Where did you start wargaming?

[Whitwort Stormbringer]

If games like Heroquest and Battle Masters count (I tend to categorize them more in the RPG/Boardgame domain than wargames) then I got my start as a kid at home playing those sorts of boardgames.

When I got into wargaming it was Warhammer Fantasy first (after stumbling across GW minis in a store in Seattle while on vacation), and even then we played at home first but shortly thereafter graduated to a monthly gaming club for kids 9-16 at a local store. After we grew out of that it was mostly either gaming at home or occasional tournaments/cons for us, since we mostly still felt a bit young to be playing in the clubs that were run by adults.

Nowadays I play occasionally at a local indie store, although I pretty much only play GW games when visiting family since I haven't kept up to date on the rules.

[Ozorik]

My very first pure GW game was Space Marine.

[Lord Cedric]

I have not, to this date, play in any hobby store - let alone a GW one. Not because I dont' have interest in trying that, but because it's pretty inconvenient for me to get there (40 minutes out of my way). So my first games through to my current ones have been etiher at someone's home or my own.

- Lord Cedric

[razielthegreat]

i remember when i was about the ripe ol' age of 8 finding space crusade and heroquest at my uncles gaming closet. loved playing with the "lil' dudes"
wasn't until a few years later that i had my first game of 40k at school with some friends.

[pointyteeth]

Seems Heroquest was the ultimate gateway game. I got Heroquest for christmas one year, then discovered the warhammer rulebook in a discount bin at a rubber stamp shop. I got some friends involved and we played with mini's from a Battlemasters set I got for my birthday. I spent hours going through back issues of White Dwarf (issues were in the 130's I believe) picking out the models I wanted to order until I started to seriously wonder where the heck we bought models for this game and eventually found a FLGS two towns over. The rest, as they say, is history.

[New Cult King]

A schoolmate brought his older's brother's WD mag to school one day, and I fell in love with the old metal Deathwing and Chaos Termies. A couple of us bought a handful of minis from a LGS (that was actually a 2-hour round trip by train away), and set up an impromptu gaming room in a caravan one of my mates' parents' had in their backyard. It was awesome. I never even SAW a GW store until years later.

[NecronBob]

I started back in 1994 with 40k 2nd edition. A friend had picked up the box at a local non-GW hobby shop, and we played on his den floor.

[Llew]

Formal wargaming began after trying to have fun playing Battlesystem with my friends and failing miserably. We were game for it, but the system made fun a virtual impossibility. I still wanted to do some sort of wargaming but that one was awful. Battletech was the first game where I had a ton of fun, and then I gradually drifted into things like Necromunda which finally drew me into the GW universe. After a few editions of WFB, I was ready to never play those games again, but luckily found things like LotR/WotR, Uncharted Seas, Kings of War and Dust Tactics. Never played a game in a GW store, and only a few games in an indie store.

[chromedog]

Playing at friends' houses and then in non-store-affiliated clubs. The few times I have played in a store have been an aberration in the statistics, nothing more.

[Graeme]

Games club at highschool - genuinely surprised no-one else in the thread to date started in the same way! I picked up my crippling MtG habit at the same time.

[Kaptajn_Congoboy]

I started playing at home with a group of friends when I was a kid, but it took a brick & mortar gaming store and a gaming club to get me back into the hobby once I quit, and the gaming scene around that store/club to keep me in.

[blongbling]

This is going to be a skewed demographic. Most of the people here are of an age and a type and aren't the same model of people that go into a GW store in the first place. All this poll will show is that most of Warseer came into the hobby through their friends, whereas I can assure that GW introduces a LOT of people into the hobby via the stores, if you think that a store will sell 30-40 games a month per store...soon adds up across a chain and a year.

[Max Jet]

Was there ever someone who tried to find out wether people going for a demo game in a GW store actually have been interested in the game before either by friends or somewhere else? Even the number of people starting at a GW store isn't an exact resemblance of how many people get introduced by it in the first place. It is merely the nearest starting point and a pretty convenient one, that doesn't necessarily mean that they wouldn't start in any other way would it not be for the store. Just food for thought.

[shelfunit.]

This is going to be a skewed demographic. Most of the people here are of an age and a type and aren't the same model of people that go into a GW store in the first place. All this poll will show is that most of Warseer came into the hobby through their friends, whereas I can assure that GW introduces a LOT of people into the hobby via the stores, if you think that a store will sell 30-40 games a month per store...soon adds up across a chain and a year.

Again - this is in the UK only - where did everyone in the US, Europe, Australia, the rest of the world start? This is the problem GW seem to have - they look at the business model through the eyes of the UK and forget that this is the only place in the world where this form of recruitment has a) ever worked and b) with the spread of stores across the world, the only place it could work.

[Sgt John Keel]

This is going to be a skewed demographic. Most of the people here are of an age and a type and aren't the same model of people that go into a GW store in the first place. All this poll will show is that most of Warseer came into the hobby through their friends, whereas I can assure that GW introduces a LOT of people into the hobby via the stores, if you think that a store will sell 30-40 games a month per store...soon adds up across a chain and a year.

Assuming Warseer has the grumpy old git market cornered, where do you suppose all the youngsters GW catches end up? Most of today's early teens are reasonably Internet savvy after all. Are they wowed by the glitziness of Beasts of War or do they have no interest in the wider discussion at all?

[Shandara]

Star Quest (Space Crusade for Holland) as a Christmas gift. Then when cleaning some years later we came across it and we started with painting that.

Haven't been to an actual GW shop yet, since there isn't one really close by. FLGS it is!

[shelfunit.]

Assuming Warseer has the grumpy old git market cornered, where do you suppose all the youngsters GW catches end up? Most of today's early teens are reasonably Internet savvy after all. Are they wowed by the glitziness of Beasts of War or do they have no interest in the wider discussion at all?

I suppose he could mean that by the time most people join warseer they are no longer part of GW's churn & burn stratagy and are part of the very, very few percent of GW gamers that last past 6 months or so. However, how that skews the results is not clear, as those that are into wargaming by the time they reach this site are likely to be in it for the long term, and still had to be introduced somehow. As GW started their major recruitment drive of opening new shops everywhere from the mid/late 90's onward the people who vote on this poll should be those that were "recruited" during this expansion and stayed - these are the people this poll is aimed at - not the 6 monthers who are more fad/impulse buyers who should not be considered wargamers in the first place.

[toonboy78]

1991 my friend had heroquest. it weas great so i pestered my dad for it.

speaking to him he went in to GW middlesborough and bout Advanced heroquest. from that momant on all GW purchases were either through a visit to the store or mail order for bits. Gary and Ian atthe store around 1991-1996 were great. full of advice and always willing to get us involved even with games we didn't play. i remeber controlling a mega gargant when titan legions was released. great fun. also a 30sec per turn blood bowl comp that i won and i still have the dwarf ref model painted by Gary. happy days

[Bloodknight]

GW introduces a LOT of people into the hobby via the stores

Nowadays maybe. I think when I bought my first stuff in 1992 they didn't even have stores in Germany. I think when I started playing 40K in 1996 they had like 3 or 4, the closest from me was the German HQ in Düsseldorf, and that was a 250km drive one way.
I also don't remember playing areas at the FLGSs I visited at the time (GW got the first store in my birth state like 2 years ago, I think), so at least in southwest Germany it were the MB games that got people interested because you actually could buy them at the supermarket, i.e. they were visible. The closest FLGS to my home at the time was a 3 hour round trip by 80 km/h moped away, with no actual train connection. Basically you had to mailorder stuff that you somehow stumbled over.

School clubs didn't exist either. Firstly wargames have a bad image here, and secondly keeping kids in school all day is kind of a new development. When I went to school, 13:00 was basically closing time unless you were in 11th grade and up, and if you were in 11th and up you'd have classes from 8:00 till 15:00 or, in my case, 17:00 twice a week.

[redben]

I came to wargaming through using GW as my LGS for RPG's back in the mid-80's. This was during 2nd Ed WFB and pre-Rogue Trader and minis only took up one wall of the store. I'm not sure how relevant my experience would be for people starting the hobby now.