First gaming memories. What got you into the hobby.

[The-closet-gamer]

I got last night off work and phoned up the crew to see if anyone was doing anything.  It started with a few coming round to play xbox and having a "few" beers then getting a call to the pub to meet others. Having a "few" more beers. Then getting a call and ending up in a club and having a "few" more beers and finally ending up in a post club late bar and having guess what ? At that point I was on the Red Bull as the sun is was starting to shine. Then everyone came round to mine to attempt to play a few board games.

I wasn't supposed to be going out but I popped out, then went out and stayed out out. What a night out. Epic. While several of us tried to play Buffy the Vampire Slayer a conversation started about what got most of us into gaming whether it be board games, RPG or table top. What inspired us to take that turning point.

For me it was my mum. My parents where hippies/alternative back in the day. And she was a big role player. This could/does explain my love or D&D. My first outing into the world of wargames was the late 80s and being take to GW sheffield store when it used to be on the moor ( being an ex staffer I never understood why they moved the store round the corner to a smaller unit but kept the lease on the old shop ) to get some supplies. This was my first taste of GW. In fact it was my first taste of mini gaming that wasn't a bunch of Eco warriors sat round the dinning room table on a Saturday night. I'll tell you some if the ladies form the way they dressed look like they would blend right into middle earth.

Taking it all in all big and bight eyed I gobbled it up. I remember set up on the table was Dark Future and a Warhammer village on the other table. The village to a young lad like me was on the same detail level as the Star Wars FX models, but from finding some old photos marked '89 on the back from a spring clean of the upstairs staff room at the Sheffield store they were quite poor. Wish I never found them cause I destroyed a bit of my childhood. In the cabinets was a multitude of painted minis. They included the old emperor dragon and Adeptus Titanicus minis with the pre epic space marine tanks. I can say without a doubt this is why I'll play Epic over any other GW game. Also seeing rack upon rack of minis in blisters and the box sets all with illustrated sleeve art. Beautiful. My old mum Slaanesh bless her asked if I'd like any thing. Suppose you should get them started early in the hobby. I'd had my eye on an elven chariot. It was a special character for the wood elves. I still have it minus a few pieces in the closet. That is why I'm the Closet Gamer cause it's where it all ends up. I really need to buy some shelves and book cases to put all this stuff on.

You would have thought this is what got me into gaming. Oh no sir I was quite happy to collect and paint (quite badly) all the minis I could get my grubby little mints on. It was only from watching Thunder Cats and turning over to the other channel and to my amazement saw the TV ad for Space Crusade followed by Hero Quest. Those two commercials lasting a total of thirty seconds each did something to me. My dad asked me what was wrong from the way I was acting. I think it was from the drool running down my chin and my left eye twitching as my brain went into meltdown as I tried to compute what I'd just seen. In a very polite manner I asked how mother and farther were today and if they would like any tea or coffee and went out of my way to be as helpful for the rest of the day until I finally saw an opening to ask very politely like if I could have any of the to games for Xmas. To my surprise the both said yes. I don't think they had a morale leg to stand on as my mum spent money on the hobby and my dad plundered the paints for his Airfix ( I'm a scale modeller cause of my dad ) and it was just an open door with Saturday games night. Never did find out what happened in Never Winter cause I was was playing Space Crusade with a friend. 

Didn't have to wait till Xmas as I got them both a few weeks later. My uncle had to get them ordered especially from a friend at Red Gates toy store cause they were all selling out everywhere.

So that is how I got into gaming. What are your stories and memories from how you got into this (very expensive) hobby of minis and dice.

P.S. If you've tried to play Buffy the Vampire Slayer and given up cause the rules don't make any sense. It uses the Cluedo rule system. Took an hour and a half to work that out. It only cost a pound from a charity shop. 

[Westfalia Chris]

I had been an avid, if mediocre modelmaker since age 10 or so, starting out with paper models and aircraft kits. I got my very first pewter minis back in the summer of 1995 (a couple of TYW Swedish Artillery from a Stockholm museum my parents had visited then), and sought out the FLGS (still around, that one) to find more like that - but back then, there was Games Workshop and little else. I bought a couple of discounted Heartbreaker Fantasy blisters, and the rest, as they say, is history.

[Vanvlak]

My first attempt at modelling was a Frog 1/72 scale model of the Gloster E28/39 (of all things), which had been my dad's but which he allowed me try my hand at. This was when I was around 7 or 8. Painting it gloss green (using a tin which we had used for painting the cupboards) did not work well. So I owe my modelling to my dad.

Wargaming came much later - I'd been intrigued by gaming models, had ordered some 1:300 scale tanks by mail (yes, years before the www) and they never turned up, so that put me off a bit. Years later I finally fell and bought some Epic scale knights (Imperial and Eldar) and a unit of Gobsmashas (Ork armoured cars), and on our honeymoon (!) bought my first copy of White Dwarf. My first game was Epic Space Marine, and I've loved this scale to bits, although I moved on to Warhammer a year or so later. Due to the constraints of the local scene, Warhammer and 40K were the only wargames I played until my cut off some years back when work put gaming on the back burner, although modelling never stopped.

Most recent games have been Zombicide and Cthulhu Wars with the wife; in the case of the latter, she has a rather worrying knack at winning.....

[WillieB]

I guess I was always interested in playing with soldiers from early age on, but almost my whole family, especially my father encouraged me in doing so.
Not so very evident for a man who was twice seriously wounded, in fact crippled for life, in combat during WWII.

Some of my fondest memories are going to see films with with my father either on Wednesday or Saturday afternoon. Yes, we still had to go to school on Saturday morning.

Obviously he always chose a film that was 'suitable' for me. Mostly sword and sandal films or something with pirates, knights or war movies.

Later on when we got home he often he often drew the main characters on cardboard, coloured them with crayons and then we sort of re-played that film. This would keep me busy for several hours
Dad was, aside from the best father you can hope for, also a very gifted artist.

Later on, when I had discovered Airfix figures, he usually rewarded me with a box of figures if my school results were decent.  Must have cost him a small fortune since for the first 10 years in school I always was either first or second best in my class.
He then started to draw  3D houses, bunkers and such which he cut out after colouring and mounted them on another piece of cardboard. I can still remember my mother being slightly dismayed when he used a shoebox she obviously still wanted to keep.

Grandmother and aunts also regularly presented me with soldiers or models. Again mostly Airfix, Aurora or Frog.

Still later my 10 year older cousin Walter married and went to live in London. Tamiya was just starting up their business and he sent me a 'remote controlled' 1/25th scale King Tiger for my 12th or 13th birthday. Dad had to help assemble it of course.
And then Walter send me some metal figures. Lamming I believe.
The rest as they say is history....

[fastolfrus]

For me - school club 1971, run by the history teacher.
(Now the school club is still there, but I run it.)
For the first term we didn't actually play much - we had to write out the rules long-hand in excercise books, one of the sixth formers wrote them up on a blackboard for us to copy.
Gaming was Tuesday evenings or Saturday afternoons.

For Glynis - Halifax Wargames Club 1985 (a cheap night out when we were at college together)

Alasdair - first wargames show when he was 3 weeks old. Don't know when he started gaming though.

[beefcake]

After my father had an accident putting him in a wheelchair he started painting up medieval miniatures. They had already been around the house (I was only just born or to be born at this stage) then when I was about 9 or so he got my brothers and myself a bunch of small miniatures (15mm or smaller), still available somewhere as I bought myself a bunch of these most nostalgic miniatures a couple of years ago. Then I got into 28mm leading to warhammer, blah blah blah.

[3 fingers]

First time was D&D at middle school,so that would been mid eighties? At a guess.then a local department store had a toy section ,and they had a little space,where they stocked GW products,I got dark future as a present,and I remember getting 40k rogue trader ,rule book.and handful of miniatures I wished I kept and a squat bike,rhino etc.

[Connectamabob]

IIRC it started for me when I was a wee lad in the 80s. Dunnae remember how old exactly, but I'd guess somewhere in the 6-8 range. My dad gave me a tiny model kit of a harrier jet, only about 3" long, and we built it together. That was the first time I found out that such things even existed, and it got me hooked on modelling.

Gaming entered the fray a couple years later, when I was maybe 9. One of the local elementary schools liked to hold an annual fair-like event, with food, and games, face painting, etc. Not a real fair, just a tiny thing barely above the level of a neighborhood pot-luck party. One year there was a kiosk (read: card table) where a teenager was selling minis he'd painted and offering classes on how to paint such minis. My little brother bought one of the minis (a mummy) and I signed up for the class.

So one weekend afternoon a couple weeks later, me and 3 or 4 other kids spent two hours learning the basics. The teenager hosting the class provided the minis and materials ('m guessing it was part of whatever our parent's paid for the class). Each of us picked out a mini, and he taught us how to spray-prime, base coat (in this case a black ink wash which would stain the white primer), then drybrush in layers. My mini was a little orc soldier with a pointy helmet, a big scimitar, and a round wooden shield, all one metal casting except the shield, which was plastic and mounted onto a peg on the orc's wrist so the domed end of the peg became the metal dome in the center of the shield.

When we were done, he let us pick out a second mini to take home with the one we'd painted, so we'd have something to go forward with on our own. I picked out a "lumbering Hulk", a large bipedal reptile/insect hybrid with digging claws outstretched in a "gimme a hug!" pose. That stay unpainted for a while 'till I could find a source for the same paints I'd used at the class (Polly-S). Found them at a comic shop, which also carried minis, so now I had both a source and a context. I painted the "Lumbering Hulk" in vivid greens, with purple eyes. Same mini is now sold by IronWind Metals, and I've been meaning to pick one up for nostalgia purposes.

From then it became a thing of dropping by comic shops to occasionally buy minis, and to look at the sourcebooks. As a wee trekkie I remember seeing the big color ads for FASA Star Trek ships in magazines, and sorely lamenting that none of the local shops had the coolest ships.

Actually, I think my first exposure to gaming books was seeing a copy of "S. Peterson's Guide to Cthulhu Monsters" in a shop in Seattle while on vacation when I was quite young. I had no idea it was a gaming book, or that gaming was a thing, I was simply entranced by the idea of a book that was a catalog of exotic unfamiliar monsters, written like a real-world spotters guide. I didn't remember what it was called, I just remembered the artwork and the layout, so years later when I spotted that book again in a comic shop while looking for paints/minis, it was a huge "oh wow" moment. I had at that point already been collecting similar books for years (Like Wayne Barlow's "Barlowe's Guide to Extraterrestrials"*, and Brian Froud's "Goblins of the Labyrinth") as a reaction to that first half-remembered encounter with the S. Peterson's Guide when I was smaller.

My first actual game was one of the early editions of "Space Hulk". Had a devil of a time finding anyone willing to play it though. In fact that's always been a thing: I just don't know of many gaming groups in my area, and my friends have never been people who shared the interest, so I don't actually game hardly at all, mostly just model.

*I still have this copy, complete with a splotch of Testors "Jade" enamel on the cover from having it on my workbench while painting the Klingon BoP from the ERTL TNG "adversary set" kit when I was like 11. Still have that S. Peterson's Guide too, and have acquired many other such books, though sadly "Goblins of the Labyrinth" has been many years lost.

[Steve63]

Timpo in the 60's (that makes me sound old)
Airfix and writing our own rules in the 70's, also got my first metal figure ECW cannon and crew from a toy shop in Richmond North Yorkshire about 1975
Citadel Miniatures and Games Workshop in the 80's and 90's
Historical Miniatures 15 and 28mm in the 00's
What ever I fancy in the 10's

[Cherno]

Started with Hero Quest (everyone seemed to have it at the time) and Space Crusade (which was called Star Quest to cash in on HQ's immense popularity here in Germany and was a heavily bowlderized version of the UK original, typical for German board and computer games until the 2000s), and BattleTech. Played some Shadowrun as well, visited the FLGS (no internet back then!) every now and then and at one time they had a promo offer for the newly-released WarZone miniatures game, with the english rulebook and two blisters for 19.99 German Marks IIRC. I was about 14 and didn't understand half of the english text but the pages were glossy and had loads of excellent Bonner art.
tBought it, bought some more minis for my birthday, played a game on the dinner table with two of my friends with me as Dark Legion vs. them as Capitol and Imperial (they had a Hedgehog Necromower that was represented as a cardboard box with some buggy-drawings on the side ) Miniatures were barely painted if at all (I was a bad painter back then, I tried unsuccessfully to apply primer with a brush which cacked on and terrain was limited to some Iceland moss and copper wire spun to resemble barbed wire... Shivers me timbers just thinking about it! On the plus side, when one unfortunate Nepharite Warlord (big, top-heavy chunk of metal) got knocked off the table and hit the floor, there was no damage because it barely had any paint on it anyway!).

[Annie]

Being 10 and my mum coming home with a stack of old White Dwarfs from a market sale and "This looks like your sort of thing", I instantly fell in love with the undead, and particularly The Black Coach, and Dieter Hellsnicht on Manticore models. Gutted when I got to a Games Workshop and most of the models I'd been circling in the magazine were out of production, I still managed to leave with my first model - The Black Coach. Those models still give me a wave of nostalgia 

[FramFramson]

I've probably mentioned it elsewhere, but I came to minis gaming quite late.

I mainly grew up playing Magic the Gathering and other collectible games (which I still play). About 17-18 years ago, when I was half my current age, I first picked up a handful of minis to try my hand at painting them. I had fun but it didn't stick; I thought I might get into 40k, but the usual things that turned people off the game prevented me from playing, most especially that it seemed like all work with no rroom for fun or silliness.

A few years later I fell into Mage Knight, a prepainted collectible game, on the back of an army that I only needed four figs to play. Well of course I picked up other armies and things went downhill from there. Still, I consider that more a collectible game like Magic than a true, proper minis game.

Recently, I've had less and less patience for letting someone else set the terms of my hobby, and I've  been playing much less Magic and it's hard to find video games to get into. I've come back to minis games as something you really make your own. I got into Pulp Alley on the strength, flexibility, and elegance of the rules and my love for the interwar period, so here I am.

[v_lazy_dragon]

Dad has been  into  military  modelling since he was a lad, so there were always kits and  paints etc around the  house. My first  memory of anything  gaming related  was seeing a  copy of  a white dwarf (with free plastic brettonnian  archers) in a local supermarket, aged about 5. A year or two later i was bought a second hand box of space crusade at a car boot  sale, although I  used the  models as toy soldiers  at that point!

My first true encounter with wargaming as a  whole  was an accidental trip to  the  Bovington gaming show  when i was about  9 (Dad thought it was a military modelling show, and was slightly suprised when it wasn't! ). Someone was doing a 2nd Ed 40k demo game, which I  ended up  playing (Assorted  imperial guard which I  shared command of with another lad vs.... lord only knows). When I  got home  I dug out the Space Crusade stuff, and tried to play it using the  rules i remembered from the demo game with dice 'borrowed' from  monopoly. 2nd Ed 40k came for my birthday a month or two later  and i've  never looked  back  !
 

[zizi666]

For me it was probably this :


Must have been 12 or so when I got this set and set up an assault using the gun on the emplacement and marbles to knock over the figs.
did some modelling (very low standard I'm afraid) for 5 years or so and  lost interest until I spotted this weird board game with figures that made me think of Alien. (Shortly after my conscription, so must have been 22.)
When I bought my 1st Ed. Space Hulk, the shopkeeper handed me a flyer for a gaming group that specialized in such games (The Red Barons) and now, 25 years on, I still play with some of these guys and am a founding member of Bylandt Wargame club Gent 

[warlord frod]

How did I get started  I started building WW II models with my dad around 1960 (I was 8 and still remember my dad saying this isn't real model making because he made wooden model planes  ) In my early teens my brothers and I played RISK and once I got to college I began playing SPI and Avalon Hill games. In the late 70's while working on my Masters Degree I stumbled upon a Donald Featherstone book and began to dream about miniature gaming. My first armies were Airfix ACW (Classic right?) I still have those armies and have played many many games with them. It was all down hill from there as I moved into the Medieval period then Fantasy and SF, Micro armor, DBA, Epic Space marine, Prepainted Mage Knight (Don't think less of me  ) Pulp etc etc. Its been a great hobby that I have passed on to one of my sons and now to my grandsons I'll never stop as long as I can hold a brush and reach across a table to push lead