Warhammer

I've got a close friend who is really into Warhammer, which, if you've never heard of it, is a kind of fantasy* wargame played with miniatures on a table (or other surface). Players organize their armies and attack one another until one army wins, using a rather baroque set of rules.

I haven't paid a great deal of attention to Warhammer as modern medievalism because I only had one friend who was into it, and it is such an expensive hobby that I had no desire to drop the coin necessary to find out more.

Tonight, though, I learned that my friend had seduced three other mutual friends over to Warhammer, and that they were planning some kind of big war this week. In their discussions, I learned a variety of things about the game:

• It's even more expensive than I thought. Individual pieces can be very expensive, meaning that armies almost always run into the hundreds of dollars. I suspect folks have armies running into the thousands of dollars.
• The world of Warhammer is far more complex than I had imagined. I assumed that it was a basic fantasy world, with these guys as the good guys and those guys as the bad guys, but it has a developed history, sometimes with individual families or characters well-developed.
• The artwork is really, really cool. Players paint and modify their figures and often even make their own terrain. Much it is reminds me of model train builders; I'm not a train fan, but I love their landscapes. Same here. White Dwarf magazine is generally filled from cover-to-cover with photos of beautiful minature. Just check out some of the images that appear when you Google "Warhammer miniatures."

No, I'm still not going to get into Warhammer; I have neither the time nor the money. Still, that doesn't prevent me from admiring the work of gamers who make those beautiful miniatures.


*There's also Warhammer 40,000 which is a futuristic, science fiction game, but since this is a medievalism blog, I'll just ignore that here.