Tabletop sim I think can’t be praised enough. Me and my friends wanted to get in 40k but we’re also a pretty ways from the city. It’s a mission to get over there for a demo game be it a GW shop or Hobby shop. TTS let us put together the combat patrols, and find which ones we liked before hand and more importantly if we even liked the game. (And because like you said it’s not cheap) Ontop of all that, I love minis and got into wargaming since I loved building/painting model kits. So I do prefer doing things physically but even now I still use TTS as well because it let’s me and friends play together with our other friend who’s moved away for school. It definitely isn’t intuitive to set up, and takes searching, but after we got it running it’s been going great!
That very much mirror's my experience! Some of my lifelong friends are in other states and love Warhammer, so the only way to play is to use TTS, and once we got used to it I loved it!
Find any Warhammer player and ask to borrow one of their 10 armies or ask whats their pile of shame looking like and if they need cash to get the next hit
I used to play Lotr back in the day and the community was very toxic and unfriendly. My friend plays 40k and he says its still the case inside the GamesWorkshop community. Meanwhile I play Starwars Legion for 2,5years now and its absolutely amazing. Everyone is friendly and its almost has no "That Guy" types.
All of my GW purchases are made sporadically and only to support my local independent FLGS, I 3-D print a lot of my GW stuff, despite my reservations in this video about it it is a useful tool
