Hey everyone Conor here!
Well I finally got it together and am writing this first of hopefully many blog posts. So as I hope you have managed to guess from the title, this blog is about miniature war gaming and there might be the occasional post about board games, card games and other geeky things.
So first a bit about myself. I started gaming back in 2006 after seeing, what I remember being, a fantastically well painted Ultramarine Space Marine army for Warhammer 40,000 on a shelf at a friends house. This army had everything the eight year-old me dreamed of. Heavily armoured super-humans, huge tanks, squads of roaring motorbikes and many heroes to lead them. I was hooked immediately. My friend gave a starter game where most of the rules were made up and I loved it. I started collecting a few metal figures before, that Christmas, Santa brought me the Battle for Skull Pass boxed game. Many a happy hour were spent throwing paint at the goblins and dwarves and facing them off across the kitchen table. Warhammer Fantasy never really took off for me and a few months later I was back playing 40k. A few more of my friends started playing and over the next few years I built up an army of Space Marines from a chapter of my own creation, the Golden Spears. Many battles took place between the Golden Spears and the Ultramarines, Necrons and Orks up until 2010 where after all my other friends giving up playing, and me moving up to secondary school I decided to put my hundreds of models, books and issues of White Dwarf into the attic and let them gather dust...
Fast forward a year and there I was with too much free time on my hands and not much to do. I had become interested in history, specifically World War II stuff through Band Of Brothers and other books of Stephen E. Ambrose. I suddenly remembered hearing about a wargame set in World War II. I
I spent hours researching Flames of War before going into my Local Gaming Store, Gamers World, ready to buy 'Open Fire' the Flames of War starter set. It was then when I realised just how small 15mm was. I decided Flames of War wasn't for me and, necause I didn't want to return home empty handed, I bought a box of Tyranids for 40k, some glue, and got to work.
I spent about a year collecting and painting my 'Nids and over that time got increasingly annoyed with Games Workshop as a company. The final straw was, the day after the release of 6th edition I went into my local Games Workshop and when I said I was looking for a game I was told "Oh, we don't 'support' 5th edition anymore, you can't play that in the shop!" They then tried to sell me the new €60 rulebook. I left the shop angry and walked across to Gamers World were they were extremely sympathetic. There was a tournament underway so I got talking to some of the players and realised the wargaming scene was a good bit bigger than I thought. Around that time I stumbled upon w-ired.com the Irish Wargaming website and forum.
I decided to try something new so I picked up the Khador battlegroup for Warmachine, a game which I had been looking at for a while however it wasn't until March that I started playing at a 25 point beginners tournament.
Since then I've been slowly building up my army and am playing in as many Warmachine and Hordes tournaments as I can with poor enough results, but I'm having a ball while doing it.
