An introduction

To begin the whole blog-thing, let me say a few words about myself.

I'm a 30-something dad of two from Finland, and I've been doing miniature wargaming stuff since I was 14, which means I've been doing fantasy miniature wargaming for around fifteen years, beginning with the 6th Edition of Warhammer Fantasy Battles. My friends picked up that fun game and I followed suit with a unit or two of High Elves.

I liked the idea of collecting an army way more than I liked painting it up or building one, and the first  years of my miniature wargaming career were filled with ghostly grey High Elves losing over and over to my friends finely painted Empire army. Time went on and by-and-by I did get something done. In the 7th Edition I fielded around 2000 points worth of (painted!) Lizardmen, followed by an increasing amount of Orcs and Goblins that ultimately reached over 4000 points fully painted in some five years.

I was happy with my two armies (having sold my High Elves to my friend, who then ungraciously went on to completely smash my Orcs time and again), and things were happy and well in our little group.

We did complain a bit amongst ourselves. The rules were too complex, the support was stupidly slow in coming often disappointing when it did manifest. We never reached out to anyone, we never went to the few tournaments that were held. Why would we? Warhammer kept us nice and cozy in our little dusty student apartments, we had plenty of miniatures to buy and plenty of rules-lawyering to keep us busy. Warhammer was king, and the king was immortal.

And then GeeDubs killed Warhammer.

Age of Sigmar felt like a slap in the face. Why would anyone in their right mind waste time trying to play a game as stupid as that? Not us for one, we read the rules, decided it was an unintentional joke and forgot the whole game. The kingdom that had been living an uneasy decline under the monarchy of Warhammer 8th Edition shattered into bickering groups and suddenly the surety of a game with people to play it with was lost. I spent a long month moping and feeling personally hurt by the company that I had all but sworn allegiance to.

Then one of our little group of gamers asked us to try out this game that was just about to enter its 2nd edition.

What is this, we said, a game from another company? No one plays games from other companies, despite spending hundreds of hours complaining about and trying to interpret rules that made the lamest of attempts to make sense. No one buys miniatures from other companies despite spending oodles of time complaining about the increasing absurdity of GW pricing and the stupidity of monopose figures in a component plastic age.

And then I tried KoW.

At first I was a little baffled. Was it a game at all? I just pushed models on the field and rolled some dice.. Where was the clever rules-lawyering, where were the disputes on how to interpret a phrase depending on the exact place of the comma? Was I supposed to win the game simply by playing it?

To be honest, I wasn't sold on Kings of War at first. It felt too simple, too quick, too mechanic. I was afraid it would simply reduce itself to a few cookie-cutter lists that were simply better than anything else and be a game that, ultimately, could be solved. I couldn't really see how a game could be that simple and still contain depth. The game had so many fewer mechanics than 8th Edition Warhammer. It didn't have reforms, it didn't have characters joining units, nor were there any templates or a separate magic phase. Units couldn't flee, casualties weren't reducing a unit's effectiveness and the spells were weak.

I was also underestimating the depth of the system because my perception of depth was based on a rule set that achieved depth only through complexity and I did not understand how the mechanics of the game alone could create depth.

Now I think a little differently.

All Kings of War players know the parable of KoW and chess; a simple rule set that creates tons of complexity and depth, and I for one tend to agree.

So now, as a father of two kids with limited time, I've been playing this "other company" game for around three years, and in many ways these have been the best years of gaming I've had since I outgrew teenage enthusiasm and the ability to feel child-like elation as I imagined my knights slamming into enemy formations (Okay, I haven't really lost that one completely, that's what keeps me going). I've taken it up to arrange myself to every single event I can travel to, I've taken it on myself to arrange one or two. I'm meeting new people, setting up demo games and promoting the game. In short, I'm trying to build a community out of the people who have the same love for fantasy wargaming as I do.

In this blog I intend to go through some tactics, some modelling, some hobby stuff and my thoughts on how to keep this aging hobby in the books of the living a while longer. If I overcome my fear of sounding ridiculous I might fill this in with a few videoblog-entries as well.

Battle reports, army show-casing and other interesting topics will soon follow!