You know the drill here. High school becomes GCSE school followed in my case by starting out in the workplace. After some fantastic seasons with my respective Undead & Chaos Dwarf (of course I had the undead!) teams the hobby once again took a back seat in place of some of the craziest times of my life. Work took me daaaaawwwnnn saaaaauuuffff (I know you’re doing the accent with me really!) and eventually, and I cannot for the life of me remember what specifically got me back into it, after relocating & the wild nights out settled, a bit, my love for the hobby returned.
Despite every one of my housemates consistently teasing me about their assumption that I wore tin foil hats & ran around the woods in a cape I made the weekly journey to Southampton to attend their Thursday games night. I took my big blue plastic carry case full of undead (now renamed Vampire Counts) excited to meet new players & immerse myself in the hobby all over again. However, the store had a huge Warhammer 40k crowd in a very busy, successful store. To be fair I nearly always got a game, but unfortunately was always pitted against the same player with the same tricksy Wood Elf army.
After starting to spend more & more time in Winchester I visited their Games Workshop store & became friends with store manager Adam. Adam was three things: Canadian, a great salesman, and utterly nuts. His nationality encouraged a really approachable personality & he really made everyone feel individual & welcome the moment you arrived in store. He would advise the kids at his painting stations to be good for their parents in the hope they would be rewarded with miniatures, a genius way to get parent points & one of his many fantastic sales techniques. His combination of nutter, gent & salesman actually sold me the dream on my next hobby love: Daemons. And after a long discussion about my dislike for the model range for the ‘never born’ he helped me created a converted Slaanesh army with counts as elements representing all the gods. To this day my Hellblade-weilding Daemonettes remain a part of my current force.
Thursday games night at Winchester was certainly less busy than at their sister store but had a great mix of players across all the different games systems. This also meant that Adam was also able to match the right opponents together, create new friendships amongst the store goers & still make everyone fee individually as welcome as anyone else. A huge foundation that I wanted to emulate into the Hammerers.
It was here I would meet the inaugural members of the Hampshire Hammerers & ‘graduate’ from vets night……….
Did you attend Games Workshops’ games nights? Tell us about your experiences.