Bahrain’s young and young-at-heart wargamers are swapping video games for dice, miniatures and self-made worlds, advocating the mental health benefits and the life skills built by a hobby with origins in military tactical exercises.
Wargaming is a hobby in which players use miniature figures representing armies, vehicles, or creatures to play out battles on a tabletop battlefield made of terrain pieces – think chess but with more rules, a self-designed and larger board, and multiple ways to win each game.
Wargaming Bahrain has been growing for almost 10 years and is looking to build a clubhouse to introduce the hobby to new members, and bring the community together.
“I started this community almost nine years ago, after meeting other people by accident who were also curious about wargaming, and specifically Warhammer, since I played those video games while growing up,” Wargaming Bahrain founder Khalid Aldoseri, 40, who lives and hosts many of the games at his home in Hamala, told the GDN.
“I had discovered the tabletop version of Warhammer while in the US, and I got some mini’s (miniature figures).
“After I came back from the US, the boxes just lay in my room for the next few years. I was playing Dungeons & Dragons during this time and met a friend, Ghazi Alshehabi, who was also familiar with Warhammer 40K (the most popular miniature wargame in the world, with a science fiction flavour).
“And we just sat down and figured it out, with our fair share of mishaps. The first model I ever painted – I melted half of its face trying to dry it with a hairdryer!
“The first few games – we had no idea what we were doing, but soon we started going to geek conventions and meeting others interested in it.
“At one point, I just rented a table at one of these conventions and basically, I trusted that if you build it, they will come! And they did.”
The community now has 70 members, with 20 to 30 of them playing regularly.
In addition to dice, players sometimes use measuring tape to map out how much their characters can move during a single turn
In addition to Warhammer 40K, the community in Bahrain also enjoys other wargames like Necromunda, where rival gangs battle each other for control of their post-apocalyptic city, Kill Team focused on fast-paced, tactical battles with small, specialised squads of elite operatives, and more.
According to Mr Aldoseri, there are three key parts of Wargaming – painting, kitbashing and playing.
Wargaming starter kits include miniature figures and weapons, which can also be sold separately, as well as campaign cards and rule books.
The miniatures, about 20mm or bigger, are usually grey to begin, but can be customised with painting, weapons, armour and accessories.
Meanwhile, kitbashing involves combining pieces or components from different kits or models into something new and unique.
Playing can be just as complex, with unique rules and character traits, and often every team or player has their own objectives and sub-objectives, which they have to complete to score the maximum points in order to win the game.
Gameplay is turn-based, and games can last anywhere from an hour to all day or night.
“I was drawn in by the lore and the stories – I really liked the concept of building and playing as one of the armies so I got myself a starter box,” Mr Alshehabi explained.
“I found myself enjoying the building process more than anything else, cutting, gluing and posing those miniatures was almost like mediation.
“That is, until I got to the painting – I was terrible. If you saw some of my early models you’d think they were done by a five-year-old.
“Even then it became a skill that I honed over time and went from works of abject horror and despair to passable creations. “The war game itself was another fun aspect. Although most games don’t have a narrative or storyline, the dice always tell a story.
“You get heroic charges, desperate last stands and unnamed units becoming legendry figures because of brilliant strategic moments and a lucky roll of the dice.”
In addition to painting and kitbashing figures, Mr Aldoseri has also been challenging fellow wargamers to create their own terrain.
During a visit to his workshop, he showed off a toy space shuttle, which was created by community members from a repurposed toy water pistol.
He added that the skills developed here can sometimes even lead to art commissions.
For example, a leading Bahraini watchmaker, who had seen community members painting figures with extraodinary attention to detail, commissioned them to handpaint some of the custom watch dials for his leading luxury brand.
In addition, as community member Amena Odeh, one of the few women in wargaming, puts it, the hobby also brings a host of mental health benefits.
“When you sit down and paint, you have to be completely focused, which allows you to switch off your mind and not worry about anything,” the 38-year-old explained.
“Even with playing, there are so many rules to keep track of that you are completely engrossed in the game for three or four hours at least.”
Academic studies have also found that painting figures and constructing scale models allows hobbyists to enter a state of ‘flow’ – a state of pleasure achieved when an individual concentrates on a specific task - which elevates mindfulness and has been reported to be beneficial to mental health.
This flow state, as well as his massive collection of figures and armies, has kept Scottish expatriate Fraser Halliday glued to the hobby for 40 years, having started at just 12.
Mr Halliday, who has lived in Bahrain for 17 years, is considered by many in the community to be a ‘factory of miniature figurines’ – painting entire armies for play within a few hours – each piece painstakingly customised with unique decals and flourishes.
“Whenever I go back home, I bring back a stack of new figures to paint,” he added.
“That’s in addition to those that I keep ordering online.
“We jokingly call it ‘plastic crack’ because it can be just as addictive, and probably more expensive!”
Mr Halliday has a room filled with shelves, each lined with custom-painted armies that he has created.
However, this kind of obsession with the hobby comes with a price tag and miniature wargaming has garnered a reputation for being an expensive hobby – something that Mr Aldoseri is hoping to dispel.
“We try to help each other out, especially those who are just starting out in the hobby, by giving them our unused miniatures,” he explained.
“Also we have friends in 3D printing who can print custom models, drastically bringing down the cost of getting into the hobby.
“However, it is still a problem, and in fact, I had to intervene with one of our members, basically banning him from buying any more models while he was unemployed!”
The member in question – 25-year-old Abdulrahman Obaid – cheekily grinned as Mr Aldoseri told the story, adding that he has been good and has been focusing on levelling up his painting skills, although he does have his eyes set on new kits now that he has started working full-time.
Because of its price tag, wargaming is a hobby reserved for older and more financially secure adults, though Mr Aldoseri’s attempts to build a community by sharing supplies and subsidising expensive equipment have paid off, and younger Bahrainis have started to join.
Almost every week, members of the community get together to paint figures together, either at one of their homes or a local boardgame cafe.
For 24-year-old Mohammed Khayami, who got into the hobby almost a year ago, the community is a big part of what keeps him coming back.
“Meeting new people with shared interests and hanging out even outside of wargaming is great,” he explained.
“I didn’t know how easy it would be to get into kitbashing and painting.
“As someone who was very unsure how his miniatures would turn out, I was surprised at how easy it was to put it all together and they turned out great.”
As they look to the future, Mr Aldoseri is hoping to have a ‘clubhouse’, built on a business model similar to that of a gym, where hobbyists pay a monthly fee to access key supplies like paint, brushes and more, and join community events.
“Wargaming in the GCC is very young, and none of the big international names like Games Workshop have a presence in the region,” he added.
“This means that all of us end up paying a premium to ship games and figures from the UK or Europe – we are hoping to show that there is enough demand regionally to have an official presence here.
“And especially in Bahrain, our community is something truly special and unlike anything else in the GCC, which keeps visiting hobbyists from around the region and the world coming back!”
naman@gdnmedia.bh
WARGAMING
The most famous miniature wargame is Warhammer, where fantasy and science-fiction armies clash.
It began as a training tool for real armies.
In 1812, the Prussian army developed Kriegsspiel (‘war game’), a detailed board simulation of battles, used by officers to practise tactics before stepping onto actual battlefields.
After the two World Wars, enthusiasts adapted these military exercises for fun, creating their own rules to replay famous battles using toy soldiers or model tanks.
This gave rise to historical wargames like Flames of War and Bolt Action.
In 1974, Dungeons and Dragons was born out of miniature wargaming, with a focus on storytelling with individual characters, as opposed to army battles.
Unlike video games, both these table-top roleplaying games (TTRPGs) are social, in-person, table-centred activities that mix strategy, imagination, and storytelling.
In the 1970s, Games Workshop in the UK began producing fantasy wargames, leading to the creation of Warhammer in the 1980s. Today, wargaming has split into two thriving branches – historical wargames recreating past battles with historical accuracy, and fantasy and sci-fi wargames, depicting epic battles between fictional armies, such as Warhammer 40K, Kill Team, Necromunda or Star Wars: Legion.
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