[semi-OT] NYT article on War(hammer)gaming

It's actually not a bad article, pretty even treatment, though
there's one or two 'cult' references in there.	I'm kind of
curious what prompted the New York Times to cover this, but
whatever, they did. <shrug>

Have to hope NYT doesn't mind me spreading an article...
probably, 'cause of the ads, but whatever. <grin>  If you want
to be happy and legal about it, please visit
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/15/arts/15warh.html --
registration required.

'Til later,
Aaron

The New York Times
February 15, 2005
Painted Armies, Tabletop Battles
By JULIE SALAMON

HOUSTON - At 6 feet 4 inches, with a shaved head and a spiky
beard, Adam Floyd, 21, may seem fierce and freaky. Wearing a
black T-shirt that says "Storm of Chaos," he is exactly the type
you might expect to find at a competition for a fantasy game
involving military strategy, in which the goal is to annihilate
an opponent's army.

But hold those preconceptions. Mr. Floyd is not in a dark,
forbidding gaming store, but at the bright, expansive indoor
visitors' plaza at NASA's Johnson Space Center here. The 70
fighters gathered for a tournament last month also included
Chris Goodchild, a cherubic 12-year-old, and Carl Bellatti, 54,
a grandfather and middle school band teacher in Houston, as well
as computer programmers, lawyers, prison guards, an all-state
football player from Texas, a substantial smattering of
adolescent boys and one woman.

Mr. Floyd, the son of teachers, is a mild, articulate fellow, a
theater major at Idaho State University in Pocatello. He flew in
with his friend and fellow strategist Matt Wyse, 21, a history
major and competitive tennis player, who has been playing the
game, Warhammer, since he was 14.

What drew this unlikely assortment of people together was a
chance to compete at Warhammer, popular in Britain, Europe and
Australia for more than 20 years but known in the United States
mainly to its numerous cultish devotees. In a culture dominated
by virtual diversions and mass marketing, Warhammer has acquired
an ardent following by being tactile and mysterious, using no
advertising at all. Games Workshop, the British company that
makes it, has licensed two video-game versions, but it is
usually played with three-dimensional figures by opponents who
face each other across a real-life table.

The armies consist of tiny metal and plastic models, measured in
millimeters. The soldiers, often nasty-looking creatures
operating arsenals of weapons, have gross or sanguinary names,
like Snotlings, Tyranids and Chaos, but they are assembled by
their generals with glue and then painted with delicate brushes,
often with obsessive precision.

Warhammer begins with a fairly simple set of rules: dice are
thrown, imaginary shots are fired, soldiers are moved. But the
game quickly becomes complex and arcane as different armies are
assigned special rules that modify the basic principles of
battle. There are thousands of figures and dozens of armies,
each with its own lore, abilities and point values, explained in
a series of 64-page manuals called codexes and army books, which
include tips on painting and modeling techniques.

Like poker and football, Warhammer appeals to men and boys far
more than to women and girls. It allows a particular kind of
socializing, the kind that requires no conversation apart from
talk of the game. Sergio Sciancalepore, a shy 13-year-old with
wavy hair and huge dark eyes, was at the tournament. He has an
Xbox and loves chess, but when he discovered Warhammer at a
store in a Houston shopping mall three months ago, he was
hooked. He goes back to that store every Saturday night looking
for a pickup battle.

Physicality is a crucial component. "You get to touch the
pieces," Sergio said, "pick out your battles, see them from an
upper view, move your army, paint it your own way."

His father, Vincent, has encouraged him. "I used to build models
when I was a kid," said Mr. Sciancalepore, a printer who grew up
in Queens but has lived in Houston for 25 years. "I feel I'm
passing it on."

Two days before the tournament, Mr. Floyd decided his army
wasn't attractive enough. He pulled an all-nighter redesigning
his soldiers.

"It takes a bit of creativity, a bit of imagination and a good
sense of humor," he said.

His friend Mr. Wyse added, "And a warped sense of priorities."

Like the Space Center, Warhammer is something of a throwback,
combining a futuristic vision with nostalgia. It updates the toy
soldiering made popular a century ago by H. G. Wells in "Little
Wars" and Lord Baden-Powell, the founder of the Boy Scouts.

But for these toy army generals, craftsmanship matters as much
as tactics, and it is this aspect that most distinguishes
Warhammer from fantasy games like Dungeons and Dragons. At the
Houston competition, prizes were awarded for best general and
best army, but also for best appearance (won by Mr. Floyd's
soldiers, turned out in official Warhammer "scab red" and
"scorpion green") and for best-painted. Throughout the day,
clusters of boys sat transfixed by a table where a master
painter, Mondel Garcia, showed them the intricacies of painting
diminutive limbs with very fine brushes.

Courtliness counts too: the second most coveted prize was for
best sportsman. This game requires mental ferocity and a certain
delicacy. The players - some overweight, some string beans,
clean-cut and tattooed, boys and men - toted their miniature
warriors as carefully as little princesses carting collections
of fragile dollies.

The company's sales methods are old-fashioned; it uses no
advertising, relying on word of mouth and its 320 stores
worldwide (57 in the United States, in 19 cities) and 4,000
independent games retailers that carry Warhammer to lure new
customers. "We truly believe the only way to get people into
this hobby is to put an empire soldier in their hands and let
them play," said Will Postell, metro manager for Games Workshop
in Houston, where there are four of the company's stores in
shopping malls with lots of foot traffic. The company has set up
"battle bunkers" in Chicago, Los Angeles, Memphis and Baltimore,
where staff members have 8 to 20 gaming tables set up, ready to
give tutorials to newcomers.

This marketing strategy has worked well abroad for Games
Workshop, which went public a decade ago. Revenues for fiscal
2004 were $284 million, up from $241 million in 2003, with a
comparable increase in profits. The company had an extra boost
four years ago, when New Line Cinema licensed it to make the
official tabletop battle game based on the "Lord of the Rings"
films. (Designed as a variation on Warhammer, it also features
painted models and tabletop battles.) When the company sponsors
its annual Game Day in Birmingham, England, 10,000 players show
up.

For Chris Goodchild, it was love at first sight. His family,
which is British, was living in the Netherlands when he saw the
"Lord of the Rings" game in a store four years ago. He
immediately called his father, an executive with Shell Global
Solutions. "He was in an important meeting," Chris said. "I told
him I saw those models and really needed them."

Though attracted to Warhammer because of his fixation on "The
Lord of the Rings," Chris said, "I became obsessed with the game
and painting the figures."

The game's popularity has grown slowly in the United States,
where it has been around for about 15 years. "Having a hobby
travel by word of mouth isn't hard to do in Britain because it's
a small country," said Mike Jones, Games Workshop's vice
president for the United States southern region. "Because of
U.S. geography and topography and sheer size, it's more of a
well-kept secret," he said of the game.

But its appeal wasn't lost on Mike Wampler, sales manager at the
Space Center in Houston, who invited Games Workshop to hold its
tournament there to pep up the slow season, when only 1,100
visitors might show up on a Saturday. He also invited the
Pokémon Rocks tour on Memorial Day weekend and the Purina
Incredible Dog Challenge for the spring.

"Sixty percent of our visitors weren't born when NASA
accomplished the man on the moon," Mr. Wampler said. "I want our
guests to leave saying, 'That's one of the coolest places we've
ever been.' You have to do Warhammer events; you have to do
Purina dog events. These are the links to the future."

Warhammer isn't cheap. Though starter sets with 48 figures are
available for $45, the lust for military might, even on this
small scale, can be infectious, and expensive. Garrick Ruscher,
37, a computer programmer whose four boys - and his wife - play
and paint Warhammer, said he found himself spending $700 a month
on figures that can cost as much as $54 for a 12-inch model of
Mumakil from the "Lord of the Rings" group.

"How they remember all the rules staggers me," said Helen
Goodchild, Chris's mother, a brisk, amiable woman who might be
the ultimate Warhammer mom. Eighteen months ago, her husband
thought the family was being transferred from the Netherlands to
Kenya, a land of limited shopping possibilities. To prepare for
a two-year stay, the Goodchilds began stockpiling crucial
supplies, including a huge collection of Warhammer figures -
about 2,000 of them - for Chris and his brother, Michael, 10.

Instead the Goodchilds were sent to Houston, where they
discovered that Warhammer had preceded them. "We didn't know
there would be such a good representation here," Ms. Goodchild
said. "The boys made friends quickly through it." At her sons'
school, the British School of Houston, children play Warhammer
at lunchtime. The boys have discovered Friday night open-gaming
sessions at local Games Workshop outlets.

Does the game's warring aspect bother Ms. Goodchild? "It got
them off the computers," she said. "It's creative. They make the
models and paint them and then turn up with the models and meet
people."

Similarly, Jacqueline Bellati, whose husband Carl is a gamer,
says she doesn't mind being a Warhammer widow. "It's not
smoking; it's not doing drugs; it's not being in a barroom," she
said. Has she thought about joining her husband in the game? "It
doesn't interest me at all," she said.

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