Over the years I have had several hobbies. As a kid, I
loved Legos! I would spend
hours putting
together kits and making a huge scene. Like most other ten year old boys, I was
obsessed in Star Wars and combined my love for
Legos with my devotion to
Star
Wars and started to buy Lego Star Wars. However, as I grew older, I grew out of
Legos and one day when I was looking for video games, I found a shop called
Games Workshop. Thinking, it was a video game shop because it had a massive
statue of a sci-fi soldier, I went inside and found that there were no video
games. Instead, the store was crammed with miniature soldiers from the medieval
times to the future.
The moment I saw the miniatures I was hooked! I bought the
starter set and ever since then I’ve been playing
Warhammer 40,000, a tabletop
miniatures game from
Games
Workshop. Warhammer 40,000 is a game of strategy as you command an army of
plastic and metal to conquer the battlefield or complete objectives. The minimum
materials needed for the game is a commander (which is you as a miniature); two
troop squads, dice, rulebook, and a Codex (a
book containing details of your
army faction). Of course, you can always have more than one commander and two
troops. You can have up to two commanders and as much troops as you can bring,
as long as your opponent can match your army! Another fun part of the hobby is
the ability
to customize the troops. Every figure comes unassembled and
unpainted, so you can do whatever you want to the figure and paint it whatever
way you want. You can convert the figure or build it like the instructions tell
you.
Although the game is very fun, it requires a lot of
patience. A typical game can take up to three hours, and preparations can be
painstaking as you have to organize your men and deploy
them. It is also difficult to play against stuck up players or even worse, the
nerds! They drain out all the fun of the game, as they follow the rules
completely and get mad at you if you do something wrong. However, you can play
at the store, since they build several terrain battlefields for your troops to
storm across.
At the Games Workshop Hobby Centers, you can buy miniatures
and paint them at a booth, or go to the gaming section and play against other
players. There are occasional special events where free miniatures are given
out for participating or even free food and drinks! There is, however, a
downside of the hobby. The
miniatures are
expensive because they are imported from England and are produced in only one
factory. Hence, having a large army can be hard if you don’t have the money.
Twenty Imperial Guardsmen, the most basic models in the game, cost about $35 and
a tank is about $40.
I go to a Hobby Center about once or twice a month because
the local hobby center at Ventura had just recently closed and so I have to take
the Metrolink down to Glendale. At home, I play with one of my friends who also
collects Warhammer 40,000 but it gets a bit dull after you have played the same
army about 15 times!
Besides playing Warhammer 40,000, I also participate in
wrestling. I have wrestled for three years and although it seems like a long
time, it takes a while for me to learn the moves, so I only wrestle basically,
or else I would mess up and pin myself in a match. I’ve wrestled for the Fremont
Wrestling team in middle school and wrestle for the JV team in Oxnard Wrestling
Team. I have also done swimming and basketball, but I don’t have an interest in
basketball, so I wasn’t very motivated in the sport. I still swim in the summer
to keep in shape and for fun, but wrestling is my main sport.
