Hi, I’m Spiro, and I paint and play with toy soldiers.
Ocassionally I also make model kits, and sometimes those may make their way to this blog.
I first started playing RPGs back in the 80s and miniatures didn’t make an appearance in my life until around ’88 or ’89. A local bookshop (now long gone) also had gaming stuff and started stocking miniatures from Games Workshop, including getting the White Dwarf magazine.
Not having a lot of money then (what I did have went on comic books), I didn’t really get into the miniatures. That is, until I traded with a friend of mine for some of his White Dwarf mags. Issues 99 and 100 (of which I still have #100). In issue 100, there were the results of a miniature and diorama painting contest and those blew me away.
I pored over those pages again and again, and over the next few years started collecting miniatures to paint.
The games themselves didn’t sink in to my brain at that time, and my wargaming didn’t actually start until I moved to a different city with an ex and met a guy who worked for a gaming distribution company and was a hardcore wargamer himself. I quickly became friends with him and a wargame had just come out based on an RPG I owned–Warzone, based on the Mutant Chronicles RPG.
Warzone was a nice little skirmish game and I got myself a force, The Brotherhood if I remember rightly, and started playing some games with him and others up there. I had seen 40K at that time, but Warzone was a far nicer set of rules and easier to get into, but they didn’t have the marketing muscle behind them that GW had, so they eventually got buried.
By the time I moved back to my hometown, I found others were playing 40K 2nd edition, and so I joined in with them, buying a friend’s Eldar army as he was switching to Chaos.
Over the years since, I have played a lot of GW games, but I also played a lot of other games.
Warmaster became my favourite GW game, and I found I loved the smaller scale games for large scale wargaming. 6mm scifi games became a staple for many years thanks to Future War Commander and its miniature agnostic ruleset.
These days I’ve fallen out of love with Games Workshop, but the future of wargaming and the miniature hobby has never been brighter with so many more games available now and so many more economical options, including the ability to 3D print.
I’m still painting miniatures over 30 years later, and every so often I’ll even play some games.
I now also do commissions, so if you need an army painted of any scale, whether it’s 6mm, 10mm, 15mm, 20mm, or 28-32mm, contact me for my current rates.
