Saturday, July 21, 2012

Welcome

Welcome to my new blog, everyone.  I set this blog up to cover my re-entrance into Games Workshop games after a few decades away from them.  I've been gaming since the early 1980's, mostly doing historical miniatures but I've dabbled in lots of periods & types of gaming over that time.  I've played RPG's, board games, fantasy, sci-fi and of course historicals during the course of my gaming 'career.'

I was introduced to Warhammer in around 1984 at one of the local game stores.  I believe it was 2nd edition, with the full color box and three (IIRC) booklets inside.  Not much fluff at that point... just figures and rules.  It always looked cool to my teenage eyes but I never got serious about building an army for it.  Likewise, I picked up the original Rogue Trader when it was released along with a few figures.  I still have the figures but the books are long gone, much to my dismay now.

That was the end of my Warhammer days.  I played other GW games like Blood Bowl and Space Marine/Epic, but that ended in the 1990s along at the same time that my activity in gaming dropped off.  This was due to the usual reasons:  career, marriage, burnout, etc.  I have been mostly on the sidelines of gaming ever since then... occasionally playing a game or painting some figures but never really finishing anything.  My last finished army was one for the Clan War game that was popular for a few years locally around 2000.

Time passes, I get older, my kids get older, and I take a job where I have the luxury of working out of my home when not on the road.  My wife notices that I am getting more hermit-like as the months pass and orders me to find something social to do outside the house.   While surfing the web I run across some sites for local GW tournaments and notice that one of the sponsors is Armored Ogre Games in Inver Grove Heights, a store I'd never heard of before which is shocking since it's maybe 5 miles away from my house and by far the closest store to me.

As luck had it I had some time to kill on the day Warhammer 40K 6th edition was released so I hit a few game stores in the area including Armored Ogre, where I met Mike, the store owner.  He was a nice guy and encouraged me to come down for their Tuesday night games which I have now done a few times.  There's a nice group of gamers there so I decided to buy a Tau battleforce which I am painting up now.

I decided to name my army commander and this blog "Commander Nearsight" as a play off of the Commander Farsight character in the Tau Codex.   Nearsight will be an older (like me), not-so-bold commander more interested in accomplishing the mission with as few casualties as possible... except for the Kroot.  The whole purpose of Kroot is to give their lives to save Tau in Nearsight's mind.  He'll be sort of like an older Vicorian-era colonial officer as I see it.

Well, that's enough rambling for now.  I hope you enjoy the blog as it develops over time.