Introduction Part One

Hi there,

I'm Brandon, and this is my first attempt at a blog.  I'm a 34 year old father of three boys.  The oldest has just turned 12, and he's my most frequent gaming partner.  It's fun to have an opponent built into my daily life!!

When I was a kid I was a big fan of miniature gaming.  Battletech was my first love, but I also got into Necromunda, and some other smaller games.  I'm a big fan of skirmish style games as opposed to massive armies / clash of the titans type of games.

My oldest son has been interested in Battletech for a while now.  Mostly from playing some of my old video games like Mechwarrior 3.  He played that game obsessively, and kept on begging me to teach him how to play the tabletop version.  

This year I decided to get back into the hobby of miniature wargaming.  Much to the dismay of my wife and wallet, but to the sheer joy of my boys and I.  You can't make everyone happy.

I went looking for battletech, and found it pretty difficult to find.  Not only that, but it didn't seem to age as well as I remembered.  I'm still tempted to order the plastic cast boxset, but less so now.  Part of the appeal for me was the mech designs, and the iconic designs from macross were straight out amazing here.  Macross was the start of my anime/manga mecha obsession, and I continue to love and watch it today.  I've actually been thinking about getting one of the models from this show just to assemble and paint for fun!

Without those iconic minis battletech just lost it's allure.  We proxied the game with some cardboard pop ups, and aprinted out hex map.  It was long and slow.  Heat is arduous at best.  Some of the mechanics are just excessive.  In short battletech just didn't hit the itch that we wanted.  My son was dissapointed, but in total agreement.  We needed a new game it seemed.

I went into the FLGS, and started asking around.  He pushed 40k very hard.  VERY hard.  The two of us were extremely excited by the whole thing.  The shop owner talked us into getting a dark vengeance box set and a paint set.  My budget for starting the game up was $200 all in.  Just the box and the paint went over that.  Still, we were very excited and I made an exception while we paid up.   The shop was a strange place, and didn't keep stock in stock besides cards.  He told me that he lost too much money on games that don't sell, and he doesn't want to take that risk anymore (I don't go here anymore by the way.)

The next week I got a call and went in to pick up the box.  My son and I rushed home and ripped it open, to find our large purchase of sprues upon sprue of mini's and a rulebook.  Now this is my fault, but I didn't look into the box set properly first.  We had assumed that we would be able to play a game with the contents of the box.  This isn't really true at all.  Games Workshop does make some games like that, but Dark Vengeance isn't one of them.    We were dissapointed.  I checked online to find some terrain, and found some very expensive games workshop terrain, including boards that would cost in the thousands!  It seemed like I had gotten myself into a very pricey hobby, and it would be tough to say no to my son for everything!

The introduction continues in Part 2.