Xtreme Kitbash - Ezra Salstrom Memorial Display Shelf

We live and game in a four car garage; with all this space available, everything tends to walk.  The ill-used third table is a nexus for all things orphaned, and on any given day it overflows with gundams, lone aegis defense line sections, regret.  Our models were everywhere, and a long-ago visit to a friend's smaller gaming area had shown us the light: display cases.  While we weren't up to cutting glass and making hinged doors, we roughed out a idea for a place where all our models could live and work.

Philosophize - Playing the Game We Want

I have a confession to make - I've been the king of my local mountain for quite a while.  After the spate of back-to-back losses that make any beginning player question their investment, I rode the Heldrake's bio-mechanical wings to a long string of victories.  A new Codex: Daemons and a new army to go with it kept me winning; Malefic Daemonology kept the streak alive.  I haven't stopped, but a new player in our circle made me question what, exactly, I've been playing for.

Philosophize - Why We Fight

     We're clustered around tables in garages, game shops, 'bonus rooms'.  This is where the billiard table would have gone a few decades ago.  Some of us are drunk, or on the way there.  There's a relatively even distribution of players and non-players in every group, the game itself a springboard for mathammering, armchair generalship, riffs on nerd culture.  The dice clatter in the momentary silence before their all-important faces are decided.
     At it's base, the game is an agreement between the players to do something together.  We've reached the point economists would call 'sunk costs,' where we're too invested to consider leaving.  The game is the campfire we gather around, the thing we have in common.  We started playing after board games got too old, or we had a bored summer with our brother, or when Necromunda wasn't complicated enough.  We keep playing because this crowded room is a place where we all have something in common.