Death of a Hobby

Part 1

Today I feel like talking about something that’s been brewing around my city for almost the last two years; the death of the Games Workshop hobby. While this may not be the case in all cities, but I know here in cold Winnipeg (it’s in Canada) there has been a continual slide of Games Workshop playing. So it is with a determined mind set, I talk about my thoughts on the GW hobby and how it has evolved in the past few years for me…

I started playing Games Workshops games back at the beginning of Warhammer 40k 3rd edition. I was a bright eyed boy who wanted to start an army of Tyranids, I had very little understanding of the rules when I started but was in love with the background and the universe so I jumped in. Every week there was a group of about five gamers who met to get in a few games, and sit down and talk about tactics or new army compositions. That’s what I’ve come to love about the miniature gaming hobby, it’s more social then most hobbies out there.

Taking a rough estimate I would have to assume that the gaming hobby has made me meet at least a hundred people who I otherwise would not have known, in fact it got me onboard at TenTonHammer. Before even being involved with this network, Messiah Ralph’ and myself were all Games Workshop players who occasionally met at our local game store and knew each other only casually. It’s interesting to think that Games Workshop games got me where I am today!

I myself got into Warhammer fantasy at about the release of High Elves for sixth edition, so I was able to experience a lot of WFB before the edition changed over to seventh. Starting with a Skaven army (which got me my moniker) I switched over to Chaos after about a year and was renowned for having a brutal Tzeentch Chaos army that was heavily based on marauders. This is one of the reasons I am starting to think that the Chaos forces off WAR might be right for me…

Gaming reached its ‘peak’ for me during the release of the General’s Compendium for WFB. Upon its release a group of local gamers got together and started a map based campaign, which I was privileged enough to be a part of. Also partaking in this ‘cunnin plan’ were Messiah and Ralph’, luckily I never had to fight them during the course of the campaign as they were literally on the opposite corners of me. Overall the campaign was fun times and saw the creation of team EBJ, or ‘The Evil BJ’s” that I got to be an official member (honor or horror?).

It was about the same time that the fourth edition of Warhammer 40k came out that gaming in my city started to die out. Dozens of players seemed to drop off the face of ‘gaming-verse’ and those who were left had little interest in 40k, life seemed to be taking a priority and other games were cropping up all around. It was a dark time in our gaming community, and we dwindled down to only a handful of players, most of which were looking at getting out of the system.

Then the worst moment in our local gaming history; the local Game Store we all attended closed down. The dark times had come…


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Last Updated: Mar 29, 2016

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