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.
Some of us are painters, modelers, 'hobbyists.' We don't want to play right now, just use it as a creative outlet. Some of us are gamers, our models sliding across the table primer-white, pristine in their unfinished state. Some of us are suckling of nostalgia, our armies gathering dust, but we still sit, and watch, and argue. Some of us are all three, obsessively painting, modeling, playing, looking for just the right combination of numbers that will make the perfect force that looks perfect fighting. Our out-of-cycle army of Blood Angels is waiting to come back in. In every war there is the frontline, the supply train, the intelligence division. We're an army together. We'll wear matching shirts when we go to war at the LVO. We'll represent the homeland.
It's a lot like poker, when it comes down to it. It's played on felt. We forget whether two pair beats three of a kind, the reference book coming down for the three of a kind and losing Jim his play money for the week, losing Mike an out-of-cover Rhino. We're not betting; there is too much emotional investment to add money to the mix, but there is cash turnover, too many losses leading to late-night Ebay rampages that will fix everything, will fix the army, will fix ourselves.
Why do we fight? Because we chose this hobby, and we're sticking with it. We fight with the rules and battlescribe computations, we fight with utility and shock value, we win or lose before we hit the table. We're too old, or weak, or civilized to punch each other. The game is a proxy for conflict. We don't want to fight, but we want to be better than our friends. The game is a finite thing, but just big enough that we can't understand it all.
We continue fighting for much the same reason that the idiot at the start of a Hellraiser movie keeps twisting the lament configuration. It's a puzzle that can't be solved, apparently. Our arguments stretch back editions, the confusion of the changing rules landscape leading us to attempt to consolidate into close combat, like we did in the good old days. The game is a chance to be an expert at something. It's a process, a journey, without conclusion; there is a new book waiting to upset the balance. It is never finished, like our armies, like ourselves.
We have no wars to fight, no territory to claim. We can rule the felt for a match, or a week, or a month, but ever will we fall. The long game is staying in, keeping your army dust free, staying on top of the rules. It's seeing the opponents who have become your friends. We fight because we can, and because we love it.
An army of neglected Tyranids gathers dust on a bottom shelf. They are waiting, like armies across the world, waiting for their owner to come back. We, the group, are waiting too, the figures pulled out, considered, put back dusty. They represent a friend who, one day, will come back to the fire.
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