This week has been incredibly busy! While I may not have a Codex Cleanup this go around, I did want to share something from my Facebook memories to help encourage new collectors.
This was the “height” of my unofficial Imperial Guard collection many, many years ago. As you can see on the top right, I was a fantasy player. I could barely afford that let alone the glorious imperial guard! I turned to Paperhammer tanks, some very affordable miniature line from Ireland (I forget the name, but they are out of business now I believe), and an Emperor class titan made from Lego.
The paperhammer tanks took 8 hours to build at first and were just printouts on construction paper (and later card stock).
The pros were:
Very Affordable. Basically free outside of super glue.
Incredibly light. They weighed nothing and could be stacked to your heart’s content, even on top of miniatures.
Even not painted, they looked ok from 3 feet away. Once they were sprayed with plasticoat and properly painted in a camouflage to help hide the lack of surface detail, some players did not even notice until they handled them or inspected them closely!
The cons were:
Flimsy. The Baneblade in particular was too large for the paper’s strength. Building it again later from cardboard cut outs instead fixed the worse of the issue. Other tanks had frequent armour plating malfunctions and needed emergency scotch tape or glue repairs. Once again, the plasticoat helped minimize these thanks to its thick and strong sealant.
Forever. It took forever to build them. But it was a good lesson in patience. I was able to get them down to about 6 hours after some practice and got my confidence up.
As I was able to rotate out models for official ones or high-quality proxies as I got older, I donated them to a new aspiring general of the guard to assist him. The point being, we all start with humble origins. Whether it is a combat patrol box, broken used models, or proxies, we all start out pretty humble. If you start young this will be really common. Good news, you can’t afford drugs if you play 40k (particularly horde armies), so get your parents to buy you plastic crack!
I hope to have some exciting news for everyone very soon! Well, at least for me! As always, happy wargaming! What are some of your first humble beginnings?
Alternate 40k Rules 