Today marks the anniversary of our very first Goonhammer article. In our first year we’ve evolved from a tiny insignificant blog that we started up because we couldn’t be bothered doing BB code formatting for our effort-posts, all the way through to the full fledged website you see today, covering a wide variety of GW games in lavish detail. We’re thrilled with what we’ve accomplished in the last year, and are looking forward to continuing to bring you quality content in the coming year, but today we though we’d look back at our ten favourite posts from the last year.
The Best of Year One
Robot Wars
The article that started it all, editor Liam “Corrode” Royle faces off against a buddy in a no-holds-barred Ad Mech-on-Ad Mech showdown.
Lock, Stock & Two Loaded Dice: Dealing With Cheating
We think this is one of the most important articles we’ve published. Many of our authors are keen participants in the competitive community, and cheating is an ever-present threat lurking on the peripheries threatening to drag everyone down. In this piece, James “Boon” Kelling addresses why people cheat, and what we as a community can do about it.
How to Paint Everything
Our “How to Paint Everything” series is something we’re very proud of, bringing together a mixture of practical advice and lore insight designed to inspire people to come up with cool armies. The recent release of the Space Marines Codex gave us a chance to explore some successor chapter paint schemes, and we think this article really shows off what this series is all about!
Beer & Bristles
Our master painter Richyp shares the dark (well, actually very, very bright) secrets of his terrible powers, taking you through a very quick guide to OSL.
Beer & Bristles: Episode 1 – 20 Minute OSL (Baharroth Blue and You)
The Imperial General’s Field Guide to Assassins
Our guide to using assassins (and the counterpart piece on how to play against them) was among our first “breakout” strategy articles, pulling in a wider audience then we’d seen before by focusing in on a hot topic.
The Big FAQ
We pride ourselves on the level of details we put into our content, and our thorough rundown of the April Big FAQ proved extremely popular. Look for our next one at the end of this month!
Start Competing
One of our goals as authors is to give our readers the tools they need to up their game to whatever level they’re aiming at to maximise their enjoyment of the hobby. With that in mind, we’re extremely proud of our ongoing “Start Competing” series, and this is the piece that kick-started that.
Start Competing at Warhammer 40,000: An Intro to Tournaments, Part 1
Necromunday
We started Goonhammer because we love detailed written content about our favourite games, and felt there wasn’t enough 40K text content out there in our scary modern world of podcasts and YouTube. Turns out that’s just as true for Necromunda, so Dan and Jules have been getting stuck in to filling that gap with the Necromunday series, with their introduction to the game being the best jumping off point.
Necromunday: How to Play Necromunda (We Promise It’s Worth It)
Codex Reviews
Getting to review new Codexes is one of the highlights of writing about this game, and these have always been among our most popular articles. Our monstrous four-part review of the revamped Codex: Space Marines has brought together everything we’ve learnt about how to make these useful to our readers, and is currently by far the most popular thing we’ve ever written! (It also caused Wings to have literal nightmares about Space Marines by the time it was done).
Codex Space Marines – The Goonhammer Review – Part 1 (Army & Faction Traits)
NOVA Interviews
To finish up we have something very recent, but very important to us. Nothing quite shows how far we’ve come in a year than this – we’ve gone from our tiny hobby blog to having experienced journalist Jonathan Bernhardt coming along to NOVA and interviewing the creators of our favourite game for us! (we honestly still can’t quite believe we managed to line this up).
…And Now for Year Two
We’ve utterly blown away by the response we’ve had to what we’ve done with Goonhammer, and are extremely excited for where we’re going to take it in the next 12 months (we’ve got big plans!).
We would like to take this opportunity to thank, from the bottom of our hearts, everyone who’s read, commented on, shared and liked the work we’ve put out – the responses and feedback we get is what makes this worth doing. Turning up to events and having people want to talk to you about work you’ve published is an amazing privilege and we’re delighted that you like our content enough that we get to experience it.
You can, as ever, reach us at contact@goonhammer.com or via our Facebook page if you have anything you want to chat to us about.
Thank you once more for reading, and stay tuned for another great year of Goonhammer content.
Rob, Liam, James and all of the Goonhammer writing team.
