How to convince your wife to play Warhammer?

When it comes to board games, I place the box on the table and wait for my wife to take an interest in the game. She asks a ton of questions, and I calmly answer them, holding back my enthusiasm. That’s how I lure her into the board game trap, and I know we’ll start playing soon.

With Warhammer, however, it’s a different story. She knows how much I love playing with miniatures, and sometimes (almost always) I was so excited that I took away all the joy of playing from her. She always came to everything prepared, meaning that the miniatures were assembled and painted, so she really only had a gaming experience.

That’s why this time I decided to use a slightly different strategy. I decided that we would go through the entire Kill Team learning process together. We would do everything together from A to Z.

I used the starter set to introduce her to the world of Kill Team. It doesn’t have the full rules and everything that should be included with the game. However, I thought it would be a good start for us.

First, we decided to read the introduction about the world of Warhammer 40K and the teams available in this set. I patiently answered all her questions. For example, who is this emperor, or why do these green soldiers have pigs on their shoulders? I felt as if we were watching The Lord of the Rings, and I had to answer how Hobbits differ from Dwarves and why elves don’t sink into the snow.

Once we had covered the lore of the world, it was time to choose a team for each of us. Gosia knew how much I wanted to play Plague Marines, so she gave in and chose generic blue-armored dudes. Her favorite color is blue, so that also convinced her a little.

Then we moved on to assembling the plastic. For me, this stage is the best thing because I feel like I’m building Lego for adults. There is a certain satisfaction when the plastic pieces fit together perfectly and you haven’t glued your fingers together. Fortunately, all the pieces were push-to-fit, so there was no such risk.

At first, I wanted to let my wife do everything, but we decided it would be faster if I did the cutting and she did the assembly. One of the reasons for this was that I recently bought a sharp knife to remove some of the protruding plastic parts. I didn’t want anyone (mainly Gosia) to hurt themselves.

5 minutes later…

and I marked one of the miniatures with the Khorne symbol. However, the sacrifice was not in vain, because I knew it would increase the immersion of playing chaos. My wife had no problem assembling the plastic parts and only asked me a few times to press something in. The plague caster was particularly difficult, because we had to cut something off to make everything fit.

After all this work, I noticed a smile on my wife’s face. She even said that “there is something so relaxing about assembling Warhammer.”

At that moment, I knew I had caught her in the Warhammer trap…

To be continued in the next episode. Because now it’s time for the tutorial.