First Post!

Hi there! Thanks for visiting my Blog.

My name is James and I am a war gamer.

There, I said it. It's out. I'm a 30 year old that still plays with toy soldiers.

So a little about my background. I've always been interested in military history (although I could never say exactly why... possibly the war movies that used to be on every Sunday). I started wargaming as a kid without even knowing it was an actual thing with rules and other people doing it. It started with playing with plastic soldiers in the garden, I moved on to lego (blocks used to represent tanks, etc) and 1/72 scale airfix plastic soldiers and eventually found out about Warhammer (Necromnunda to be specific) while in 2nd year at high school - via a class mate reading White Dwarf issue 200.

 After much pestering my parents, I got the 2nd Ed Warhammer 40k box set for my xmas that year... and the rest is history. From there I moved onto Necromunda then Epic 40,000. Epic really caught my attention as it combined they 40k background I love with the same scale as the lego I used to push around the bedroom floor pretending the 8 dot blocks were Shermans and Panzers and the 6 dot blocks were light tanks, the 4's artillery and the 2's A/T guns....

During my gaming career I was always more into the actual building models and playing than the painting side of things. This meant I would normally play with unpainted models. Often converted, perhaps undercoated but generally unpainted. Interestingly this is the opposite of some of my current gaming friends - who started out modelling and painting and eventually got into playing.

Last year I started a Flames of War army (for the second time, but thats another story). I've had a real interest in researching my grandfathers wartime service. He served with 144 RAC - as far as I am currently aware as a Sherman tank driver. I decided that my FoW force should be relevant to him. This meant that as well as a gaming angle there was also an emotional connection which brought with it a determination to get it done, and get it done right. I had originally decided to document this via this blog, but as with many (most) blogs the actual blogging part never quite happened. I have, however, got some stuff to add to my FoW force.

I realise from my own experience that it's handy to see what other people are doing, so I'm going to give this a bash!