No Cardinal, still Games Day :)
This weekend I had the opportunity to meet 50 fellow Games-Workshop Outriders… and best of all: in Nottingham, where GW has its HQ. It was a riot! All of us had such a great time! I knew most of the Dutch Outriders, but there were folks from Belgium and all over Scandinavia as well. Yeah… a real bunch of oddballs bound together by the great hobby called Warhammer!
I don’t know why, but for some reason I love sitting in my room, just painting miniatures. A finished mini is usually very rewarding to look at, you can play a cool strategic game when you have a bunch with them, but just painting them is very relaxing in itself. Now imagine other folks that give demos in painting and playing for GW just like I do and then share the enthusiasm for the hobby with them, as well as a couple of beers at the official GW bar “Bugman’s” (with loads of nice English beers!)
I’ll just mention some highlights of our Outrider gathering: getting to know each other, presentations by various GW employees, like those in HR, sales, the design studio and support, playing small battles against one another, trying the various beers at Bugman’s, visiting Warhammer-World, where you can spend hours gawking at the ‘official’ GW armies, which they use for pictures in army books and promotion material, getting sneak peaks at stuff that is about to get released, and so on!
Now Sunday we all went to Birmingham for Games Day (UK edition). Games Day is the largest event GW hosts. Here, all of us worked all day long in various halls. I cannot describe how large this event was. If you think this is a niche hobby or something – yeah, maybe you are right, but nearly 10,000 people take the effort to come down to Games Day anyway. And I think that is quite a large group! The hobby is really growing, more so now that some of the Warhammer PC/Console Games (like Dawn of War) are getting more popular.
At Games Day, you can pretty much do all things hobby related. You get sneak previews of new models, you can purchase some stuff that won’t be in stores for weeks, there is a very tough painting competition, where you can look at the most beautiful models ever painted, I daresay… you can play and try out various Warhammer armies, assemble and/or paint models yourself, buy loads of GW items and merchandise, buy the Warhammer novels from Black Library and get them signed by the authors (I got two books signed by Mike Lee *yay!*), you can play some upcoming PC Games they are releasing… and boy, a lot of other stuff that I probably have no idea of. That’s to say, there was barely any time to do anything for us, it was just *that* busy. At the end I was able to sneak over to the Black Library corner, buy the books and talk to Mike, who by that time had signed well over a 1,000 books. Ouch.
In any case, you guys will all gather that I had a swell time. Some pics to be made available soon 
One Response to “No Cardinal, still Games Day :)”
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Hi Sebastiaan,
I’ve just discovered your seminar-site and I think it’s really nice. Too bad I’m no longer teaching or I would have invited you over to Belgium to give some guest-lectures about life as a seminarian.
Games day was indeed great.
ps if you happen to be in Antwerp this year, be sure to hop into the GW store in the Vleminckstraat, I’m on pre-training for squad leader untill January.
May you find peace in your prayers
Stijn