"Can't Believe I Used To..." Topic

Complete the sentence. Regarding miniature wargaming, of course…

…cut my own bases.

.. invade Russia in the winter.

Enjoy stripping paint from figures.

Play those horrid games from the 90's: star fleet battles, combined arms, seekreig, johnny reb, grand tactics, etc.

. . . trying paint eyes in 15mm

painted figures with Testors gloss paint

painted figures with Testors gloss paint

Are you kidding me? I thought I was the only guy to do that!

Play GW games.

played games with complicated rules.

cut my own bases and buy figs that were only in an advancing pose.

That makes 3 of us ZPAL and Ed!

. . . use Pactra paints, along with Testors.

For two years when I first got married, I gamed seven hours every Saturday and the wife hardly complained. Now I am only good for about 4 hours every other Saturday and the wife gets concerned if I dont give her a call. The good part is it has been 41 years that we have been married

… bought into Warhammer 40K…

played games with complicated rules.

Amen to that one! "Consult chart 1 to see which Musketry chart applies. Then decide which accuracy chart applies. Now cross reference the result from the appropriate musketry and accuracy charts to the shooting factors table…"

Carry 3kg of Champions RPG stuff into the office every day of the week just so I could spend my lunch hour doing write ups on stuff that we'd done a night or two before…

…pay for a catalog that (possibly) had line drawings of miniatures so that I could then mail in an order form to purchase said miniatures sight unseen!

…flew to England to buy a very large order of 28mm napoleonics because it was cheaper than shipping.

Used to order miniatures by mail and figure that life was good if it took less than four weeks.

Get to go to the local, large hobby shop at least once a week, to see what was new, and frequently to spend pretty liberally on the hobby.

Sadly, those shops are now gone, and spending has been trimmed considerably, which I suspect is purely coincidental (but then again, maybe not).

Regularly played Empire

Used green baize for a wargames' mat.

Paint pupils.

Paint with enamels, so smelly.
Cut my own bases.
Here's the biggy…..not researching uniform colors, just painting what I thought it should look like.

painting hair yellow

Played the original D and D. I mean THE original folio, black and white printing. Before figures and before the first hardbound version.

I don't know if I can't believe it because it was so long ago and it reminds me of my age, or that I ever played a fantasy game.

Cutting bases, first from mat-board and then from balsa – and without a mitre box too.

Care about what others thought.

Yes, Doctor X et al …

cut my own bases

Phil

Plated SPI board games at home with first wife (she hated the hobby) and two kids under 3 around.

Honorable mention, rules with with "National characteristics" in the game.

Never cared what others thought after High School. Being a Hispanic nerd growing up in East Los Angeles pretty much had that beat out of me.

Bought and set up SPI's monster game "War in Europe" including the economy spirals, taking up almost every inch of floorspace in my little bedroom, then put it all away, never to crack the box again!

Complicated rules are OK. There, I've said it.

I can't believe I didn't tell a few surly gamers I've known over the years where to go.

cut my own bases

Agreed.

Melt down perfectly good 25mm castings back in the 1981. I used them to make damaged and destroyed tanks.

Not prime my figures. Paint right on to the (then) lead.

Played SPI War in Europe with friends 3 times. Each game took almost as long to actually play as the real war lasted.

+1 Punkrabbitt and Hatshepsuut

also 3 day marathon with late teens to mid 20s war gamers at young friends parents' house (yes, they knew) SPI's Wellington's Victory: Battle of Waterloo to a conclusion on the fourth day…

Painted bases (that I cut myself) simply a plain green. Not textured materials, no ground cover/bushes, just plain green painted bases.

-Often spent a Saturday or Sunday playing huge 12-plus hour Warhammer or 40K games to the bitter end.

- Worried about stupid GW rules or botched army lists, when we could just house-rule what we want to make everyone happy. I'm looking at YOU, White Dwarf #111 Squats!

Cutting my own bases WAS a pain, and took away for painting & modelling, and is now only done occasionally, sort of (a while back I turned some Litko 40x30mm's into 30-squares). But personally, it doesn't fall into the "don't believe I did that" category.

…believe that Vikings had horns on their helmets.

believe Airfix figures were the only way to go.

I still cut my own bases for some applications, but I can't believe I used to paint 15mm Napoleonics with Testor's enamels and those flat nylon brushes with no point. I used to cut toothpicks to paint fine details (very, very badly, I might add).

Thankfully, Dan Richardson and Chuck Vadun introduced me to proper brushes and acrylic paints when I was only 2-3 years into the hobby.

believe that complicated rules=realism.

Nothing wrong with monotone painted bases at all.

Taped a quarter to an index card and mailed it off….."in return for your latest catalog."

… live in the world before computers.

1. Cut my own bases
2. Used Araldite (epoxy glue) to glue figures to bases. Now I just use PVA or superglue
3. Used a horrible green flock that was nowhere near the colour of any grass on earth.

I stopped doing 1 about 10 years ago. 2 and 3 over 30 years ago

When I was a kid I used to buy minis by mail order like this:

1. Look in a catalogue and write a letter to the shop saying what I wanted to buy
2. A few weeks later they would reply with an invoice
3. I asked Dad to write me a cheque, which I then posted to the shop
4. Waited for the parcel to arrive in the mail

All up the process took about 6 weeks, and that was from a domestic supplier. You wouldn't even try to buy from overseas

. . . sweat the fact the I mounted my Johnny Reb figures on 1" X 1"' instead of 7/8" X 7/8" bases.

I really don't know what I was thinking – like the extra 1/8" was going to earn me a visit from a distressed John Hill, or that game play was going to be completely screwed up somehow. But I agonized over the decision.

They were my first historical armies after playing DnD, and it was uncharted territory for me.