How I stopped worrying and learned to love the dice – One weirdo’s perspective on making the jump into competitive play.

By Will Chaffee

It’s a well-known fact that the competitive wargamer is a fraction of a fraction of the wargaming hobbyist writ large.  There’s a lot of moving parts in that equation – as anyone taking the time to read an article like this would likely be aware of already.  

Actually making the leap can be a bit of a daunting proposition.  I know!  I’ve done it myself!  And since I went all in a few years back I hope that sharing my experience can help someone else out there do the same.  

Just to give you a bit of background – I’ve been interested in the hobby since I was a glassy-eyed child and my parents would use the hobby store as an unpaid babysitter while they went off to do their shopping and maybe sell my siblings for magic beans or whatever.  Somewhere around 1997 a friend and I start collecting and painting.  We perused the books, and sorta-kinda focused on something that might one day turn into an army – which explains my shamefully assembled and painted core of Eldar (now Craftworlds Asuryani) forces.  Then I got married and my painting buddy got a girlfriend.  And then WoW happened.  And then kids.  And then and then and then until 2018 rolls around and new and improved Killteam happens. 

The small scale of units but the big scale of terrain fanned a smoldering ember.  Priming and painting with the old buddy happened again and with it the internal promise of “At least trying to roll dice and move dudes around”.  That meant learning.  

And that’s how it happened.  As a 13-year-old child the rulebook was a daunting exercise that combined the forces of “making an effort” and “your dudes aren’t invincible”.  As a 40-year-old child the rulebook offered a way to play that everyone agreed on.  A structure of understanding around which narratives formed organically.  After I read and re-read the rules the larger picture came into view.  Yeah, it wasn’t perfect, but it was certainly good enough to fan that spark into something more – a deep desire to pit my understanding of those rules against someone else who is like-minded.  

And this is the critical juncture.  

It’s further where I’m going to make my pitch to you.

At the time I was weaning myself away from online gaming – and anyone who’s played online anything can relate to the problems of matchmaking. Even the crappiest unpopular games with dysfunctional matchmaking manage to get you paired up with someone without you doing anything or going anywhere.  And often it’s within minutes.  I knew it wouldn’t be that easy, but just going to local stores and hoping for a pickup game was largely unsuccessful.  

Ok it was just unsuccessful.

 This is a truly analogue experience we’re working with here.  And if you don’t have the patience for a 5-minute matchmaking queue then this is going to be eye-opening.  Depending on how your local store handles things, you’re probably going to need to put in legwork.

But, in my frantic search for any kind of opponent I happened upon a posting for a tournament happening 3 months and 70 miles away.

And it was therefore written in stone.  At least I had a game coming up!

There’s a wonderful sense of relief that comes with knowing the competitive expectations ahead of time.  Everyone there was going to try their very best.  That’s awesome!  I better do the same.

With 2 months to spare I managed to get a Killteam buddy.  He was looking to get some reps in on his way to Adepticon (and at the time I had no idea what that meant).  Oh yeah!

Alright – so this is the first part of my pitch.  My very first Killteam buddy is a guy named Nate. Yeah, sure we got our reps in.  It also led to fast friendship.  Eventually, our families also became close and we did other events together as well.

Thanks to getting some reps in with Nate, I went 5-0 at the tournament I attended.  It was narrow, for sure, but it was mine.  Nate didn’t do so well at Adepticon, even though his Deathguard were consistently 3-1 against my Astra Militarum.  

Come to find out, Nate’s Adepticon roomie ended up taking first in the Killteam event and went home with one of those shiny medals.  The hooks were in then.  I wanted one.  I needed one.

 Which is obviously how it snowballed from there over the course of years.  

My first actual-factual GT was the Michigan GT.  After years of Killteam and 3 painted Warhammer 40k armies, I obviously settled on Age of Sigmar.  

My reasons are my own.  

We can talk about that in a different article.

I went 3-2 in my first GT (and with only 4 practice games under my belt I feel pretty good about that in retrospect) and went home delighted but exhausted.

But here’s the next part of my pitch.  My very first GT opponent was a lovely gentleman named Kamran, who drove to 5 hours to the event which was also his very first GT.  I’ve since seen him at nearly every other event I’ve attended and every time it’s like running into an old school buddy.  

I later ran into some other players that I met at the GT in the local store and they invited me to join them for games – under the caveat that competition would be stiff.

YES.

I’ve been out with those guys nearly every week since.  

Yeah, I’ve been getting my crap pushed in nearly every week for over a year.  

Due to that I don’t feel like I can authoritatively write about winning strategies yet – but I can write about why you want to try.  Yeah, you’ll lose some games.  You might even go as boldly as me and lose most of your games.  

But now I’ve got some buddies I would move furniture for.  Now I know a married gaming couple out of Indiana that I’ve seen 3 times in my life and have giddily sat to chat with them about dwarves for an hour.

Yes, dear readers – you probably see where this is going.  The real prize is indeed the friends you make along the way.

Unfortunately, those weirdos start complaining when you jam them into a trophy case.  C’est la vie.

Besides the camaraderie – which is worth it all by itself – there are other reasons to get into the scene. 

And hey, I don’t know what got you into wargaming in the first place.  As mentioned before, I was primarily a painter for 20 years.  I didn’t think the tournament scene would be the type of place I would enjoy – I carried with me this internet forum-bred preconception that it would be a den of joyless try-hards.  

As if trying hard made someone lesser.  

Recall for a moment that we’re playing violent make-believe with dolls and dice.  Any amount of effort that your opponent puts into the game is entirely for the benefit of the person across the table from them.  

And when the game is done, you get to work through an after-action report together and geek out about lore or painting or dramatic moments granted by the dice and on and on and on.  

And if you stick with it, you will be lucky enough to have moments like watching your buddy Kamran end up on the livestream at Adepticon.  Or watching the kid who fell in love with the hobby after demoing with you once end up at the top table for game 5 the Michigan GT.  Or laughing until you cry with a delightful opponent because his priestesses could not drink blood and yodel simultaneously.  As I write this, I’m days away from the Motor City Mayhem GT and I legitimately hope that everyone who was there last year is there this year and I hope you can make it out too.