Warhammer Night at Phoenix Games

It's tough to avoid war these days; You can't turn on a TV—or even a radio—without getting some sort of depressing update on the situation in Iraq. Or Afghanistan. Heck, we even like to declare war on nouns: terror, drugs, poverty, illegal immigration. You name it, we'll declare war on it.. War is all around us, but no one seems to be able to do anything more than talk about it.

Well, almost nobody. It's Thursday night at Minneapolis' Phoenix Games, and conflict is in the air. Several clusters of war gamers are unpacking miniature lead soldiers, talking trash and preparing to literally get medieval on each other.

While there are a variety games in progress (including Heroclix, a comics-based affair that addresses the age-old question of whether Superman could beat up the Hulk), the main event is Warhammer, a fantasy war game based loosely on the standard Tolkien model. Each player controls an army of fantastic creatures, facing off against another general on a tabletop battlefield. "It's kind of like chess," says gamer Joel Vogt as he marshals his troops, "but with cannons and knights." After a setup consisting of an endless series of plan-within-a-plan adjustments and counteradjustments, battle is joined.

The broad strokes are easy to follow- platoons of miniatures maneuver about the board, and periodically casualties are removed- but the mechanics of all the dice-rolling and tape-measuring are mystifying to the outsider. After High Elf commander Ryan Carlson affably explains an obscure point, his opponent, Andrew Niekamp, mock-taunts him: "You're a huge nerd." (Niekamp's accusation aside, no one here radiates nerddom; the small-scale Rumsfelds duking it out look like a representative sample of reasonably- affluent young Minneapolis men).

Actually, the rules mystify even the vets. After a few rounds, a dispute arises in Vogt's battle with Ted Naleid over which direction a chariot would flee after a dice-rolled loss of nerve ("I brought basically a terror-causing army," Vogt says gleefully; and as things progress, his troops teach Naleid's some harsh lessons about courage under fire). This question is resolved quickly, but a subsequent dustup involving how much one can hack up a body to prevent it from coming back to life sends both men digging into the rulebooks. Things get tense before the two agree to break the impasse by rolling dice. "This is why money isn't put on the game," Naleid says, still slightly ruffled.

Wargaming isn't all tactics and rules-lawyering; There's also a heavy element of collecting. The miniatures are painstakingly sculpted, and each player spends hours spiffing up his troops (in official Warhammer tournaments, the aesthetics of your army count towards your final score). Carlson prefers the collection aspect to combat: "For me, 70% of the hobby is actually painting the army and modeling it." His pieces are sharp, but the most gorgeous units on the board are Niekamp's, several streamlined demons called "screamers;" imagine huge, flying manta rays airbrushed in delicate shades of blue and purple.

As the evening wears on, the battles draw to a close. On one table, Niekamp's screamers get behind Carlson's lines and savage his artillery- they're deadly as well as beautiful. On the other, the few remnants of Naleid's army who haven't turned tail are being boxed in and massacred by Vogt's forces. It's brutal, but Naleid takes his lumps in stride. There's always next week.
--Keith Pille

Portions of this article appeared previously in The Rake.