Introduction

What is this blog?

This blog is essentially my new online hobby space. While many years ago I attempted to create and run a blog, my skills were severely lacking and it was unpopular, even by the standards of wargaming blogs. I lost interest and shut it down.

Coming back to wargaming now, it’s clear the online climate of this hobby has completely changed. Major brands now have a significant online presence, in some cases again after a long hiatus, and Youtube is filled to the brim with Patreon-supported painters, gamers and reviewers churning out high-quality content. Miniature, terrain or board game kickstarters abound. Even a quick look at Reddit or Facebook reveals bulging threads of posts or conversations for a whole menagerie of tabletop wargames. It really has never been a better time to be a geek and a wargamer.

This blog is therefore my attempt to give something back, while also encouraging my own participation, productivity and enjoyment of the fantastic hobby that is, ultimately, moving little plastic men around and rolling buckets of dice.

The Warhammer Skirmish Project

Given all that, you might reasonably ask, why is this blog presumptuously labelled the Warhammer Skirmish Project? Well, being largely out of the hobby over the better part of the last decade has given me time to do a lot of soul-searching over wargaming. Much like the perfectly accurate and perfectly playable WW2 wargame does not exist, and I should know – I’ve played, modified and drafted my share, any wargame, no matter how inspired the rules and how superlative the miniatures, is only as good as the experience. I may be a young’un, for I have yet to reach my 24^th winter in generic fantasy parlance, but I’ve played a great number of games. These have ranged from the dark forests of the Old World to the intrigue of Westeros, and from the open seas of the Spanish Main to the killing fields of the American Civil War, and the claustrophobic green of the hedgerows of Normandy. Some of the best games that I remember were played with simple or only adequate rules, yet it could be a wonderful host, fantastic terrain, a compelling narrative or even the moment of a Panzer exploding from a single lucky hit that still makes me fondly recall those small wars.

To get back to Warhammer Skirmish, then, this game possesses many of those traits. I remember religiously scouring the Games Workshop website at a time (2003) when it really was bursting at the seam with articles, whether on gaming, converting, painting or terrain building. That these articles were interlinked, for example with instructions on how to build an Empire watchtower, provided with a scenario for it coming under attack, and finally even a battle report of that action, blew my febrile young mind. While, ironically, I only played Lord of the Rings and did not have the miniatures to recreate these games, I converted many of the scenarios across to Middle Earth. I can, even now, vividly recount a desperate struggle between groups of Mordor orcs, standing in for two factions of beastmen fighting for supremacy. Reading these Warhammer scenarios and articles over and over planted a seed of the Old World in my brain. A few years later, I dabbled in Warhammer Fantasy proper, but the dark intimacy and tense atmosphere of the skirmish game never really translated to the blocks of unpainted troops which comprised my Warhammer Fantasy battles. I then sold off these miniatures and didn’t think of it again.

Until two years ago. Digging through my padded foam archives I found a few of my cousin’s Warhammer miniatures that had been gifted to me. In their garish ink washes, these 5^th edition Chaos sorcerers worked their magic. My brain started ticking. The distant myths of games of younger days focussed to reveal a history beset by Warhammer Skirmish. Before I knew it, I had recovered the fabled pdfs and was plundering the depths of the Wayback Machine vault, feasting on the tiniest broken glimpses of the past glories of the Games Workshop website. At the same time, I started poaching on ebay, assembling a small horde of miniatures I wished I could have had when I was younger. Now these Trollslayers, skeletons and beastmen haunt my workbench, as well as my fevered dreams. While the Warhammer Skirmish scenarios remain everything they were, being varied, fun, small and atmospheric, the passage of time has not been kind to the rules themselves. After this long detour through my wargaming history, then, we get to the crux of the blog. The rules need a bit of a sympathetic tweaking and the scenarios, while lovely, could do with clarification and updating too. Yet, no one wants to read only dry and dusty rules notes and tweaks, and nor do scenarios without terrain, miniatures or opponent make the blood surge in us wargamers. As such, this blog, or project, will endeavour to encompass the full menagerie of the miniature wargaming hobby, with conversion, sculpting, terrain and painting articles jostling for space with new rules, scenarios and miniature reviews. I sincerely hope you will join me in this journey of model discovery.

Thanks for reading,

Owen.