Toy Soldiers

It's in the subtitle of the blog, so I should probably talk about the whole wargaming thing sometime. The problem is that my wargame is normally Warhammer, and Games Workshop has not been very kind to me lately.

Once upon a time, I had serious fanboy love for White Dwarf, the gaming magazine of games workshop. It had everything - cool models, interesting stories, terrain projects to make, gamer feedback, and special rules and things. Having an issue made me far superior to the legions of gamers who didn't, and brought me a lot closer to the people that were willing to throw down a few hundred bucks to seriously get into the game. I'd vanish for a few hours into a nerdy paradise, and come back fully pleased and energized about my hobby. This is probably too revealing, but it is truth.

In the past year and a half, Games Workshop released new editions of most of their games, released two different warhammer-based computer games (one was Warhammer 40,000, but that still counts), and the venture into video games was very successful. It allowed gamers who couldn't afford to get into the hobby as much as they would like a way to enjoy it, and that was good. With this game, though, game dreams of greater exposure, and this culminated in White Dwarf being available in the racks at Borders and other such stores. However, the gaming magazine the helped create and sustain the devoted hobby was not deemed fit enough for this new, wider audience, and this is where my lack of attention to wargames recently comes from.

White Dwarf reads like a catalog, or a promotional pamphlet. it is dry and filled with product information, and nothing else. It no longer shows models painted by mere mortals, and it only features the big three games, living the amusing little oddities to rot in some far corner of their website. The magazine is dry and uninteresting, and I can only imagine this course of action will be a tremendous failure. At least, for the sake of the hobby, I hope so.