Warhammer - My intro

My tank has more guns than yours...

As I mentioned in the first post, I play a lot of wargames, with Warhammer 40,000 being the primary one. There's a lot going on with it that I'd really like to talk about, but I guess I should be polite and kinda explain what it is I'm talking about here.

To put it bluntly and succinctly, I play games with plastic army men.

It's much more complicated than that, of course, but if I wanted to boil it down, that's the bottom line.

The game consists basically of two separate steps: building and painting your army, and then actually playing the game. The first is a lot of work and money (the tank pictured took several hours to paint as it stands, and I still have a lot of things I really need to do to it before I can really consider it complete), but can be a lot of fun. Games Workshop, the game's maker, produces a wide range of kits that have some truly exquisite detail for how small most models are (maybe an inch or two high for most of them, though obviously tanks are bigger), and a master painter can do some truly exceptional things with them. I am not a master painter. I can still do some really fun things with the models, but I'll never win any awards for mine.

Actually playing the game is where the most fun is, however. Two players would bring their armies, balanced against each other through a point-buy system (each model is worth a certain number of points against a limit agreed upon by the players), and proceed to throw dice at each other until one player wins.

Not actually at each other, mind. That would just be painful. Through a series of die rolls, everything from movement through dense terrain, shooting effectiveness, or even the morale of your soldiers can be determined. Once you get the rules, it's a lot of fun.

The setting is what makes the game work for me, however. It's set in the year 40,000 (convenient, huh?), where the Imperium of Mankind has spread to the four corners of the galaxy, and is locked in an unending war against the forces of Chaos, the primordial forces of destruction and decay that seek to bring the galaxy to a burning ruin. There are also many alien forces, such as the war-loving hooligan Orks, the holier-than-thou space elf Eldar and their evil kin Dark Eldar, and the "we're the not-quite-as-bad" blue space communist Tau Empire.

The background is really fleshed out and detailed, so much so that Games Workshop has an entire division called the Black Library that publishes novels based on it, which are some really good books to read if you enjoy military sci-fi, even if you've never played the games.

But there you have the basics of Warhammer 40k. Next time, I'll delve into some more of the game, though what exactly I'll talk about I'll leave a mystery for now. ;)