HAPPY BIRTHDAY

NEO Aaron has been playing and organizing events for Age of Sigmar and reflects on the release of AoS three years ago on the 4th of July, 2015.

Aaron: I started with Warhammer at the end of 2013 when a new friendly local gaming store opened in my town. The store was only a mile from where I lived, and I would stop by on my way home from work to pick up paint or meet friends for a board game. I started a RPG group every Monday night, and I took an interest in the miniature games they sold–they only carried two Warhammer games, but I was drawn to the fantasy version and decided to buy both copies of the Island of Blood box set they had on the shelf with the idea of building and painting two armies to run demo games in the store and help grow the local miniature wargaming community.

When the End Times books started coming out, it felt like a very exciting time to be involved in Warhammer. I didn’t have any history with the Old World and it was fascinating to follow the story of an epic invasion which unraveled the civilizations of that world. Our small group started a fantasy league, I helped organize build days for both fantasy and 40K players and a tournament in the store, and toward the end of 2014 attended my first NOVA Open convention. I bought each End Times book and listened to a variety of podcasts. And then there was the announcement of something new coming in the summer of 2015….

July 4th was a Saturday, and all of the rules and army warscrolls were available as a wide assortment of free downloadable PDF documents. I downloaded everything and was eager to pull out some models and try a game. I asked my wife if she would indulge me for a game–she reluctantly agreed. She was a boardgamer, but didn’t have any interest in my toy soldiers. We negotiated terms for the game–she would read the rules and I promised we wouldn’t play more than 45 minutes.

I set up some terrain on the table in our home, deploying a units of glade guard and wardancers, a spellweaver and a waywatcher for my wife to command on one side. Opposite I set up some of my skaven, plenty of clanrats and a warlord. My opponent asked why I had more ratmen models on the table, but she was willing to start to game to see what happened.

And hour later… after removing the last of my clanrats from the tabletop, she cheerfully asked if I would set up more skaven as reinforcements for her aelven forces to destroy as they had done with the first batch!

The following weekend, we visited a friend and played a multi-player battle on his kitchen table–he had recently put together the Nagash model, and after two turns my wife and I decided to join forces, and with both a treelord and a forest dragon we managed to take down Nagash. I don’t even remember who won that game, but we felt satisfied to bring down that lord of death while the objectives on the table were swarmed with hordes of undead skeletons.

In the following weeks, I got involved with the NOVA Open to help organize the first AoS event at that convention, and it was an exciting time (to say the least) as different players worked to experiment with new army composition systems and enjoy a new and different fantasy Warhammer game and setting.