A New Wargamer

I'm not really new to wargaming. I've been out of it for at least 14 years however. I started in middle school when I was at the local comic/game shop (which sadly no longer exists). My mother would drop me off when she went shopping. Normally this annoys shop owners, but I was nice and always bought something, so they didn't mind. 

Once day, looking at their small spinner rack of Warhammer boxes, the owner asked me if I was interested in it. Of course I was. At this point I had Magic cards, Star Wars cards and generally loved all sorts of gaming, so this was new and interesting. She talked to one of the guys there and he set me on track with a tactical squad of space marines and some paint. I bought them and when my mom picked me up, I went to work.

I remember staying up all night painting. More the next day. Then I was off to school. I talked about it to all my friends. Eventually I bought a Devastator Squad and the box set. This was second edition, so I had Ork Goffs and Space Marines now (and an ork dreadnought cardboard cut out- which I always thought was odd). Now was time to talk my friends into playing. 

I had a paper route, so getting the money to buy games was easy. For my friends? Not so much. Either way Erik took up Eldar and Cam took up Blood Angels. I of course played Ultramarines. Soon we grew to have Cyro playing Space Wolves (and later dipped into Chaos), Black Iniquity took up guard. Cyro's cousin Derek got Chaos as well. Now we had a league of our own. We painted and set up games and all that. Unfortunately back in middle school we never really set down rules for the club or anything like that. We just bought everything we could and named a point value to play. Over the years a few more joined us, but we never really played any more. ZigZero took up guard, Erik expanded to Tau. I eventually bought Eldar, Necrons, Tyranids and probably a few more. But we faded out in high school and mostly stopped in Junior and Senior years. 

Knowing what I know now (and this is how I'm running it now) the right thing to do was to say: "This is our point total, just get that ready." Our point total right now is 550. That's the magic number. Mostly because I have Tau, Eldar, Dark Eldar, Necron, Dark Angels, Chaos, Ultramarine and possibly more armies of that size. And that's from random pieces I've gotten over the years. ZigZero and Black Iniquity are taking up the guard again. Both are talking about using allies as an expansion force. Both are thinking about Eldar or Tau. Cyro confessed to me he never wanted to play Space Wolves. However now he's a huge fan and wouldn't play anything else. Me? Whatever will I play. I want to play everything. I used to have an attachment to Ultramarines, but only really because that's what I was told to play. 

So here I am, coming into sixth edition right from second (though we played a bit of third). I'm starting to paint an army tonight. A Kill Team I should say. Let's see how this goes.