Mantic Blog - Always be prepared (and I was a boy scout even)

Had a great evening, but learned to ALWAYS have your demo stuff with you when going to the game store.

Went to our normal Mantic Monday night down at The Hobby Shop, Dayton Ohio, and brought my bin of Twilight Kin to assemble as I didn't expect anyone else to show up (stupid real life getting in the way of gaming). As I was buying some paint I heard a kid asking where the Warhammer Forty Thousand was. I couldn't help but talk to him. 16 and really interested in starting the miniature gaming hobby. He and his father and two younger brothers are already building a game table in their basement and terrain for it based on what he has see on the web, but he has never played a game and the only miniatures he has are those green/tan toy soldiers you get in a bag at dollar general.

Had he heard of Mantic? So I tried to compare what he needed to get started with 40K (especially since they don't yet have a starter box for the new edition), and then I pointed him to Deadzone. The Hobby Shop has all their games 20% off retail - so the Deadzone box is cheaper than just the base rule books for 40K, and has everything to get started. And then I asked if he had enough time for a demo.

I reach for my Training Day stuff - and realize that it is still sitting on the china cabinet where I put it when I was preparing for Origins. However I did have my full set (as this was supposed to be our Deadzone league night) and my posters, so I recreated it from my normal terrain (though I hated the fact that the minis weren't all painted). He and his brother played, and had a great time, with an enforcer getting mauled early and devoured early, then they came back to kill three of the plague winning 4 pts to 3 pts.

I talked to their mom a bit, suggesting that it might be best to start with a small, skirmish level game (aka Deadzone) as a first mini game rather than the much larger scale 40K because you don't want to invest heavily in a system and then find you don't like it. While they didn't buy it right then, the three boys were figuring out how to split it cost. Unfortunately they live north of town where the shop is on the south side, so not that convenient to them - however being able to buy a complete two player game that they have had fun with I think will definitely win out over just buying the books for that other system, so I think we may have some new converts.

However the lesson I learned is to ALWAYS have my training day box in my demo crate, because you never know when a quiet evening of assembling minis at the local store will turn into a great demo instead.

Of course I didn't manage to get anything put together on my twilight kin :-).

Because it is all fun and games . . .

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