Welcome to CrankyOldGamer.net! This website was created as a place for a group of friends to post, share, and show off all of our game-related interests. The name of the site shouldn’t shock you – our group of friends is neither cranky (we’re actually pretty decent fellows), we’re not terribly old (teens and twenty-somethings may differ, but we’re all in our thirties). But we are gamers, and here’s where we come together to bond over our game-geekery.
Where we came from…
So who the heck are we? Well, we’re really a group of guys who met up in junior high and high school, into college, and now even co-workers – we found camaraderie and a heck of a lot of fun playing all manner of games.
I think it all started back in 9th grade, I met a few guys who I’d become life-long friends with. I think we all met in science class. We learned we had a few things in common, and in particularly that we’d played role-playing games in the past, and wanted to play again. We started a gaming group and off we went. We’d play games for hours on the weekends, and we went through a whole lot of them. We’d played many games, including Palladium, Role Master, Battle Tech, RIFTS, Gamma World, Cyber Punk, Traveller, and Space Master, to name the major ones. We played others too, but these are the ones we really played the most. We’d go through our phases of different games, and spent the majority of our time I’d say on Role Master, Palladium, Battle Tech, and Cyber Punk, but we always had a great time. Then, as we got to our senior year and wrapped up high school, we all went to college, but still kept in touch.
This is when we got into miniatures games. It started with Warhammer 40k. I got into that game, and my friends followed. We also got into Warhammer Fantasy Battles (3rd edition), and started making our gaming armies. We got really into the miniatures scene, and I must have spent literally thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours collecting, assembling, and painting miniatures and terrain. I think I loved building and painting more than I did playing! We dabbled a bit into Battle Tech with miniatures as well. We really loved miniatures games, but the time and money spent always seemed so dramatically large to the number of times we got to play. The investment in making such huge armies didn’t seem worth it, so later on, especially after we got out of college and started our “adult” lives, we sorta put the “massive army” thing on the back burner and focused more on skirmish games, such as Necromunda and Mordheim.
Then, for inexplicable reasons, we sorta just stopped gaming for a while. I think we were all into our careers, got caught up into making our way into our lives, and / or were scattered across the globe for a while (quite literally). I went back to school, got married and had children (whom I quite naturally adore), and we seemed to go into a state of not gaming for quite some time. I still had hundreds of painted miniatures in cases in my new house, not being used. At one point, my wife had one of her friends over, who had teenage kids, who were into WH40k and WFB. Somehow the conversation got onto their hobbies and they mentioned they were into these games. My wife told them that I had played that hard-core at one point, and suggested that I show them them my miniatures. So I did. Now my wife and I had discussed selling off my figs, and I had eventually warmed to the idea – I figured I wasn’t using them anymore. Then I thought, these were really great kids, I’m not really playing anymore, and so I did it – I just donated all of my stuff to these two kids. Gone. Now you have to understand, these miniatures were my babies. No, seriously, my babies. Ask any of my friends, and they’ll tell you. One was not likely to survive scratching the paint off of or otherwise molesting one of my miniatures. But it was good – I felt good about it, and I kept my unpainted stuff thinking – if I ever do get back into miniature gaming, I’ll play skirmish level games, which I could make small investments in and enjoy, now that my time was so limited.
Now here we are…
And then somehow it just happened. I think sometime in 2009 I had all my old buddies over (we still got together, typically to hang out and socialize), and we started talking about gaming. I think we jumped on the notion of not spending so much time making / painting miniatures, and that’s when we started thinking about getting back in to gaming. We started with Warhammer Quest, which we had a blast playing. It was quick, fun, and simple. I even started painting again, slowly getting my miniatures collection back up. I also got back into making some terrain/rooms. Then John suggested getting back into role-playing, which we did. We intend to get together to play all sorts of games, and we try to do on a monthly basis. In between family life, work, the yard, my 27 other hobbies (which my patient and wonderfully forgiving wife continues to “coach” me on reducing in number), and all the other things in life, I try to take time out with my friends to game – it recharges me and lets me exercise my imagination.
So what now?
Where do we go from here? A Cranky Old Gamer’s response would be, wherever we want! This site is really intended to share my gaming passions in (semi-) real time. One thing I’ll always strive for here is to keep it casual and keep readers up to date on whatever and wherever my gaming journey takes me…
DISCLAIMER:
This web site and materials associated and contained herein is in no way affiliated with any game publisher, including but not limited to Games Workshop, or any other for-profit game producing or game-related products producing companies or organizations. This is a not-for-profit website dedicated to our gaming group and sharing gaming experiences. Any profit (yeah, right!) made from this site from our Merchandising page goes solely to keeping the site active and for feeding our bellies during our gaming sessions.
