The Treasures of the Shed

While back home for the holidays mention was made that "there are some black sacks in the shed with some boardgames" and I went out to see what was there. Short answer; treasure.

At a first look I was a bit concerned - genuine cobwebbed bin bags sitting on a shelf and I had no idea what they could be.

Hauling them down and taking a look I found something I had been looking for not a month before in the first one - my War Captains Companion! Stuffed full of all the pieces, a bunch of un-punched ships and all the ship reference cards from the War Captains Companion and my old Spelljammer 2e core set. A good find since I'm running Spelljammer now. I had been hunting for all my ship reference cards, knew I had put them somewhere safe but could find them nowhere in the house - for now obvious reasons.

Colditz can go to a charity shop, not sure why it hadn't gone long ago but Renegades and Armies of the Imperium are other nice finds - complete if a little dinged, from when I collected Epic scale Warhammer. It is really interesting to me to see many of the old models that existed in art or as silhoutte on the unit cards for these expansions begin to get dedicated models as part of the Horus Heresy line on Forge World.

The next sack was even more good stuff - my old Space Crusade box and Battlemasters - Warhammer Fantasy Battle for kids.

Space Crusade is just a shell - I traded away lots of the minis to a friend collecting 40k scale stuff. After much of the contents went that way, the rest of the gubbins went to a huge coin-op con game run at Leprecon back in the early millenium. This was a bunch of Space Crusade boards tacked together to make a full Space Hulk and as a charity events you played until you died then bought another ticket and got a fresh boarding torpedo of dudes. Was great fun but it means the box has just got random bits left in it.

Battlemasters was partially complete plus an expansion set (Imperial Lords) so really that just needed a new home. I believe it too had been mined for models for playing the bigger tabletop wargames but I could not tell you when or how at this point.

The last box was treasure indeed - my old D&D Black Box sandwiched between the guts of my Warhammer 40k Epic collection.

The Black Box had all the bits in it - standees, the rules book, the catalogue from '92 plus a copybook with my first attempt at a dungeon and the character sheets from the first raggedy attempts we made at playing this game.

Space Marine had a bunch of buildings - I remember playing Titan duels - I think I owned Adeptus Titanicus first? And one of my very first Games Workshop experiences was spending an afternoon in the Hammersmith store watching some guys play epic scale and reading and re-reading the epic battle-report in White Dwarf ... 138? Maybe. Anyway - those boxes are both stuffed full of uncut sprues, buildings and a complete mix and mingle between the older set (Space Marine) and the newer (Titan Legions).

I am intrigued at what survived and what has dissappeared along the way, which games survived used but still complete, which ones got stripped for parts, which ones never got used at all.

I started off as a Games Workshop fan. Space Crusade and Heroquest were my lines in but I detoured off into D&D somewhere along the way. In any case, it was a great find to recover my black box and War Captains Companion and bring them home; the date was written in the lid of the Black Box so 2023 will be 30 years of me as a D&D gamer. I knew I was ~94-95, I did not realise I was quite this long-in-the-tooth a gamer.

Goals for 2023 - run someone through the dungeon I wrote up in the back of that old copybook and see if it holds any water at all.