Those of you who subscribe to the Foundry newsletter will know that things are changing there, with all sorts of things being reorganised. I mention this because they are the publishers of my long awaited (by me) fantasy tabletop rules: God of Battles, and I thought it only fair to tell you what I know in case you may have been waiting too. After all, I have muttered about it more than once. Possibly.
Well, I know little more than you do. A firm release date is up in the air along with whatever else is going on, and until things settle down again with Foundry I can’t be more specific. To be fair, the timing is not all their fault. The Chinese seem to have found an even slower boat than usual and I think it would have been out by now if the original plans had gone through. As it stands, copies seem to only just have docked in the UK. Nice that they’ve got past the Somali pirates and all, though still a week or more to wait before it could arrive at the warehouse.
The Foundry Fantasy website doesn’t seem to have been taking pre-orders, though Amazon do. Confusingly, while the Foundry fantasy website simply says coming soon, Amazon UK says the release is the first of August and Amazon US says September.
I’m hoping it will finally be out in a week or two because I really want a proper copy myself. I also want to talk about it in detail, and see what everyone else thinks. Been sitting on this for well over a year now and it’s burning a hole in my brain…
Quirkworthy 
Amazon’s pre-order system has always been a bit dodgy. I once pre-ordered a book that hadn’t even been written yet (as it turned out).
OK, you win 😉
Amazon put items up for pre-order once they become aware of their existence and then estimate a delivery time which often bears no relation to reality. The younger Ansell didn’t seem to know when it would be released when I was down there. When I told him the reason I expected GoB to still be released that weekend was because the details were on the Founrdy Fantasy website he said that he forgot the website was even there and they’ll be taking it down at some point.
There’s a younger Ansell? I didn’t know. What’s his name?
I can’t say that taking the separate fantasy site would be any more of a surprise than hearing that they were going to put it up in the first place.
In my view, the best way they could improve their website is to add content rather than duplicate the shop, but doing that properly means paying someone to do it. I’ve run enough websites and forums to know how much time it takes. Few companies do it well and it may be better left well alone rather than doing it badly. As a catalogue and shop the site works well enough.
I believe his name is Marcus.
The main difference between the two sites was that the main one was charging £8 for postage and the fantasy was charging £2.50. I suspect someone at Foundry decided the non-historical market wouldn’t pay that much postage so launched a separate site for those lines.
I think they do need to do a lot more with their website (and told them as much). Growing and maintaining a customer base is as much about brand loyalty and identification as it is about the product. They also sell such an array of different historical minis that it’s difficult to know what they all are and none of them have as much as a short bio.
They do indeed have a vast range. Part of the discontinuing of the lines seemed to be an effort to make the ranges easier to navigate, but it looks like they’re putting them back again now. At least, that’s what the newsletter seemed to be saying.
It will be very interesting to see what this reshuffle does in terms of altering direction.
Yeah, everything they can find the mo(u)lds for is going back on sale eventually. They’d already set aside space on the shelves for the armies they were bringing back when I was down there last week. They also were planning on removing the free standing shelves in the middle of floor, putting all the stock onto the walls and opening up the floor as a gaming area to run tournaments on.
All sounds like fun stuff. Look forward to seeing it bed in.
Thank you for the update, I was coming to your blog to see if there was any news regarding the release of Gods of Battles and I’m happy to know that the wait is almost over !
Still no news ? I hope that the boat did not sank ! 😉
I’m still trying to get a definite date. I’ll let you know when I know more.
So any news on this yet? Or have all things dreadball taken over?
I’ve asked Foundry and didn’t get an answer. I’ll check the date on my email and see if they need prodding again.
Personally, I’ve got no influence on when they decide to release this, which is frustrating, but par for the course. I am busy with DB, but even if I wasn’t it wouldn’t make any difference to this.
I’m now the proud owner of a copy of God of Battles 🙂
So do I, if you ask them (by phone or e-mail) they accept to sell you a copy of the book, I do have mine for 1 month now, we will run a game during the holidays !
So they are selling it now? I’m confused. It’s not on their site.
In fact I sent an e-mail to marcus to ask him if knew when the book would be available, he replied that the book was not publicly available but that he could sell me one if I wanted to… So I did buy one…
Curiouser and curiouser.
I am perplexed that it seems that they have a stack of books and are slow selling them when sitting on a pile of inventory is bad capital management.
I think it’s more to do with the fact that a new game needs a proper launch when it’s released and Foundry aren’t in a position to do that right now.