Self

My name is Randy Tenvoorde and self employed as a graphic designer/web developer, co-founder of Firestick Pretzels (with my wife), and part-time beer slinger for Bad Habit Brewing in St. Joseph, MN. I’m married to a beautiful woman named Becky and have three wonderful kids with a combined total of 7 grandkids.  Except for wanting more than 24 hours in a day, I couldn’t ask for much more.

I started scale modeling around 1979. It started with cars and worked my way up to aircraft, sci-fi and into military. I liked military the most because of the level of detail and realism possible in recreating these machines. I didn’t worked much on creatures or people though. I still have the instructions for a majority of those models I’ve built over the years as a record of sorts. There’s about 120 of them. I did scale models as a hobby through high school, even winning a few modeling contests at our local hobby shop.

My gaming addiction started about the same time. A friend at the time introduced me to Dungeons and Dragons: Basic Set. When we couldn’t play face to face, we would call each other and play over the phone. In retrospect, I guess my parents never needed the phone that much! At about the same time another friend of mine introduced me to a game called Midway by Avalon HIll and another game called Flattop. Both were WWII sea/air warfare simulations.

In 1983 I hit high school and found a gamers club there. Battletech became my newest obsession. I have the books and boxes going back to “Battledroids”, which was the first iteration. (FASA was sued by Lucas, who owned the term “Droids” and FASA changed the name to Battletech.)

This gamers club was responsible for introducing me to an enormous range of gaming. Nuclear War, Naval War, Illuminati, Car Wars, Titan, Diplomacy, Fortress America, Junta, Gammarauders, Steve Jackson’s Killer, Rail Baron, GEV/Ogre, Talisman, and many others that I can’t remember at this point. I’ve played a lot of games.

Around 1995 a friend introduced me to a game called Warhammer 40000 (40K). I was offered a bunch of orks for free (Thanks guys!) and haven’t looked back. I didn’t start painting my miniatures until about 1998. This is also (coincidence?) about the same time that my kids started becoming of age to understand gaming and want to do/paint up models.

After taking a roughly 10 year hiatus from gaming/painting, my focus, for now, is to re-learn the skills I once had and to paint for me, and maybe the occasional competition. Since I’m not doing for gaming reasons, it’s kind of liberating to pick and paint a model simply because it looks cool or I want the challenge!

Cheers!