A New Direction, Some History, and a Mission Statement (LONG post)

Why the new Blog? Will I post on the old one? What's this one about? Why the name change? These questions and more will be answered after the jump...

Welcome to my new blog! For the two people and 15 bots reading this, thank you SO MUCH for stopping by! I am looking forward to posting up more opinion pieces on topics outside of Games Workshop products, which honestly I was already doing. My previous blog covered Warhammer 40,000 as a primary subject but I often found myself covering different games and even non-gaming subjects. Gasp!

So the point of this blog is to not only have the name match my Dave0047 usernames but also allow me to cover more subjects without them seeming sort of "off-topic." I will be actively promoting products and companies I'm excited about but I may also rant a bit from time to time on gripes I have with them as well, including even the communities, and hopefully provide suggestions on how we can fix or adapt to these issues. Basically this allows me to post more often without feeling constrained to keeping it 40k-related or just hobby gaming related, so in theory you should see more posts from me! As for the old blog, it will stay up but it's not going to be used anymore. Please subscribe to/favorite this page if you like my content!

---

Also, one thing I've never done before is made a sort of background post about myself and my experience. There's no way to post this information without it sounding conceited but at least I'll have a place to direct people to if my qualifications ever come up or if people want to know my history in gaming. And yes, it's come up in discussions before where people have said "what have you ever done?" Why do people even have to answer that question just for expressing their opinion? ARGH! So whatever, here goes!

Video Gaming

I've played video games and board games for as long as I can remember. I grew up a Nintendo kid with a Game Boy, Game Boy Color, NES, SNES, and N64, and branched out to other consoles and brands after high school. I had access to a PC as well and got to play games like Doom, Wolfenstein, Age of Empires, StarCraft, Warcraft, Quake, and Star Wars Dark Forces. I had friends with other consoles that I got to play throughout my childhood like Sega Genesis, Dreamcast, and PlayStation 1 & 2. After that I joined the military and was able to fund my video gaming desires more directly, though while I was in Basic Military Training my parents decided to take almost everything I owned previously and throw it into the trash, so I had to start from scratch going forward. I grabbed a PS2, XBox, and GameCube, moved on to an XBox 360 (and always continued the Nintendo handhelds), then an XBox One, PS4 Pro, Nintendo Switch, and now a PS5. I've had a gaming PC of my own since 2002 and currently I own a pretty beefy custom-built gaming rig that has asked me a few times where John Connor is...

Pokémon TCG

I received Pokémon Red Version for a late birthday gift in 1998 literally the day it released (one day after my birthday). I was instantly hooked and could not get enough! In January of 1999 when the TCG launched, I got started with a whole box of base set and the starter deck with Machamp and was equally sucked-in. Once I started getting the hang of playing the game and building my own decks, I ventured out to my local hobby store; a quaint little shop called Burke Centre Comics in Burke, VA. It was owned by a really nice guy named Lance which also happened to be the video game's penultimate boss which I always thought was cool. I must've pestered that poor guy a hundred times to start playing the Pokémon TCG with us so that we could "beat Lance" just like in the video games. Ah to be 16 again. I wasn't too bad at the card game, eventually being considered part of the store's "elite four" (mimicking the video game's final bosses, basically the self-proclaimed "best" four players in the shop). Since then I've never really stopped buying or playing the Pokémon Trading Card Game and over the years I became an official judge and organizer for the Pokémon Company in 2005. I run a long-standing League that I started in 2005 and I even competed in fairly large tournaments level in 2005 and 2006 (and 2012) earning the following accomplishments:

4-2 at 2006 Regionals, CO Springs, CO (just missed top cut by a few spots)
6th place, 2006 World Qualifiers, CO Springs, CO (my wife took 7th place!)
4-2 at Dec 9th 2012 Cities, Denver, CO (didn't get close to top cut here but had a LOT of fun)

Today I still am a League Owner and Tournament Organizer for The Pokémon Company International and those roles fall under the "Professor" title you get when you take tests on their site proving your knowledge of the game's rules and mechanics. Our league over the years exploded in popularity and we got to the point where, before it was commonplace, we were one of few selected stores in a region that could hold prereleases. We've also held about a dozen or so League Cups which are still store-level tournaments but usually draw crowds into the 30's and sometimes even over 40 players.

Dragon Ball Z Trading Card Game

A couple of years after I had started playing the Pokémon card game, another card game became extremely popular, and that was the Dragon Ball Z TCG. In the year 2000 this game released its first starter/demo decks which instantly sold out at our local store, and the coming expansions did pretty well too. We had tons of fun playing this game as our "off-game" when we weren't playing the Pokémon TCG and it ended up becoming another mainstay for many of us. I again got heavily involved in playing and competing and even ended up becoming a judge for the game with Score Entertainment just a few years later. One of my few claims to fame in gaming as a whole is that my friend and I had actually created one of the popular meta-type decks close to the end of the game's life involving the Black Style Mastery, Master Roshi as your main personality, and the deck focused on collecting all 7 dragon balls and ending combats before they even start as just another way to draw through the deck finding the dragon balls. It was incredibly successful and spread so far as to eventually be used by some players in the finals of that year's World Championships, before social media was as commonplace as it is now (you had to use forums and such back then). I'm pretty happy with that accomplishment!

Naruto CCG
In the summer of 2006 before I moved back to Virginia, the Naruto Collectible Card Game was released. I was a pretty big fan of the show having watched everything currently available subtitled via various online... erm... sites... since its launch in 2002 or 2003. Just like the Pokémon TCG I was very excited to get into this game too and both competed in and ran events. I became a Meijin (tournament organizer) and stayed one until 2011, and I achieved the rank of Jonin while in Virginia (which requires nine tournament wins in a season, Genin was one and Chunin was three). I still have the pin!

Dungeons & Dragons

In about June 2002 while I was in the middle of tech school in the Air Force, a few friends/fellow airmen taught me about Dungeons & Dragons and roleplaying as a whole. I had heard of it before in my childhood when a few of my friends had explained their campaigns and characters but I brushed it off as silly saying "why would anyone just imagine a character and a story, I'd rather just play a real game." Back to tech school, I was invited to play in a campaign after being explained in full what the game was about, and played for months and loved every minute of it. That was the 3rd edition of D&D and about a year later the 3.5 edition launched with slightly more streamlined rules and content that was 100% compatible with 3rd edition books. I loved that edition and I started running my own games (sometimes out of necessity) after buying and reading a ton of these highly-addictive books. I was playing in a campaign with some co-workers from the Air Force while stationed at Buckley Air Force Base, playing from about 2003 to 2005. In about 2004 I took an online test and became an "Organizer" for Wizards of the Coast for every game they held licenses for. I mainly did this for the "official Dungeon Master" status lol, but it came with about zero perks other than being able to organize official games at sanctioned WotC events. I also didn't quite have a community of people to "officially DM" for so it was just for bragging I suppose.

Over the last decade or so I've been the GM (Game Master) or DM (Dungeon Master) for various RPGs. I have plenty of areas I need to work on but I'd like to think what I lack in vocabulary/descriptions and NPC interactions (actually role playing), I make up for with rules knowledge and interesting and tactically challenging combats. I've DM'd for dozens of groups, dozens of campaigns, modules, and even written and run my own homebrew campaigns to varying degrees of success. Pretty standard stuff.

Warhammer 40,000

In around 1994 to 1995 I walked into a Games Workshop store in Springfield Mall, Springfield, Virginia and fell for GW's trap. I had flat out decided that based on the awesome painted miniatures I had seen there and one particular "vampire" miniature (Chief Librarian Mephiston, Lord of Death) that I was 100% going to get into this game and hobby. I spent that summer mowing lawns to save up enough money to buy the starter boxed set for the now second edition of the game, released in 1993. I played the intro games and missions in that box over and over by myself and about a year or two later I was able to start a 40k club after school with one of my cooler teachers. When 3rd Edition released in October of 1998, I bought a core rulebook and kept it in my school backpack where I'd bust it out in-between classes and on the bus ride to and from school; I was obsessed! As with 2nd edition, the artwork was stunning and I couldn't get enough of the lore, but more importantly the game just seemed like so much fun to play. In November of 2002 I was stationed at Buckley Air Force Base in Aurora, CO and immediately started seeking out a store like my old hometown Burke Centre Comics shop. I found one called Attactix located at Hampden and Chambers in Aurora, and it turned out to be a store that would change my life.

I joined the local game club there (called "Games Workshop Anonymous" or GWA, previously ATAC which I can't remember what that stood for) and was finally able to start playing more regularly. Over the next few years I was able to participate in campaigns and tournaments run by the veterans of the club, experience more edition changes (3rd to 4th, 4th's experimental assault and vehicle rules, and the introduction of Apocalypse) and expanded my collection to be a pretty sizeable force. The club also went through a break-up/rebrand and was called FNG (Friday Night Gamers) and KGB (Kolorado Gaming Brigade) but still hosted game nights at Attactix and still ran events. I moved back to Virginia in early 2006 but moved back to Colorado again in late 2007, and in the summer of 2008 I took over the 40k club and re-branded it "The War College". Since then we've had our ups and downs but I'm quite proud to say we're [probably] the largest wargaming club in the state of Colorado.

While we were at Attactix as FNG and the War College, we held many successful events of all different kinds (campaigns, tournaments, special events, etc.). Our club was so popular that people used to line the walls waiting for tables to open up, we had over 20 people showing up each week, and I had collected over 250 emails from club members that had come and gone during that time! From 2011 when Attactix closed through 2016, we moved through a few stores, held a few tournaments, I won a few run by other people, yadda yadda, and we finally settled at Colpar's HobbyTown USA in Aurora. The War College is currently the biggest the club's ever been, with an average of 30 regulars each week and events with as high as 54 people! Not a single 40k event in the state since 2015 has had that many people actively participating! It's been an insane ride! Of course these numbers are all pre-COVID though, nowadays we're either intermittently on lockdown or trying to keep numbers small intentionally.

Moving on...

Now, with all that being said, does this allow me to speak on any of these subjects with any kind of authority? Nope, don't misconstrue my intentions by sharing all of this. But at least you now know my experiences and background and can judge for yourself if you'll take my word on things or not. 👍 Thanks for reading!