Motivation Monday – Community Spotlight – Mat Green

Hello and welcome back to Motivation Monday!

This series of blogs will delve into the wonderful Mantic fanbase to find stories and interviews with some of the most well-known and loved members of our community, with the hope and intention of inspiring the rest of us to dust of those sprues, pick up that brush or take the leap into a new game.

Today we speak to… Matthew Green

Hello unnamed mystery Mantic interviewer*, I’m Matthew Green. I play lots of Kings of War, but I’ve dabbled in quite a few of the recent Mantic games. Like many people my age, I started with Hero Quest and then Warhammer, but I eventually  came to Mantic through a slightly convoluted route. After tiring of long, complex rule sets that took my (admittedly very slow) gaming group a whole Saturday to play, I had started looking for a new systems to try. I’d also started collecting some historical miniatures, at first to use when teaching history at work, but later just because, well… Romans and Vikings are cool right?

We’d tried a number of games, some very simple, others with more depth, but none quite fit. After a year or two of trying (and adapting) various systems, I remembered that I had a copy of Kings of War Historical on my shelf. I had no recollection of where or when I bought it, but I convinced my friends to give it a go. Suddenly my Romans could be Romans and still fight elves. The more we looked into the rules, the better it got. The rules produced basically the same outcomes as our childhood games, but with less dice rolls. Movement trays and then multibasing sped things up even more. Suddenly we could play tabletop wargames games on a weekday evening, which was unheard of before.

What’s your favourite Mantic game and why?

That would be Kings of War. The game is the perfect mix of scale and complexity. There are fewer statistics than other similar games - keeping it fast - but the combinations of those stats and the special rules can still give all the flavour and variety that other ‘quick’ rule sets often lack. The game has the look and feel of large armies, with hordes of miniatures marching across the table, but without the need to remove casualties. Movement trays and multibasing make the game so fast to set up, play and tidy up. When the game is boiled down to its fundamentals, we are only deploying and moving a small number of entities, but the look of the game hides that, in a way that never breaks the immersion. I have been intrigued by the new version of Firefight in development, as that looks like it could achieve a similar result with a sci-fi battle game.

What is your favourite faction/army and why?

Goblins, obviously. What, you want more detail than that? Ok. Firstly, I’ve owned goblins pretty much forever. While I've dabbled in other armies, the elves and the greenskins remained  my favourites. Goblins are cool, they are funny. They are bad, but not evil. Well, I guess they are evil, but in such a cheeky way I’m sure even the Basilean villages being plundered and burnt down don’t mind that much, right? By the time we had played Kings of War enough that I wanted to move on from the historical armies, goblins seemed the best idea. I spent a few weeks rebasing my collection, first in sabot trays, then as multibases, before almost immediately deciding to just collect a Mantic only force.

Towards the end of 2^nd edition I’d bought a tonne of trolls, planning to make a Varangur troll army, but as they were replaced with snow trolls on their larger bases in 3^rd,they joined the budding goblin army and were such a joy to paint in bright glowing green, I started to see what else I could paint. Before long I realised that I had most of the Mantic goblin range, so it only seemed right to try and collect at least one of every Mantic goblin sculpt there has ever been - a stage which I think I am now at. I tend to play a somewhat atypical goblin list, without the massed shooting and winggits that seem common and instead have trolls, luggits, and as many furry little beasts as I can cram in.

Do you have a favourite mini?

That’s a hard one. Gaming wise, I think it’s Magwa and his oversized pet Jo'os. I’ve started to style my army around the army collected together by that powerful but clinically insane gobbo. He always seems to pull his weight in games, shutting down fliers and individuals. I think people forget he is a mighty individual, and that he can both shoot and fight well. From an aesthetic point of view, it’s harder to choose. I love lots of the new goblin miniatures, with their exaggerated and fun to paint features. The goblin slasher was particularly fun, although I’m also very fond of my mashed up fleabag riders with new plastic parts, an idea that I in no way stole from Rob. Honest. I’m also quite partial to some of the older metal models. Figures like the goblin sneak, which I use as a wiz, positively ooze character.

What’s on your hobby desk at the moment?

At the moment I’ve got a horde of luggits that are base coated and need finishing off, a few goblin characters and a half painted winggit. Unfortunately hobby butterfly-ism kicked in and I’m now halfway through a Mazon Labs force for Deadzone too. There is also a second troll and a League of Infamy unicorn that my daughter has started painting, with a drakon to go after that.

What’s next in your hobby plans?

More goblins, there is never an end to the goblins. I’ve also dropped lots of not so subtle hints about Deadzone and Firefight Enforcers, so we will see what 2022 brings. A few of us at Thor’s Hammer gaming club have also started dabbling with Matt James’ siege rules from 2^nd edition, and that’s proving fun.

Do you want to add anything else? Perhaps you’ve got an event or club you’d like to promote, well this is the place! 

A few things really. I’d like to talk about tournaments, and how much fun they are, both to run and attend. In all my years gaming with other systems, I’d never attended a club, an organised event or played in a shop. I’d always just played with my own circle of friends, pretty much assuming that any wider community would be full of scary, win at all costs players with unkept beards and an aversion to deodorant. That or unruly children. Somehow one of my friends managed to talk me into going up to the second Beers of War tournament held all the way up in Wakefield. I figured with a name like that, it couldn't take itself too seriously! We loved it so much we went to all the rest. It became clear that the other people in the community were nice, friendly people who treated the game as a source of fun, even when they were three hours into the drinking competition. When we looked around for something to attend in our area, we couldn’t find much. Grant Alexander had run the only Kings of War tournament to date in the south east, and was just about to start up the Shroud of the Reaper series of events from their club in Bexley, but that was still to come. My friend Paul and I figured, if we couldn’t find one, we’d make one, so we now run a series of Kings of War tournaments in the South East called Kings of Herts, mostly, but not exclusively, hosted by the primary school where I work.  It turned out the people in our area were just as nice as the northern lot, and some of the friends we made up there were even willing to travel down to us. The uptake started slow, but grew rapidly, with a number of the players who came to ours and the Bexley events in turn starting up their own series of tournaments. We also have a Facebook group, messenger chat and discord channel called ‘South East Pannithor collective’. Anyone in our area, or to be honest anyone who has an interest in chatting to anyone in the group is quite welcome to join.

This year, we are planning on returning to the real world, with our tenth, eleventh and twelfth proper tournaments booked in. We have a small doubles tournament which we are running at The Pit, our local gaming shop in Borehamwood. This will be followed by a singles tournament at the school in the summer, which will be the South East Clash of Kings 2022 qualifier. Both of these events are sold out, but we have a third tournament penned in for October. This will be another doubles event, and we are aiming to make it our biggest yet, and now we are established, with terrain and tables, and with the prize support companies like Mantic have given us, we have started to be able to plough the proceeds into the school. This year we are aiming to buy reading books for the seven to to eleven year olds. As always, we are supported in these by Matt Ramsden at The Pit, who decamps his entire Mantic premium reseller stock and sets up a discounted stall in the school hall.

There are a few other projects that are always on the go. Last year we started the Pannithor KoWiki, a wiki covering all the rich narrative now building up around Mantic’s Pannithor world. The group, especially Mark. Have put a lot of effort into writing up content, but with the rate that new material is published my Mantic, Winged Hussar and Red Scar increasing all the time, we could really do with some help there. It’s free to sign up for an account and then people can start writing new articles, or editing ours for accuracy and content.

We also have an online gallery for young painters to show off the miniatures they’d painted of various Mantic games, which I’d love to add more too as it’s great to see children as young as three sitting down with parents and having a go at the creative side of the hobby.

Finally, my main focus at the moment, is encouraging Kings of War and other related games in my very local area. This is starting to be possible as our favourite local club, Thor’s Hammer, run at The Pit is starting to open up again, at the moment fortnightly.

A brilliant read, thanks for sharing.

Check back next Monday for great another instalment.

*Editor's note: Rob, can that be my job title please? It sounds so mysterious.