Introducing The Way We Play

I’ve been in this hobby for more than forty years. In that time I’ve played a lot of games, painted a lot of miniatures, written rules, run businesses and, like most of us, picked up a great many habits along the way.

Some of those habits are useful. Some are simply familiar. Every so often I find myself looking at something we all take for granted and wondering why we do it that way in the first place.

That is what The Way We Play is for.

It isn’t a design diary and it isn’t where I’ll post rules updates or project news. The Journal already has a place for those. This is the part of the site where I can step away from whatever I’m currently working on and talk about the hobby itself: how we build armies, how we put games on the table, the conventions we’ve inherited, and the little decisions that change the way a game looks or feels.

I don’t want it to become a column about the “right” way to play. Forty years in the hobby has mostly taught me that there isn’t one. I do think it is worth asking why, though. Why do we use the bases we use? Why do tables look the way they do? Why do some rules survive from one generation of games to the next? What do we gain from those traditions, and what might be better if we looked at them again?

Some of these pieces will start with something I’m working on. The first proper one did. I originally wrote it for Warhost after finding myself thinking far too much about the thickness of plastic bases. Looking back, it was really the first The Way We Play article, before I’d given the column a name.

I’ve moved it here because this is where it belongs.

That is the idea. A place to look at the familiar parts of tabletop gaming, ask questions, tell a few stories, and see where the conversation goes.