I don’t really do New Year’s resolutions, but this year I have resolved to play more games. To fulfil this endeavour I have started to attend one of my local game stores, Justice Comics, every Wednesday night. Justice Comics is fairly new, only being a couple of years old, but has steadily grown from supporting comics and card games to board games and war games.
The first two weeks were quite quiet. For me, anyway. I didn’t go with anyone in particular, and spent the first nights reading rules for games and talking to some of the regulars. This is how I met Liam, roleplayer, card gamer, war gamer, and one of the organisers of a local meetup. We talked during my second week, and he told me about his love of roleplay games and Warhammer Fantasy Battle. I asked him if he had played Warhammer Quest, an amalgam of roleplay and Warhammer, and he hadn’t. We agreed to meet the next Wednesday and I would take him through the game.
Quickly the next Wednesday night rolled around. Liam was already there when I arrived, and after he had played a couple of games of Magic: The Gathering we sat down and player Warhammer Quest.
It has been almost a decade since I last played Warhammer Quest, and I was a little rusty. After some initial referrals to the rulebook I got back into the swing of it, and Liam and I were soon battling our way through the dark dungeon in search of our quarry. In this case, a Goblin Shaman.
The game was made in the mid-1990s, and as with a lot of Games Workshop games at that time, there was a lot of random effects that could happen. I had forgotten just how wildly things could swing from everything going well, to absolute disaster. Liam and I were burning through healing potions and spells, and in some combats only just holding on by the skin of our teeth. I even botched the Barbarians berserker roll at one point and attacked Liam’s Dwarf instead of the many monsters nearby. Pandemonium!
In the end we made it through the dungeon to the objective room and killed the Shaman. Liam and I had a great time, there is something oddly fulfilling about slaying some monsters and collecting some treasure. I will give it a couple of weeks breathing space, but I can’t wait to take it back to Justice Comics and see if I can rope in four players for a dungeon crawl.
