A Tabletop Pirate Looks at 40
It’s been over five years since this grognard threw together a miniature wargame. In that time I’ve sold off the bulk of a once formidable collection, failed at more than one business enterprise, moved across six time zones, and carefully prepared three children for life with a wargamer. As my 40th year approaches, I find that sweet siren song of the tabletop calling once again.
My hands itch to roll some dice.
They also itch to hold a paintbrush and glue some fingers together. That, after all – preparing to game – is the bulk of the hobby. In past year’s the ratio of solitary time assembling a game to social time playing a game tended to exceed 20:1, and anticipate this go around will be no different.
As is so often the case, you need three things for this hobby: time, space, and money. To be frank, I have none of the three. But I do have years of experience and a blank slate upon which to draw. Hopefully this time around I can plan things out with more care, and not wind up with closets full of half completed and never played wargames.
To that end, here are the ironclad ground rules for the endeavor:
- I cannot begin to build the tiny warriors nor the terrain over which they will fight until I have finished my current game. What’s more, I have to play at least one full game of a project before I start on a new one.
- Every game must be self-contained. That is to say, everything needed to play must fit into a single box. (Hence the title of this blog.)
I just discovered War In A Box and I've spent far too many hours working my way back through all of your posts since then – further neglecting the poor ranks of unpainted minis on my painting table!
Like you, I'm a forty-something father of three who left the hobby for a while (selling off boxes of rulebooks and minis on eBay) and then chose to go with 10mm models for roleplaying and wargaming.
And I blog about it at gamingtabletop.com
Only you're so much better at it than I am – War In A Box is fantastic! How on earth do you come up with the time to get so many terrain pieces and miniatures modeled up and painted?? Seeing what you've accomplished has been quite humbling but also very inspiring.
Thank you for sharing your enjoyment of the hobby. I've browsed through a number of blogs over the past few years, but yours is the first to interest me enough to make me a regular reader.