How to Warhammer for CHEAP

I have many tips on how to save money on your Warhammer hobby - it's easier than you'd think.

[tammyschilling]

Best money saving tip for all hobbies: stop buying stuff and use what you already have. Paint the minis you already have, use the colors you already have. Hobbyists tend to go on shopping sprees as a stand in for actually doing the hobby. Stop acquiring and start using.

[albdamned]

I made a few sandbag barricades out of glued together pennies. I called it my aegis defense line. It totally isn’t counterfeit but I still got a disapproving glance from the store manager at a GW store lol. Ironically it was a lot cheaper to use literal money than GW’s plastic…

[jonrollason]

These are great!

Few add-ons...

- Skirmish games are SOOO much cheaper, and let you collect slower. Kill Team is such a fun game.

- Learn to mix your paints. GW want to sell you 5 pots of "blue". You can mix so many blues, so easily.

- making character models from basic troops is a huge money-saver - Greenstuff, extra bits, size bases up and add drama with rocks and whatnot. Boom.

- sand from the road, beach or whatever is superb pro basing material.

- you can make wash/shade paint for big projects in bulk using matt medium and calligraphy ink.

- texture paint is really good using fine sand, PVA, and cheap poster paint.

- deodorant stick grav-tank is the best grav-tank.

[horusthewarmaster]

I have a friend who bought the 'Zombicide Black Plague' and 'Massive Darkness'. He then painted then and orgainised their bases and created movement trays so that he could use them in multiple games. I've since seen him use the undead, orcs and monsters from those games in Zombicide, Massive Darkness, Age of Sigmar, Kings of War, Warlords of Erehwon, Saga age of magic, Frostgrave, Dungeons and Dragons, Mordheim and Warcry. I haven't heard anyone raise an objection yet. In fact, most people just ask where the miniatures are from. Some of those 'miniature boardgames come with hundreds of miniatures

[mattpaxton]

Make friends with someone at your FLGS who plays the army you are interested in. Watch them play a few games. They may even let you "use" their models to get a feel for them. A good way to figure out if you're going to enjoy playing the game and that army in particular.

[imcubanb]

I quit going to the game store years ago. I played from the start all the way through 3rd edition. When 4th came out, me and my buddies wanted to wait a while before switching. We liked 3rd and had already spent so much money. Well a few weeks passed and the owner only wanted people to play 4th edition to make us buy more stuff and was being a prick about it. We were still buying magic the gathering, dnd, comics, and other things, we just didn't feel the need to change over to a new warhammer edition. We ended up just buying a couple of tables, built sceneries, and just played at each others houses. Never went back to that store.

[chromasus]

Age of Sigmar is just now shifting to the Combat Patrols-styled boxes as well. They seem to be aimed at 750 points, which is roughly the smallest amount for playing proper games.

[IXxEzechielxXI]

I am glad that my local game store don't care about proxies and stuff. The main goal is to have a nice community to play !
And that makes me want to support it

[cordial]

Start at a skirmish/warband level (or in games like Kill Team) and slowly build up to an army only if you want to. Doing that will make tabletop gaming one of the cheapest hobbies for time invested imo.

[Ironsidedgamergirl]

do have to say, as someone with adhd this hobby is honestly the best, maybe not money wise but the sheer selection of troops and organization it's just so fun building list and fighting my armies, and i get the whole backlog thing but for me personally i feel like i still want at least one of every army because i like playing different styles on different days

[eneaceribelli]

I was interested in 40k and was looking where i could buy a recruit box for 9th edition. My friends told me to check out a shop because the people who worked in the one i was going to buy were kind of dickish.
Now that shop became my FLGS and is basically my second home. Friendly owner and customers, kinda active community (both for WH and MtG) with both new and old folks, with ideas, stories and experience into the scene (there are people who are just starting out or simply watch to see if it's of their interest and others that are in the hobby before I was even born).
Now I try to support it in every way I can, be it ordering GW products or buying boardgames or getting a booster pack for MtG.
Because it's a small store it can't make discount and since it's a small community in a not so large city the variety of game system is a little dry, so the players need to stick to one or two games to play (namely MtG and WH).

[JachymorDota]

Make your own heroes! Of course, GW heroes look great with their poses and stuff, but a single hero costs sometimes as much as a box of dudes. Put them on a big stone or broken pillar, make them raise their weapon or glue extra bits and heraldry on them and voila - a hero for cheap and plenty more models free for conversion.

Thinking back on Warhammer fantasy, many players used filler for their big regiments, like barrels, graves and the stuff, to embiggen their ranks and remove them first as casualties. I had the idea for my trolls/troggoths, to use the extra heads and harms and some greenstuff to make these come out of holes or water on big bases. I mean, they are official GW parts and clearly distinguishable. But I am not sure if this would count as modelling for advantage, because they would have a much smaller sillouette. Kings of War deals with this the best, since each unit has a predetermined footprint and height, regardless on what happens on the bases.

[decimus]

I fell into this exact loophole last year, I was just finishing my conquest subscription (which is another cheaper way into the hobby short term - pachow!) When the indomitus boxset came about, I grabbed it like everyone else did, and then about 2 months later I was painting an army for someone and because of financial reasons he no longer wanted it, after already buying the miniatures for me to paint - I asked him that I would buy they off him. I paid him the money and considered it a great deal £300 worth of mini's for £150.
The thing is, I'd barely got around to touching my indomitus set, and now I had a huge amount of other mini's as well, plus what was left of conquest and imperium now, and a couple of other boxes besides. And yep I gave myself too big a mountain to climb. I'm slowly beavering away on it, although it'll be a few years before it's painted completely. 🤦

[THX-togg]

I really enjoy buying half or badly painted minis from eBay and “rescuing” them.

[Mutsume]

i love seeing this "pro painted" on ebay and then all it was is just a very "basic run of the mill" paint job and charge you 5x

[balazszsigmond]

Kitbashing. Needed 4 Tomb Banshees, got 4 Myrmidesh ones, which didn't actually need any kitbashing whatsoever. Pay the price of one, got four.
Also kitbashing kind-of stuff: there are boxed characters, again, for fantasy stuff, in Underworlds. Cheap af, full of character. Friend got his warqueen from the Godsworn Hunt box, super cheap, looks great, kind-of unique, cheap, what is not to like there? And he has a bunch of extra guys as material for his kitbashed Spire Tyrants Warcry team.
In 40K, there are always extra bitz left from building regular squads, and if you have enough, you can, again, kitbash colourful characters out of regular guys with them. Back in the day, I wanted sternguard, but couldn't afford, so I picked five regular marines, picked the nicest bits from the boxes, gave them robes from tissue paper and thick sewing thread, dipped them in pva glue and went to town. People spend a lot of time sculpting clothes out of GS, but it is faster and more realistic to do it from actual fabric, like tissue paper. Tissue paper clothes are awesome. Some more elaborate clothes are a lot trickier, but there is always a way.
While we are at clothes... Ghosts are just extra skulls and hands sticking out from under pva drenched paper on a metal wire. They look as good if not better than any sculpted ghost. The flow of paper as clothing, the texture is just out of this world. Takes paint like crazy.

[lennartlindeman]

Know the meta chasers / impulse buyers in your local gaming group.

Buy their stuff second hand when they move on to the next army, usually every two months or so.

Great succes.

[tmorton]

Well said sir.
You've said this before, at different times and in different ways, but to have this all together is very nice.
Now I can send this link to new folks coming in to think about.
Nicely done!

[borisdevilboon]

For age of sigmar, the underworlds warbands make good "counts as " or conversion fodder as leaders for their respective armies. For example, the seraphon warband out of the box has a decent skink priest / star priest option and a saurus old one. And another skink that I converted for use as a priest.

[johnbruce]

"How to save money playing GW? I'll tell you how to do that!" Listen to Uncle Atom. Well balanced, sensible advice. The eponymous Quiet American.