There is something rather fascinating about the way some clubs manage to convince themselves that they operate like every other club while simultaneously doing things that are rather different. Greenock & District Wargames Club is an interesting example. Let us be entirely clear from the outset: this is not about holding a grudge against the club or wishing it ill. There is absolutely nothing wrong with historical wargaming, and a thriving local club is a wonderful asset for any town. If you enjoy Napoleonics, Ancients, World War II, the American Civil War or any other historical period, fantastic. Paint your miniatures, study your army lists and spend three hours debating whether a particular regiment should realistically have been positioned seventeen centimetres further to the left. That is what hobbies are for.
The problem is simply that the club’s day-to-day operations leave a great deal to be desired, particularly in how they manage, promote and greet non-historical players. The trouble starts when historical wargaming becomes treated as the default definition of a “proper” wargame, while fantasy and science fiction players are left feeling as though they have wandered into the wrong building. There is a massive difference between a club having a strong historical gaming community and a club creating an environment where non-historical players struggle to find opponents, receive little visible promotion and are expected to build their own player base. Those two things should not be confused.
Apparently, The Players Are The Marketing Department
One of the most striking things about the approach I have encountered is the suggestion that if players want to play fantasy or science fiction games, it is up to those players to bring in other people who play them. On the surface, that might sound reasonable. After all, players can invite their friends. The problem is what happens when the player does not already know anybody locally who plays the game.
Suddenly, the person who simply wants to play a game has apparently become responsible for recruitment, promotion and community development. Find the players. Advertise the game. Convince people to come along. Build the group. Then, presumably, once you have done all of that, you can finally play the game you wanted to play in the first place.
Most clubs manage this rather differently. They advertise the activities they offer. Historical games get advertised. Fantasy games get advertised. Science fiction games get advertised. Different systems get advertised. If the club wants people to play something, it tells people that the game exists and gives them an opportunity to participate.
It really is not a revolutionary concept.
Apparently, however, the alternative is to hand the individual player a metaphorical clipboard and say, “Congratulations on joining. Your first job is recruitment.”
The Core Responsibility Belongs To The Club, Not The Individual
This is where the entire premise falls apart. It must be up to the club to advertise all the games available under its roof, not the individual players.
A club has the infrastructure, the collective presence, the digital footprint and the organisational identity. An individual newcomer walking through the door has none of those things. When a club shifts the burden of promotion onto the player, it is fundamentally abandoning its primary function.
Promoting what is played, welcoming different systems and drawing people in through active outreach is the absolute baseline of what a community hub is supposed to do. If the club does not advertise the games, how are people supposed to find them? Shifting that responsibility onto members is not just lazy management; it is a complete abdication of the role a club is supposed to play.
The Reality Of A Vanished Player Base
The absurdity of the “bring your own players” rule becomes even more glaring when you factor in the natural lifecycle of a hobby. People move away, life gets in the way, work schedules change, or friends simply drift away from wargaming altogether.
If you do not already have an active local group, perhaps because the people you used to play with have lost touch or left the hobby, where exactly are you supposed to conjure these opponents from?
Expecting a player to pull a ready-made gaming group out of thin air ignores the fundamental reason clubs exist in the first place. You do not join a club because your social calendar is already overflowing with active opponents; you join a club precisely because you need a space to find them.
Telling someone who has lost their usual gaming circle to just bring their friends is rather like telling someone stranded on a desert island to just bring their own rescue boat.
The Trap Of A Tiny Circle, Edition Shock, And The Rusty Opponent Problem
Even if a player manages against all odds to scrape together a micro-group of two or three people, a new set of issues immediately rears its head. Playing the exact same two or three people week in and week out quickly turns stale. You learn every tactical quirk, every predictable list adjustment and every habit they possess. A healthy hobby relies on a rotating pool of opponents, varied play styles and fresh challenges.
Worse still is the sheer barrier to entry when you are trying to return to a hobby after a hiatus. If the last time you regularly played a system like Warhammer 40,000 was a couple of editions ago, the rulebooks have completely shifted, core mechanics have been rewritten, and armies function entirely differently. Coming back into the fold with no introductory sessions, no casual warmup games, and no supportive onboarding means you face an intimidating wall of rules overhead before you even roll a dice.
When you combine that kind of edition shock with a tiny, insular circle of veterans who live and breathe the current ruleset every single week, the incentive to play plummets entirely. They expect razor-sharp tactical execution from the word go, treating your rustiness as an inconvenience rather than an opportunity to help someone reacclimatise.
I know how that feels firsthand. As the rusty player stepping back into the mix without a proper local network, I inevitably got steamrolled simply because of that lack of practice and the massive gap in rules familiarity. When an environment offers no wider community or beginner-friendly rotation, showing up out of practice means you are walked over rather than welcomed back.
You do not join a club to get interrogated or crushed by the same small clique just because you are shaking off years of rust or catching up on skipped editions. You join a club for a diverse, welcoming environment where different experience levels can find a fair game without needing to pass an unspoken competence trial.
The Great Denial And The Deflection Routine
Worst still is when members or management insist with absolute sincerity that there is no underlying issue or bias against non-historical wargames in the club, acting as though the mere suggestion is absurd.
Yet the moment you ask the obvious, clarifying question, “So where are all the non-historical wargamers?”, the conversation shifts instantly. Instead of addressing the glaring absence of players, the response turns into an elaborate exercise in dodging the issue. You are told that anyone is free to bring whatever they like, which neatly loops right back around to the magical expectation that you are supposed to conjure opponents out of thin air.
Denying that a barrier exists while simultaneously refusing to provide the infrastructure, advertising, or introductory framework to overcome it is a brilliant way to ensure nothing ever changes.
Welcome To The Recruitment Department
Imagine joining a football club and saying that you want to play goalkeeper, only to be told that you need to find the rest of the team yourself before anybody can arrange a match. You might reasonably wonder what exactly the club is contributing to the process.
The same principle applies here. If somebody walks into Greenock & District Wargames Club wanting to play a science fiction game and does not already know several local players who play it, telling that person to find those players themselves does not solve the problem. It simply gives the problem back to the person who came looking for a solution.
That is particularly ridiculous when you consider that many people join clubs precisely because they do not already know other people who share their interests. If somebody already has a large local group of gaming friends, they arguably have less need for a club in the first place.
The club should be the mechanism through which people discover games and other players. Expecting the newcomer to construct that mechanism themselves is rather like opening a shop and telling customers that they are responsible for advertising the products they want to buy.
Brilliant business model. I am sure that will go swimmingly.
The Strange Idea Of “Proper” Wargaming
There is also a wider cultural issue surrounding the apparent attitude towards non-historical games. Among some players, there can be a perception that historical games are the “proper” form of wargaming, while fantasy and science fiction occupy some sort of secondary category.
That is a rather strange position to take when you consider just how enormous the wider tabletop wargaming hobby actually is. Warhammer 40,000 is a wargame. Battletech is a wargame. Star Wars: Legion is a wargame. X-Wing is a wargame. There are countless other fantasy and science fiction systems built around movement, terrain, tactical positioning, army construction, combat and strategic decision-making.
The fact that the battlefield happens to contain spaceships, aliens, dragons or genetically engineered soldiers rather than Napoleonic infantry does not suddenly cause the rules to stop being a wargame.
Apparently, though, the future is acceptable only if it has been historically documented.
The Corner Has Entered The Chat
There is another part of the experience that is harder to quantify because it concerns atmosphere rather than written rules. People can be told that their preferred games are welcome while simultaneously receiving signals that they are not particularly wanted.
If you are not ignored, you can sometimes find yourself dealing with the muffled murmurs from the corner. Perhaps they mean nothing. Perhaps they are completely unrelated to the game being played. Perhaps there is a perfectly innocent explanation.
But when you are already entering an environment where your preferred games receive comparatively little support, it does not exactly help.
It creates the feeling that you are being watched, judged or discussed simply because you have turned up with something that does not fit the dominant interest.
Nothing says welcome to the club quite like wondering whether the background conversation is about the fact that you have just unpacked a science fiction army.
Ostracism Does Not Need A Written Rule
This is an important distinction. A club does not need to have an official rule saying science fiction players are not welcome for science fiction players to feel unwelcome. Exclusion can happen through patterns of behaviour, lack of promotion, lack of organised games, dismissive attitudes and the simple absence of opportunities to meet other players.
For someone who already knows a group of people, those barriers may be relatively easy to overcome. They can arrange their own games and bring their own opponents. For someone who arrives alone, however, the situation is very different.
They are effectively told that they need other players in order to play, while simultaneously being expected to find those players themselves.
That is a rather impressive chicken-and-egg problem.
“You need players.”
“Where do I find them?”
“Bring them with you.”
“But that is why I joined.”
“Yes, but bring them with you.”
At that point, perhaps the dice are not the only things that need rolling.
This Is Not How A Club Grows
If a club genuinely wants to grow, the solution is remarkably straightforward. The club must promote the games. Put fantasy and science fiction on the club’s advertising. Run introductory sessions. Tell people which systems are being played. Give newcomers a reason to turn up.
If one person turns up, help them find another player. If two people turn up, you have the beginnings of a gaming group. If five people turn up, congratulations, you have a functioning community.
Instead, if non-historical players are effectively expected to construct their own groups from scratch, the club creates an unnecessary barrier that disproportionately affects the very people who need the club to help them meet other gamers.
Then the numbers fluctuate.
A few players arrive. Some stay. Some leave. Interest appears to grow for a while, then falls back again. Another group appears later and the process starts over.
At some point, it becomes reasonable to ask whether the problem is actually a lack of interest in non-historical gaming or whether the environment is simply failing to retain the people who are interested.
And Then People Travel Elsewhere
The consequences are not purely theoretical. When local players cannot find a suitable community, they look elsewhere. That can mean travelling out of the area to places such as the Bus Stop Toy Shop in Largs or travelling into Glasgow to Warhammer.
That means additional travel, additional time and additional expense simply to find people who are interested in the same games.
And that is precisely what a good local gaming club should be helping to prevent.
If somebody living in the Greenock area wants to play a science fiction or fantasy wargame, the ideal situation is that they can find other local players without having to travel elsewhere every time they want a game.
If people consistently have to leave the area to find that community, perhaps the local gaming environment needs to ask itself why.
The “We Are Just Like Every Other Club” Problem
Perhaps the most interesting part of all this is the apparent assumption that Greenock & District Wargames Club operates like any other wargaming club.
From the outside, that assumption is perfectly understandable. It is a wargames club. It has players. It has gaming sessions. Therefore, it must operate like other wargames clubs.
Except that the details matter.
A club that actively promotes the different games it supports is doing something very different from one that leaves the promotion of certain genres largely to individual players. A club that helps newcomers find opponents is doing something very different from one where newcomers are expected to bring those opponents with them.
The difference might not be obvious from the name of the club or from looking at a photograph of people playing games. You discover the difference when you actually try to participate.
That is where the we operate like every other club argument starts to become rather questionable.
The Advertising Paradox
The whole situation produces an almost beautiful contradiction.
If you want people to play a game, people need to know that the game is available.
If people do not know that the game is available, they cannot reasonably be expected to turn up and play it.
Therefore, if a club wants to grow a particular game, advertising that game would seem like an obvious first step. And that burden rests squarely on the organisation, not the individual walking through the door.
This is not advanced military strategy. Nobody needs to consult Sun Tzu.
It is basic community building.
Yet somehow, the individual player can end up being treated as though they are responsible for solving the advertising problem themselves.
It is a little like a restaurant saying, “We do serve pizza, but if you want anyone else to know about it, you are going to have to advertise it yourself.”
You might reasonably start wondering whether the restaurant actually wants to sell pizza.
The Awards Ceremony
Naturally, no critique of this magnitude would be complete without recognising some outstanding achievements.
- Most Innovative Recruitment Strategy: Expecting the person who wants to play a game to find everyone else who wants to play it. Why advertise when you can delegate?
- Lifetime Achievement Award for Stagnation: For the apparent cycle of non-historical players appearing, disappearing and occasionally reappearing. Consistency is important.
- Outstanding Contribution to Corner-Based Commentary: For the muffled murmurs that apparently form part of the ambient gaming experience. Because apparently even the background noise needs to have an opinion.
- The “You Build It Yourself” Award: For the magnificent concept that an individual player should construct the player base for the club’s non-historical games.
- The Common Sense Avoidance Medal: For demonstrating that simply advertising the games a club wants people to play can apparently become an unexpectedly complicated proposition.
Why I Wanted To Build Something Different
This is ultimately why I wanted to create my own gaming community.
It is not because historical wargaming is bad. It is not because historical gamers are the problem. There are plenty of excellent historical games and plenty of historical gamers who are perfectly happy to share the hobby with people who enjoy something completely different.
The issue is the apparent culture surrounding non-historical gaming and the barriers that can result from it.
I wanted something different.
I wanted a community where historical, fantasy and science fiction gamers can all turn up and simply be treated as wargamers. No hierarchy of proper games. No expectation that someone needs to arrive with an entire army of friends. No requirement for an individual player to become the unpaid recruitment department.
Just people who enjoy putting miniatures on a table, rolling dice, arguing about rules and occasionally watching a perfectly constructed tactical plan disappear because somebody rolled a one.
That sounds considerably more enjoyable.
Building The Alternative
That is why I have created a forum where all wargamers are welcome, regardless of whether their battlefield is historical, fantastical or somewhere several hundred light years away.
The intention is to build enough regular players to eventually rent a hall and invest in proper gaming boards, scenery and the equipment needed to create a dedicated local gaming space.
But the community comes first.
We need the players before we need the hall.
And crucially, the idea is to build that community together rather than telling each individual player to go and construct their own.
If you play historical wargames, you are welcome.
If you play fantasy, you are welcome.
If you play science fiction, you are welcome.
If you play several different systems, even better.
If you are completely new to wargaming and have absolutely no idea what you are doing, you are welcome too.
The point is rather simple.
Because This Really Should Not Be Difficult
Wargaming is supposed to be a hobby. It is supposed to be enjoyable. People should be able to turn up, put their miniatures on a table, roll some dice and have a good time.
You should not need to pass an ideological entrance examination to establish whether your particular army qualifies as a proper wargame.
You should not need to recruit half the town before being able to play.
You should not have to travel miles because nobody locally bothered to promote the game you enjoy.
And you certainly should not have to wonder whether the muffled conversation from the corner is about you because you dared to unpack a futuristic army.
A good club should open the door, tell people what is being played, encourage participation, help players find opponents and promote the hobby as a whole.
The club should promote the games. The club should promote the community. The club should help players find each other. The players should not have to become the club’s unpaid marketing department. Now there is a radical idea. Perhaps someone should advertise it.
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