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Who Is The Wargame Explorer?

Hi! I’m Robison Wells, the Wargame Explorer. I have been running this website (with a little help from a handful of freelance writers) since May of 2021. But unless you’ve been to the About page, there’s a good chance that you don’t know much about me, what I do, or why I do it. This blog aims to explain all of that and give you a reason why you might want to read more.

Robison Wells: The Beginning

I got started in miniature wargaming at a very young age, but I was interested in miniatures before I was ever interested in wargaming. When I was probably seven or eight years old I got a copy of the Boy Scout magazine “Boy’s Life”, and there was an article on model railroading.

I was hooked almost immediately. The pictures in the magazine–which were black and white, if I recall correctly–had me entranced, and I read the article again and again. When Christmas came I asked Santa Claus (I was young enough to still ask Santa Claus for things) for a train set. And Christmas morning I got a big box with a Super Chief engine of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe railroad. The day after Christmas my mom took me to the toy store to spend some additional Christmas money and I bought some long stretches of track, a couple box cars, and the first model building I ever owned: an HO scale Burger King.

Playing under the Christmas tree only lasted as long as the Christmas tree did, but my very accomodating parents bought me a big 4×8 sheet of plywood and set me up a place in the garage where I could layout the train.

Now fast forward a year or two to when I was nine years old. By this time, my brother–the brilliant writer Dan Wells–and I would walk a couple blocks over to Comics Utah, a comic shop that also sold miniatures. This didn’t directly get me involved in wargaming yet, but I did see my first Warhammer miniature: a catapult that launched goblins. I remember ogling it time and again, going to the store over and over to see if anyone had bought it.

But then I got my big break. My dad brought home from work four copies of Wargames Illustrated. I don’t know where he got them, and he doesn’t remember them, but he is the same kind of nerd that my brother and I are so it doesn’t surprise me that he got them.

I read through those magazines cover to cover, over and over, admiring the pictures but also discovering to my wonderment that there were rules to these games that could be somewhat easily understood by a precocious nine year old. There was one ruleset for a Vietnam War game that was laid out over three pages, and I knew that if I just had models, I could figure out how to play it.

So, I went to the store and bought two packages of little green army men–at the time each bag probably cost $1.50. And then I bought six bottles of Testor’s enamel paints from the local Osco Drug. I proceeded to paint my model soldiers just enough to differentiate them on the field: one side wore blue uniforms and helmets, and the other side remained green. All their guns got a sloppy coat of black. And I was set.

My model train layout table became a miniature wargaming table. I made some amazingly crude scenery from styrofoam, and then I played. I played and played. I was playing almost exclusively solo, but I never minded. I had so much fun with that game, those figures, and that table.

My brother was quite a bookworm (I wasn’t) and we would go to the public library all the time. He would check out science fiction and fantasy novels, and I would check out the one and only book they had on the subject of wargaming. I WISH I knew what this book was because it was so formative in my early hobby life, and I’d love to track it down. But it was primarily about historical gaming and had beautiful color photographs. I’d check the book out again and again–it was almost always in my possession.

Meanwhile, I had been saving up my money. I’d still been frequenting the Comics Utah and now I was older and had a paper route that paid me $30 a month. I’d been eyeing the Warhammer stuff for years (still not having any idea that this was an actual game–I just thought the models were cool) and I was ready to make my first purchase. I bought the Warhammer Fantasy box of skeletons. I don’t remember exactly which box it was, but it had regular warriors, cavalry, and a chariot. This was all around 1988.

I remember being really proud of how well I painted them, but that’s just because I had figured out what dry brushing was, and I basecoated them all in flat black and drybrushed bright white over them–and that was it. But for 11 year old me it was a major coup.

At the same time Games Workshop had pamphlets available for free (exciting for a little kid!) that showed how to paint models. I gathered all of these pamphlets–there was one each for a handful of major units. Like the other things, I read and reread these pamphlets dozens of times. (This was before the internet…) All of this spurred me to buy my next Warhammer purchase: a box that contained 10 each of six different factions. I don’t remember all of what was in there, but my brother put together the elves and I loved the Skaven. The box even had the stats for the units on it, and we made an effort to play the game (we hadn’t read the rules at this point, so we were just making it up–I remember my brother always winning because his elves had a higher Initiative than my Skaven, or so we believed).

Making the Jump to Real Gaming

Fast forward a couple more years. All this time I’m still playing solo games with the army men in the garage. At some point I learned about the idea of a sand table: basically turning a wargame table into a giant sandbox so you can constantly sculpt new terrain. It was messy, but it was fun.

Then in the 7th grade a friend of mine was reading a book during Spanish class that looked incredible. It was the Warhammer 40000 Compendium, released in 1989. I asked him about it and he showed me the Chaos Space Marines, the Space Marines in all of their wildly colorful paint schemes, and we sat and ogled the Imperial Guard for a long time. I remember being fascinated by the Penal Legions and the Human Bombs. I asked him if he would lend me the book and instead he sold it to me for $10.

Now the next part is a little muddy, because I can’t remember the order in which I made the next two purchases. I bought the set of metal Harlequins–I think 15 or 18 came in the box. I also bought the box of 36 Squats. I can’t remember which came first, but they formed the basis of my earliest games of Warhammer 40k.

My friend Travis actually owned the rulebook, painted Orks, and had a 4’x4′ gaming table. It was there, over many many days, that I fell in love with Warhammer. I was actually learning the rules. I was understanding what made an army good or bad. I still selected units based entirely on how cool they looked, but I was getting ensnared by this hobby.

Of course, this is where wargaming got put on hold, because in addition to discovering Squats and Harlequins, I also discovered girls and cars. My disposable income went into dating and eating out and going to movies.

Returning to The Hobby

It may have lasted four or five years, but I didn’t stay away for long. I got married in 2000, at the ripe old age of 21, and wouldn’t you know it but just a few blocks away from my house was ANOTHER location of Comics Utah. And I would frequent it and talk to the manager, and began dipping my toe into the hobby again. I was mostly just buying copies of White Dwarf.

But with the sudden influx of Real Job Money, and a brother who was also really into gaming, we dove headfirst into Warhammer 40k 3rd Edition and especially into Mordheim. It was here that I learned my love for all things kitbashed and terrain building. We built whole cities of ruined Mordheim buildings. Right around this time we got into Inquisitor, a game which I really deeply love (even though I admit it was flawed).

Around this time my brother and his friends started a website called The Official Timewasters’s Guide–a site that covered everything from boardgames to CCGs to video games and movies. I became the Tabletop Wargames editor and wrote a ton of articles about the hobby. It really is the precursor to my time with The Wargame Explorer.

Over those years I spent A LOT of time wargaming. I was into Warhammer 40k with a large Imperial Guard army (I proxied in my Squats as Imperial Guard troops when Squats were discontinued), plus I saved up all my money and bought an entire 2000 point Chaos Space Marine army in one go–this was back when you had to mail in your order and a check. I can still remember getting that enormous box from Games Workshop and being thrilled as I opened beautiful model after beautiful model.

My brother and I had a standing appointment: we both had Thursdays off work for years, and I would drive the 45 minutes to his house, where my Imperial Guard would fight his Space Wolves, or my Chaos would fight his Dark Eldar. We even got into Warhammer Fantasy, with him owning a Dark Elves army (he liked Dark Elves and Eldar) and me with an Empire army.

The End of an Era

I remember the day well. We went as an extended family to a ski lodge where we were all going to hang out and play games and have fun. It was Memorial Day and we were all off work. I had brought all of my Chaos and he had brought all of his Space Wolves. And then…

We had kids by this point, and his oldest was now just barely tall enough that she could grab models off the table.

And that was it. Our game couldn’t be played without the constant threat of a three year old, and we boxed everything up. And that’s where it ended. It was the last game of Warhammer 40k that I would play with my brother for close to a decade.

Meanwhile, I went to grad school which made me 1) very busy, and 2) very poor. I also moved my family into a very small on-campus apartment, and wargames just took a backseat for two years. And in the two years after grad school, things also took a backseat, because I was entering a new job market.

But…

The Revival

I wrote a book. It was after grad school. I graduated during the peak of the Great Recession, and there were no jobs to be found. For nearly a year. So everyday I would spend the first three or four hours of the day on the job hunt, and I would spend the second half of the day writing books. (This wasn’t the first book I’d written–I’d published three with a small press before grad school–but this was my first book to hit it big.)

And hit it big it did. I signed a three book deal with HarperCollins that would eventually stretch into a five book deal–the five books being Variant, Feedback, Blackout, Dead Zone, and Dark Energy. I eventually became a New York Times bestseller, and have 15 novels under my belt.

But at the launch party of Variant, my first big novel, my brother gave me the starter set to Warmachine. And I fell hard. I played Protectorate of Menoth, and I still love those models even though I don’t particularly love the rules. (I swear, I have played Warmachine & Hordes dozens of times and I may have won a single game?)

But this began a revival in my wargame playing. I was now a fulltime novelist, with extra money and extra time on my hands. I began taking models and paints to my office and painting every morning before starting work–a routine I continue to this day.

The Downward Spiral

If you’re new here and haven’t read all the posts, you may be unaware that I have several mental illnesses (and I’m not ashamed to talk about them). Specifically, I have OCD and schizophrenia. And yes, they’re terrible, but the picture you have in your head is probably wrong.

Anyway, OCD is a bitch, and it led me to make some really stupid decisions. First, it led to some really creative things, like these enormous terrain pieces. (If you can imagine Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind making his conspiracy garage you can imagine what it was like for my wife to come downstairs to my basement office and find the place overflowing with foam debris when I was building these in OCD mania.)

Also, when Warhammer Fantasy died and Age of Sigmar took over, my friendly local game store was selling off Warhammer Fantasy models on really good sales. So, I started buying them. Lots of them. More than I could afford to buy, and faster than I could even put them together. I was just collecting and collecting. I would take them out of the box, cut the pictures off the box and slip them into a three-ring binder, and put all the sprues in a larger box.

This all went downhill faster and faster until it was no longer sustainable and my doctor finally diagnosed me correctly: the reason the I wasn’t getting better was because they were treating the OCD but not the schizophrenia. Once the schizophrenia was under control, suddenly all of my obsessing was under control.

Where I Am Now

All of this leads to today. I started this website during the pandemic as a way to enjoy the hobby when I couldn’t play games with other people. At a time when I was working from home (still am) and had ample time to paint, I couldn’t go to the friendly local game store to engage, so I started my own place where I could engage.

And that brings me to now. This website has been running close to three years.

What armies do I have now? Well I have a bad habit of selling all my old miniatures, so I have very little of my early models. I hardly even have stuff I bought two years ago. I love to paint, but to afford the latest and greatest–and all the new game systems I want to play–I flip things on eBay quite a bit.

But I have in my possession full armies of:

40k:
Space Marines – an as-yet unnamed homebrew
Genestealer Cults
Imperial Guard

Age of Sigmar:
Seraphon
Gloompsite Gitz

Kill Team:
One Kill Team each for all the Space Marine legions

Horus Heresy:

Blood Angels

Bolt Action:
US Army
US Rangers
US Marines
British Airborne
British 8th Army
German Waffen-SS
German Fallschirmjäger
German Afrika Korps

Aeronautica Imperialis:
Orks
Imperial
Tau

Flames of War:
German Early War
British Early War

And then lots of half-finished projects.

And That’s Me

That’s the introduction to me, Robison Wells, and The Wargame Explorer. If you’re interested in talking you can contact me on Instagram or Threads. And if you’re interested in playing games with me, an event is being put together as we speak and will be announced very shortly!