The Many Joys of our Hobby.

Colour Scheme for my new Cadre

This post was sparked by a post on face book by a friend. His post got me thinking about the many aspects of our hobby, and how varied it is.

There’s something in our hobby for everybody. If you’re a gamer, it’s sufficiently complex to provide a competitive challenge, if you’re a painter you can create some beautiful minis, if you’re a modeler the scope for conversions and terrain modeling is endless, and if you’re into the fluff, then you can immerse yourself in the grim dark world of the 41^st millennium.

I think what some people forget is that there is no “right” way, there is just your way. Forgetting that leads down all sort of anger soaked byways, none of which end well.

But here’s the thing, you can enjoy all of them. Last year I got really into the competitive side of the hobby going to many (many) tournaments. I had a blast, got better at playing the game, and met a lot of interesting people. But it culminated in Cally this year. After Cally I felt a little “burned out”. I was beginning to tire of optimised lists, Flamers and Screamers, Wraith spam and Night Scythes, and Biomancy Tyranids. (BTW - I’m not complaining about people using lists like this – it’s a tournament, of course people will bring hard lists -  it’s just that it gets a bit stale, and ironically I avoided all these lists at Cally!).

But the beauty of the hobby is its variety. I could “retreat” from the competitive side into other aspects of the hobby. “Beer and pretzel” gaming at the non-club on Wednesday nights, father and son weekends away at Throne of Skulls, painting and modeling my SM bike army etc etc.

And of course the new Tau Codex has reignited my “love” of the fish folk. But it’s interesting … in the past I’ve focused on playing my Tau competitively (if that isn’t an oxymoron!), optimising lists and only bringing the most effective units. However, what I’ve decided to do with this codex is build a completely new Cadre, and I find myself wanting to field units “because they’re cool” and getting really motivated on the painting and modeling side.

And that’s the point, there are so many different aspects to the hobby, it never gets old. If one aspect gets you down, you just move onto another.

Since the new Tau Codex came out I’ve enjoyed working through all the various options. At the moment I’m enjoying the creative process of building a new army - coming up with a new paint scheme, thinking up cool conversions, and modeling thematic bases. But in the back of my mind I’m list building, and in due course I’ll start to hone and refine “my” list for some competitive tournaments in the autumn.

And the latest “project”? Well the other night at the non-club a friend and I sat down and built some models. While “chewing the fat” we came up with a cunning plan to build an “uber” board using a modular tile system. The idea is that it would be the non-clubs “showpiece” when we run our gaming days. A couple of years ago I build all sorts of weird and wonderful terrain for a campaign I ran with Little Geek and my brother. It was great fun at the time, but after spending hours (and hours) building everything from a simple ruined building to a massive gothic cathedral, I got a bit sick of building terrain….. but now I feel my enthusiasm for creating worlds returning.

There is so much variety in our hobby, that it would be difficult to get bored with all of it!

EYIG