This is the first post of the restarted Daan of War wargaming blog where I explain what I’m doing here and why I’ve decided to restart. Posts from my old wargaming blogs will occasionally be editted and posted retroactively under the [Classic] tag.
Hello again reader!
Welcome to the restarted Daan of War wargaming weblog. I’ve had my own wargaming blog since 2010 and this year I’ve decided to come back to it after more than a year and a half of inactivity. There’s been a good reason for this inactivity and I’ll briefly go into it further down in this post. First though, I want to welcome any new people reading this by telling a bit about myself and what I hope to achieve with the Daan of War weblog.
Hobby History
I started wargaming around the beginning of 2004. Someone in my magic: the gathering / dungeons and dragons high school friendgroup brought along some fantasy dark elves and that immediately set the rest of us off to the local warhammer stores. My friends had called dibs on Brettonians, Dwarfs, High Elves and Dark Elves, which left me to peruse the 6th edition rulebook for something unique. I found Skaven.
In the early years I not only became very active in my local scene, but also online as a member (and eventually administrator) of UnderEmpire.net. Working on my Skaven soon became my favorite thing to do at home and having a fully painted army was my top priority. I got the hang of army building after my Skaven and by 2008 I had also built an Empire army and started cautiously getting into 40k with Tau. After 4 years I was also regularly attending tournaments and even organising international meet-ups with friends I met on warhammer internet forums.
The struggle between my Skaven and Niels’ Seraphon is as old as time itself. 
Megabattles are still one of my most favorite things to do in the hobby. 
Dirk at a local gamestore tournament 
Local tournaments used to be very busy! 
Battle of the Clubs and GT’s were my bread and butter back in the day. 
The Eindhoven Wargamer state of being: painting up your squad markings for extra points AT THE TOURNAMENT. 
The mythical crew of the UnderEmpire get together of 2008. 
My armies have seen so many battlefields like this I quite honestly lost count.
Despite my love for warhammer, 2008 was a difficult time for me as I had to drop out of university, work a part time job and move out. This eventually led to me spending less time on the hobby for a few years. I still did the odd tournament in between and that was also the time Warmachine and Hordes really kicked off in my area. When I was done with my first warmachine armies I sold my Tau and started up Chaos Space Marines to get back into warhammer. By the time 2011 rolled around I was much happier and in a way better place. My Chaos marines were in for a serious repaint (I speed-painted them earlier), so I deleted all my old blogposts and started writing this one.
The early beginnings of perhaps what was to be my best army yet. 
I was able to get almost the entire army with store credit from my participation in GW’s Outrider program.
The Gap Year
So, from the summer of 2011 until the start of 2019 I have been blogging intermittently. These posts will all be reposted in the following weeks and I will also begin adding new posts on a regular basis (weekly I hope). As to why I haven’t been active during the past year there’s a simple explanation: I went through a divorce.
Only a couple of weeks after my first ambitious post of 2019 (Ironically titled: The Year of the Pile) I was starting to realise my relationship was failing. The decision to divorce came soon after. These were hard times. I lived with my parents for a time as I went through the legal shenannigans, sold off our old house and made arangements for a new appartment. 2019 became a terrible year for me, but at the end of it I felt a lot stronger and better about myself. At the start of 2020 I was feeling very optimistic again and was all set to make 2020 one of the best years yet.
But then of course: COVID-19 happened. Normally, you’d say you’d get a lot of hobby done when the world is in a lockdown. As it happens though, my job is one of the ones that got busier during the crisis and I also just started dating again. Which basically means that only now, during the summer, as things are slowly beginning to normalise, I felt compelled to start blogging.
The Plan
I have to admit that if it werent for this hobby, and the friends I’ve made through it, I would never have been able to handle last year the way that I did. That’s why I want to continue this weblog as my way of celebrating the hobby.
The next posts are going to be very big updates in which I’ll try to collect everything miniature related I’ve been up to in the meantime. From then on, I hope for this to be a place where I can post occasional hobby updates without too much fuss. Mostly with the aim of entertaining myself and maintaining a diary through the years. Hopefully concentrating on typing some english every once in a while will also help with keeping up my writing standard.
Thanks for reading!
Daan of War 