About me
My wargaming history
Somewhere in the 20th Century a friend of mine introduced me to Warhammer Fantasy. Precisely when I can't remember but it was when the fourth edition box set with High Elves and Goblins (with the cardboard Griffon and Wyvern riders) came out as my friend had a copy.I didn't have an army per se back then. My friend and I both had a few bits of Empire and High Elves painted (another member of our little group had Orcs and Goblins), certainly in the case of my models, not particularly well, and most games were Floorhammer, aside from the occasional trip into town to play at the local Games Workshop games night. (Ah, the fun of about six people a side trying to cram their couple of units onto the board only for someone with a flyer to "fly high" and come down somewhere you couldn't do anything about it...).
As with a lot of wargamers, we drifted away from the hobby for a while - in our case until around 2008 when my buddy who got me into the game in the first place was having a dig around in his mum's attic and found a box of our old models and suggested we have get together for a game. The rest, as they say, is history.
Presently I play High Elves, having amassed a collection of several thousand points (albeit most of that is still unpainted) with the intention of being able to run themed armies in Warhammer. Given GW's idiotic decision to kill off Warhammer, rather than introduce rules to make it scale to lower points levels, I'm not currently sure what the future holds for me or my collection. I'm not particularly enthused by Age of Sigmar based on the free rules (and there seems to be zero interest in it at the two clubs I frequent locally for me to want to invest in any of the campaign books they've been releasing). For the time being I'm just planning to finish off my army by adding the units I don't have and will then probably take a look at the Warhammer, Age of Sigmar and Kings of War scenes and decide how much of my army I'm actually going to need in future and rationalise everything from there.
Previous blog
One of the things that helped get me so enthused about the hobby when I got back into it is podcasts. Having apparently missed the glory days of Podhammer, I started listening after spotting a post by Dan Heelan on The Warhammer Forum promoting the Heelanhammer episode "Who takes the Frost Blade". After listening to a few episodes I started posting up battle reports on the Heelanhammer forum as well as a painting blog.If you know me well the latter would surprise you. I'm the first to admit I'm not the world's best painter by a long chalk, nor am I particularly quick with a brush, which combined with wargaming not being my only hobby, as well as having a young child, means it takes what feels like forever for me to get models up to tabletop standard.
Somewhat surprisingly, to me at least, people actually seemed to want to read the blog of someone so confident of their (lack) of painting ability the blog was titled "WIP Blog of a barely competent painter".
Around May/June time 2015 the Heelanhammer site got hacked. Aside from the site being down for a few weeks because of this it also meant that the forums were gone - I'm not clear on the exact details of what happened to any backups of the forum but whatever did happen, the dudes named Ben couldn't restore it. I was possibly almost as gutted at that as I was at Warhammer being killed off.
Fortunately I can say "almost as gutted" because most of my previous blog does still exist, courtesy of the Internet Archive. I starting submitting my blog pages to the site late in 2014 which means I only seem to have lost my posts for late 2014 and 2015. That said, it's not as straightforward as it should be to find but if you're really interested in seeing where it all began for this blog, you can access the old posts via the following urls:
Page 1, (Page 2 not there for some reason), Page 3, Page 4, Page 5, Page 6, Page 7, Page 8, Page 9, Page 10, Page 11, Page 12, Page 13, Page 14, Page 15, Page 16, Page 17, Page 18, Page 19, Page 20, Page 21, Page 22, Page 23, Page 24, Page 25
I can't remember if I ever submitted my battle reports to the Internet Archive (and without the URLs it's difficult to search for them) but a number of them should still exist on various Warhammer army specific forums (particularly on Ulthuan.net) and I should still have the original text for most of them saved on my computer should there ever be enough interest in them being re-presented here in this blog.
Wargame Tournaments Website
My one real contribution back to the wargaming community is the Wargame Tournaments Website. Launched at the end of 2009 with the aim of consolidating and standardising tournament information, the website lists forthcoming wargames events in the UK, Ireland, USA and Canada. While initially I only logged tournaments, as time has gone on I have updated the website to allow for other types of events (e.g. campaigns and demos) to be listed as well.
As something to primarily occupy my time on the daily commute, I've been continuously updating it over the years, albeit not having enough quality time working on it to have taken it as far as I'd have wanted to by now.
In 2014 I took over running the UK Warhammer Fantasy Painting rankings from Mo Ashraf and incorporated these into the listings site. As with the main event listings part, work is ongoing on improvements, although again, progress is somewhat limited by the intermittent programing time I have.
