun. Some classmates of my own told me about this game, Warhammer, that they had started playing and which might interest me.

Conveniently, a friend of theirs had started collecting Undead miniatures, but lost interest in the game altogether, so I bought all of his stuff 2^nd hand at a bargain price. It might come as no surprise that I still have many of those 4^th Edition miniatures like Nagash, Arkhan the Black on his chariot, Dieter Helsnicht on manticore, a few pewter wights, wraiths, ghouls, mummies, and even a few venerable old plastic skeletons.

Thus began my journey into the Old World, and while I never played as much as I would have liked (see a pattern there?) I made some good likeminded friends along the way.

I remained “in the hobby” until around 7^th Edition, mostly buying the odd mini to paint, but since I was away at university and had found other hobbies more rewarding, the whole thing became increasingly sporadic.

Fast forward 20 years, then in my early 40s, with a wife and two kids I was desperately looking for something to spend disposable income on. Throughout the years I had occasionally checked on the state of Warhammer taking note of such controversies as the End Times, the birth of AoS, the ever-growing popularity of 40k, etc, but all this had remained very much in the background. Then, in early 2023 my wife, who had taken up scrapbooking, wanted to buy a Cricut plotter for her hobby. I figured, since she was buying an expensive hobby-tool, I should do so too! One thing led to another, I bought a resin printer (which I had been eyeing for some time), started buying stl files left and right, and through my friend Gerard I got into touch with the creators of this blog and rolled my first dice after a good 20 years!

Now, after this quick recap of my relationship with wargaming, I want to tell you about a couple of things I want to do – and share on this blog – in the future.

While I have mostly been rambling about Warhammer (for reasons of nostalgia no doubt) the state of the hobby feels a lot bigger these days: One Page Rules, both fantasy and grimdark future, Trench Crusade, Dragon/Lion/Xenos Rampant, Pillage, Doom1492, the upcoming game Greathelm, all those are games I want to check out with the other guys in the near future. Especially the game Greathelm has the potential to be something special, because it seems to be ultra-portable in terms of size. So whereas gaming-colleague Dan is working on an awesome Mordheim board, I plan on building a number of small but varied, or possibly even modular, boards for that game in the upcoming weeks and months, and I will be documenting those builds and share them with you on this blog. Since I also want to get back to some rank&flank action, albeit at a reduced scale (“Ain’t nobody got time for all that painting!”) I might check out the new “Battle March” rules for Warhammer The Old World. I am also in the process of completely redesigning my hobby space, which has (over-)grown organically and is a complete mess right now, much to my chagrin. I’m sure many of you can relate, though. Once I have set up everything the way I want to, I’ll make a post about that too, especially since I plan on making use of FDM-printed paint-racks for IKEA Skadis panels.

To sum it up, I hope you enjoyed this quick introductory post, I promise to follow it up with some actually useful stuff as soon as I possibly can. Until then, join me in raising a glass to this this blog in celebration of the past 5 years. Here’s to hopefully many more!