Hi, my name is Ossie and I’ve been painting and playing with miniatures, on and off, since I was about 8.
A friend of my Dad’s was visiting from Canada with their family and their teenage sons wouldn’t talk about anything except Blood Bowl. I had no idea what this was. They got out some metal skaven, purchased on holiday, drew out a board, and proceeded to kind of sort of teach me to play. “This guy can go here and then smash this guy”. I was hooked.
I started with Blood Bowl (2nd edition with the polystyrene pitch) and Heroquest. Then with some of my friends interested we tried to wrap our heads around Rogue Trader and Epic. We never really played much but we spent a lot of time painting (badly) or talking about painting. Later it was 40K Second edition with all those colourful single pose models and Blood Bowl 3rd Ed was a hit.
I drifted away from the hobby as a teenager but, working in a comic book shop in 2001 a Kiwi colleague got advance word that Games Workshop had secured the rights to make a game based on the upcoming Lord of the Rings films. As a lifelong Tolkien fan I knew that was it for me and it was time to dust off my brushes. Since then I’ve dabbled in various games and now try my hand at way too many systems and amass way too many minis. I made a YouTube channel to cover it all.