Is Warhammer 40,000 fun?

My friend Todd Fadden got me in to a little game called Warhammer 40,000 (or 40k), and by little I mean huge.  It is a miniatures game, meaning you buy little bits of plastic or metal, and then glue them together, and then paint them, and then you have to develop a strategy, and then after all that, you get to play a game for about an hour and a half.  It is also a ton of fun.

There are a ton of different factions to choose from.  You can be space bugs, space orcs, space marines, space elves, and tons more, those aren’t the official names of the groups but they are easier to understand.  I have been building a group based of the space marines called the Space Wolves, and if I was good at the painting, they would look like this:

Maybe if you are nice I will take a picture of my guys for you someday.

As with all geeky games, Warhammer 40k has very complex rules and every faction has its own subset of the rules, but what it comes down to is that you compare spread sheets and roll a bunch of dice, and argue about whether the units have line of sight or not.  It is very fun.

Now for the not so good part.  The maker of this game, Games Workshop, has started jacking the prices of the miniatures, and they weren’t cheep to begin with, so the only affordable venue is to buy them off EBay, but that can get frustrating if people aren’t selling what you want, or someone else snakes your units (in my case probably guys ridding giant wolves) out from under you, and then once you get them you have to paint them, so it requires a ton of time.

But all that being true, the game is fun, and it possibly one of the geekiest games in this word.  Now, if you will excuse me, I have to check on some EBay bids.