I have a pretty damn good time with it. Lot of elitist douchebags in the hobby, but if you can find a good group that just drinks and makes it fun, then absolutely. That said, if you bought all of this new it'd be closer to $3,000. I keep a very close eye on Craigslist for used stuff that I can fix up.

Think a ridiculously complicated mix of chess and risk. It's a tabletop game that you play using your own models, terrain, etc. If you've got a games workshop near your place, the guys that work there can do a far better job of giving an intro to the game than I could ever do via text.

The basic idea is that each player has an army, and your objective varies from mission to mission while fighting off the enemy army. Each unit or model has a bunch of rules and stats associated with it, and you play to beat your opponent (or opponents). The main appeal for me is that there's a massive amount of fluff/back story with all of the models, so it's really cool for me to be able to, say, re-enact battles from the 40k books I've read, or come up with missions of my own. My buddy and I frequently do planetary invasion campaigns, but my favorites are the boarding action missions.

Actually when Harry Truman decided to nuke Japan at the end of ww2, he signed some papers on his desk opposed to telling someone.

Burnt shadows on the ground have no opinions

well about 35000 people that didn't die immediately had an opinion..