When Adam announced that he was moving on from the Tau (and this blog) and starting his new Eldar blog at first I was a little disappointed. I had been reading the blog for quite a while and it, in part, had helped me get back into 40K, and the Tau in particular. However, then I thought it might become an opportunity to give myself the push to really grow my Tau army and finally turn them into the efficient fighting force that I want them to be.
So who am I anyway? I have been collecting miniatures and gaming with them since the early 1980s, initially role playing and then drifting into wargaming. I think the first wargame I played was first edition Warhammer Fantasy Battles. After leaving Uni in the late 1980s I lost touch with the gaming side of things but I kept up with collecting minis. As such that meant I missed out on a lot of the early GW games. In the late 1990s I found a new gaming group and started wargaming again. Since then I it has become my main past-time, and occasional obsession! I had a large Empire army for Warhammer and I soon built a sizable Eldar army. My friends and I also gamed outwith the Games Workshop hobby, regularly playing Warzone and various historical wargames too.
However, my gaming group drifted away from GW and on to other things, both playing other systems and evenutally, as my family grew and free time became rare, we played more and more board games. For the past 5 or 6 years, although we all considered ourselves wargamers, in truth we were almost exclusively board gamers. Still, my lead and plastic mountain continued to grow and I had a real yearning to get some real wargaming done!
As we all enjoyed 40K it seemed logical to use it as a way back into wargaming. Over the past couple of months we have played 5 games. The first three had my Tau going up against Jeff’s Necrons. The results were mixed, I lost the first and third games, but decisively won the second game. The fourth game featured Jeff’s Tau going up against Del’s Eldar. The Eldar had a hard fight but soon dealt with the Necron menace!
The fifth battle, between Del’s Eldar and my Tau, I will come back to in my next post, which will be a battle report.
It’s fair to say that my army building skills and also my strategy and tactics are proving to be very rusty, so I have started doing some heavy reading, re-familiarizing myself with all aspects of the Tau army. I am specifically looking for ways to give my Tau army a slightly better chance in close combat.
As for my plans for this blog? Initially, while I get up to speed I am looking for some articles on Tau background, and artwork. I will also be aiming to do a few articles on modelling, both the Tau and related scenic items. I will also be following the the growth of my Kroot Mercenary army, as I build and convert it (I love the figures and am therefore forced to ignore their ineffectual abilities on the battlefield). At the moment my gaming group have only just moved up to 40K version 5. But I hope to pick up a copy of 6th edition in the near future, not least as I have heard that they improve the Tau in many ways.