Warhammer (with the models and everything)

Barth first 'got into' Warhammer 40,000 thanks to video games, many moons ago - he played a "shitload" of Warhammer 40,000: Dawn Of War with college friends in the early noughties. In the process, he developed a cautious enthusiasm for Warhammer 40,000's rancid supporting fiction. The table-top game itself? Not so much. "I once, many years later, tried playing the actual miniatures game," he tells me over videocall. "I have a friend who's obsessed with it - like, obsessed obsessed with it, went too too deep into buying plastic and not being able to paint it all, that kind of obsessed. And so, finally, years later, I got to play it and it fucking sucks.

"I really don't have a lot of patience for many games, especially board games, especially tabletop miniatures games," Barth continues. "And it's funny because it's the kind of thing I want to love, but I just can't fathom how you can play something like that and be like, 'yeah, I want to do this again'. Like, the games last hours! It's like four turns in an hour, just so much dice rolling!

"It's so random, it's so expensive, it's much work to paint it, and it's going to look bad because who's good at painting? It seems like the worst hobby, but I've always been really interested in the idea of it, as an outsider, because it looks so cool, but it's totally inaccessible. I certainly couldn't afford it as a kid growing up. It was like, it's a hobby for rich kids, you know - that's not my background. And so, the only real connection I ever had to it was through video games, right?"