About - The Hobby Zone

I'm Eric. I like to play table-top miniature wargames, board games and card games. I also enjoy the hobby craft side of things:

assembling/customising/painting miniatures
making battlefield terrain to set the scene and to play over
making or customising extras, such as games tables, storage/organisers, and so on

I have enjoyed these pastimes since childhood in the 1980s. Since then, adult life has gotten in the way a lot, and there have been long spans of time where I haven't had the opportunity to indulge myself much.

Life is a little more settled these days, so I'm able to enjoy these pastimes more regularly.

This website is mainly a hub from which I can share some resources with friends and fellow hobbyists. I sometimes post photos and stuff to the blog, but I'm not at all consistent about this.

Idle thoughts on some games that are of particular interest to me:

Ah, Epic... such fond memories. Grand armies of tiny warriors and their little-giant war machines. Nominally at 6mm/1:285 scale, but rather variable in reality.

Back in my teens I played a lot of games of Epic when it was in its second edition (Space Marine 1991, later extended with Titan Legions, 1994).

I bought the third edition (Epic 40,000, 1997) when it came out and, though it had radically different game mechanics that upset a lot of people, I liked the look of it. Unfortunately I didn't get to play it much before life got in the way.

I entirely missed the release of the fourth edition (Epic Armageddon) and only discovered it in 2016. Though the game was no longer supported by Games Workshop by then, I nonetheless obtained some miniatures and rulebooks and played this edition for a while with a couple of friends.

I've since become a little disenchanted with fourth edition, and investigated third edition. So far, I've found this much more to my liking.

Related information

I have a huge soft spot for Necromunda as a setting and game system. I loved the original from 1995, and I find a lot to love in the latest edition too, from 2017 onwards.

However, the messy and disjointed way that rules have been released from 2017 onwards, the holes in the rules, and some particulars about how the campaigns work, have drained a lot of my enthusiasm.

I've played a bit and had some fun, but just stopped prioritising it — it'd take far too much effort to adapt this game to play the way I want to, and I don't have a regular set of friends to do that with anyway.

I still have a hankering to play some more Necromunda — perhaps even solo — but it's somewhat 'on the back burner' for me at the moment.

Related information