loonyblog.

I played through Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War recently, and thought it was a lot of fun (if extremely short on the single player content). Playing Dawn of War (and also the fact that I’m working on a wargame) got me curious about the table top Warhammer 40k universe, which I know absolutely nothing about. I have a vague recollection of Space Hulk coming out around the same time as Doom, but that’s pretty much it. So when I first encountered a Games Workshop store in the Village (and then later in the Sony Metreon building) I was taken aback. I mean, how big is this hobby? Apparently they have literally hundreds of these stores around the world (50 in the US and three in Manhattan alone), and they’re a publicly traded company, so apparently they’re doing something right. But that’s all beside the point. It’s the game I’m curious about, not the company.

Read on for my take on the whole thing after spending some time in a Games Workshop store this afternoon.

My office is moving today, so we all left at 1:00. Getting out that early is rare indeed, and while I’ve taken to walking home a few times week, I’m still recovering from E3, so that ruled that out. So instead I opted to walk up to Forbidden Planet for my weekly comics. On the way, and with nothing but time, I walked into the Games Workshop store on 8th Street, right next to NYU. Now before walking in there, I had read quite a bit about the game online, and Games Workshop does an excellent job of making their game accessible purely from stuff you can find online — but I’m a visual person, and I really needed to see it before I could get any idea what it was really like. So I walked into the store, and was greeted immediately by a very nice employee who offered to answer any of my questions and if I was interested, he’d even play a game with me.

Since I had nothing better to do, I took him up on that offer, and so I played a short round on the Battle for Macragge. The first thing I noticed was that those miniatures really are cool. When I was a kid I was really into building things — model rockets, trains, all kinds of stuff. I suppose that’s why I enjoy building PCs as much as I do. There isn’t a whole lot of construction involved with the simpler Warhammer figures, but I do like the idea of painting them carefully and literally building an army slowly. I imagine there’s a real sense of pride that comes when you’ve built and painted a really big army. The game board we played on was constructed (I’m told) from styrofoam (which is good to know if I ever get into the game), but it was painted enough to look nice and barren. Macragge has a bunch of crashed spaceships on it, so they all added to the experience.

The actual gameplay was, to my surprise, quite fun. I never got into any pen and paper RPGs because all that math was a major turn-off (plus it was a little too much imagining for my taste). But Warhammer has no math at all, and the miniatures make it more like a board game than anything else, albeit one with a larger scope. But I found the whole thing very easy to grasp. We played a very simple match, with my team consisting of four space marines against a horde of Tyranids, but it was straight up combat, and very easy to understand, even for someone like me that has never played anything like this before in his life. The whole thing took ten, maybe twenty minutes, and was quite enjoyable.

So now what? I’m not sure. For now, I picked up a starter paint set, which has five space marines and their accompanying paints. That was pretty inexpensive, and I figure I’ll give it a whirl and see if I enjoy painting miniatures. If I don’t, then I’ll stop there, since so much of the hobby is in the construction phase. If I do take to it, then I have another hurdle: I need to find people to actually play with. I’m not a very social gamer (even on Xbox Live, I almost always play with and against total strangers) due mostly to the general lack of interest shown by all of my immediate friends in that part of my life (I know, it seems insane, but pretty much all of my close friends are casual gamers, if that). This is something that requires face-to-face gameplay. Heather might be interested in playing and it would be nice to have something we can play together (I love chess, but I play it a lot more than she does, so it’s no fun for her), but it’s a long shot with her. I can think of a couple of other people who might be interested, but again, they’re long shots.

And then there’s the fact that right now, the last thing I need is another expensive hobby. Fortunately for me, this isn’t the kind of hobby I see myself spending as much money on as video games. It’s too slow moving for that. And it’s significantly cheaper than video games for the average person as far as I can tell (I guess if I got obsessed with it and started getting all the really big models it could get pretty pricey). So we’ll see what happens. If nothing else, I have a bigger understanding of that whole culture now, and I always like expanding my knowledge of geekery.

And I must say, I was really impressed by how nice the people at the Games Workshop store were. I was expecting Comic Book Guy snobbery (I’m used to it), and instead found some very nice, and genuinely helpful people who were really into their hobby. Which is good for business, because let’s face it, tabletop wargaming isn’t what you associate with the average guy off the street. Can you imagine how obnoxious the employees at an official D&D store would be? Yikes.

It never fails to amaze me how effective just being nice is at retail. There’s a reason I never shop at St. Mark’s Comics. Forbidden Planet’s not as good as Midtown (still the best in the city), but the people there are pretty cool, and don’t look down at me for buying Superman books. Had I walked into the GW store today and been greeted by someone who snorted to himself as he saw a total newbie, I wouldn’t have bought anything, and I sure as hell wouldn’t be interested in learning more.