Just to remind anyone who is sufficiently local that tomorrow and saturday are open days at Foundry in Nottingham.
I’ll be on hand both days to talk to people about God of Battles and run folk through demo games. The Foundry guys have the rules at a discount and there will be packs of the whole range (I think) of their fantasy models including all the new stuff. That might be at a discount too 🙂
I’ve slated the days as GoB days anyway, so whether people come or not I’ll be happily playing with the toy soldiers. Why not come and join in the fun?
Quirkworthy 
Was going both days but will be their saturday now. Should be a good day…
Look forward to seeing you.
Weirdly, Foundry open days used to be busier on the Friday than the Saturday, though I never understood why. From the people that have told me they are coming to play GoB, Saturday is going to be the busier day this time.
Of course, if I’m the only one there then I get to spend the day wandering round the racks rattling blisters. Ah, the nostalgia 🙂
It’ll be Saturday for me too. Budget couldn’t stretch to a night in a b&b.
Save your pennies for more toys. You know it makes sense 🙂
Have fun, I’m on the wrong side of the pond. On the plus side I got my rulebook yesterday. And now I want to see the range for the godless.
Mad, bad and dangerous to know: that’s the Godless. There are quite a few pictures of the models in the book. I think that they’re working on new websites now, so presumably the new packs will go up as soon as they can get the technical stuff all sorted. I’ll see if I can get any good pics of the stuff in the cabinets today. I know there were some Godless in there.
Yes nice teaser of them, can’t wait for them to get their new site up with them on it hopefully. Pics would be cool if you can get them.
Sorry imp, my camera died (for good this time) 😦
There were a few Godless in the cabinet, but those on the shelf vanished into the collections of some of the visitors pretty quickly…
Hey Jake, just seen their latest newsletter on TMP – they seem to be discontinuing fantasy? Or at least unspecified parts.
(Quite) BIG CHANGES COMING AT FOUNDRY
We’ve been running Foundry since last June. Our plan was to wait at least six months before we made any major changes. We felt it would take that long to get to the bottom of everything. We can’t really claim to have actually got to the bottom of quite everything yet.
However, we have now started getting on with those changes!
Our Website
We have to put our hands up and admit to running a mediocre website: ugly, confusing and sometimes so slow it can make you want to weep uncontrollably with boredom and frustration. Our models look awful in the mean little photos, even though the majority of them are very wonderful castings indeed.
Embarassingly, someone chose to pointlessly change the names of many of our models without any reference to historical accuracy or common sense.
Our website must have lost us many customers over the past few years.
We can only offer our apologies, and our heartfelt thanks to all of you for sticking with us through the slow process of putting your orders together on our uncooperative website.
We have started to build a new website in the format that Kevin Dallimore designed for us back in about 2000: when we were in Guernsey.
That was the one with eight life-size packs of models shown on each page. Clicking on them brought the images up massively in size.
You may recall that our site was previously packed with historical information, articles, painting guides, banners, rules and suchlike jollyness. We will put all that back too. This may turn into a big job. I should be able to do much of the legwork but this may take a month or three.
This is a sample page that I put together so that you can see what we are aiming at:
Removing Substandard and UnFoundrylike Models
From some point after 2005, a number of the new models made at Foundry were of either of a substandard quality or inappropriate in style.
It may seem strange to condemn a model soldier for “inappropriateness”: but Foundry was originally founded when Cliff Ansell (my grandfather) took over the manufacturing of early Citadel historical models that would otherwise have been discontinued. Foundry started with a selection of mostly models by Michael and Alan Perry, and various odds and ends from Alistair Morrison and Dave Andrews. Since then Foundry has always stuck to a style that reflects the work of the early Citadel sculptors: Adams, Andrews, Ansell, Bibby, Goodwin, Morrison, Naismith and the Perrys.
Where a model obviously doesn’t fit that style, we think that it really should be taken out of the Foundry ranges. We think that our customers have a right to expect us to maintain a consistent general style.
We have already removed the hundreds of packs of Napoleonic models that were made over the last seven years to replace Michael and Alan’s ranges. We currently have no plans to put them back in production.
We will shortly start taking down all the models on our website that we regard as “UnFoundrylike”.
We will continue to manufacture these models permanently, but will give them their own independent website with a new name. Until we sort a new website out we will put them up on eBay (“THE CASTING ROOM: Budget Wargames Miniatures!”). As they go up on eBay, we will remove them from our main website.
Substandard models are a more serious matter. There is no fun at all in selling models that are not adequate in proportion, finish, detail, pose or historical accuracy.
When we took over Foundry, we found ourselves in a painful situation. Customers were buying models from us that we considered to be substandard. This made us very uncomfortable: our instinct was to just discontinue them, we didn’t want to push relatively poor models onto our customers. But we didn’t want to be pushy newcomers who went about obstructing established customers buying choices either, or deny customers who have different tastes to us the chance to finish their armies.
In the end, we decided that we couldn’t just discontinue ranges that people were still collecting and we stuck with our six month rule.
As it happens, when we looked at the sales figures, it turned out that although we manufacture a number of models that could be described as substandard, they make up only a tiny portion of our overall sales. Shortly we will permanently remove all those models from our site. We may offer them for outright sale (see below).
Pre-2006 Fantasy Models
We have a fairly large number of fantasy models in our ranges. My father had quite a few fantasy models made (well, actually over 300 wonderful Orcs and Ogres and Snorklings and Dwarfs and bits sculpted by Kevin Adams and great Elves and Dwarfs by Kevin, Mark Copplestone, Mike Owen and Shane Hoyle). These models were all made before 2006.
My father must have had them sculpted for old times sake!
We have a vast fantasy range, but we sell hardly any of them: regardless of their quality. I suppose that as we are a company known for military miniatures, fantasy is just not what people expect us to be doing.
Foundry’s last management reduced the price of our fantasy packs from £12 GBP to £10 GBP to try and get more sales in: but it made no difference.
We have done a proper costing of the earlier fantasy models.
It seems that for the big models which make up the bulk of the older fantasy ranges, we would have to charge closer to £20 GBP a pack, just to break even.
This being the case, we have decided to withdraw all those fantasy models that date from my father’s time from our website while we think about things. However, we don’t want to leave anyone in the lurch, so we will still supply any models you need to finish your collection or army over the next couple of months: you just need to ring us up.
More Recent Fantasy Models
Some of the new fantasy stuff made more recently between 2006 and 2012 is pretty good.
There’s a lot of it, but it’s a bit of a random mishmash. We are going to remove all of them from our website and put them up on eBay. The new eBay site is called “FlytesofFantasy”. We haven’t put much up yet as we are waiting for eBay to go through their technical machinations to increase our selling allowance.
Unreleased Masters
Foundry’s last management left us with surprisingly large numbers of masters of unreleased models. We keep finding more of them.
Some of the masters are rather sad: the underlying structure is fine, but the surface detail is quite poor.
The sculptor must have been taking the (as we say here in Nottinghamshire).
We plan to hang on to them and use them as training tools for new sculptors. Eventually they will probably be nicely sorted out and will see actual release.
Others will probably be manufactured and put up on the “FlytesofFantasy” eBay site.
We have some very eccentric Steam Punk Orks that we will most likely put into production eventually.
Others (recently discovered Marlburian pikemen for instance, or power armoured science fiction warriors) are of little interest to us, so will probably be auctioned off on eBay. If we do that, we will sell them complete with the rights to manufacture them. This might be the first time manufacturing rights for model soldiers have been sold on eBay.
Cheers
Marcus
Foundry aren’t discontinuing their fantasy ranges, far from it in fact.
I talked with Marcus about this. Basically they’ve been left with a mix of models, some of which they feel are below the standard they want Foundry to be known for (and so they want to lose them). Sounds fair enough to me. As far as I understand they’re not discontinuing anything from the GoB ranges and were, when last seen, frantically casting as much as they could so that the whole range was available and in blisters on racks for friday and saturday 😉
I don’t know the details of what’s going, though the impression I got was that there was no need to panic. They’re very much behind GoB.
I understand the point about the cost. The fantasy foundry I bought during their last sale was inordinately heavy, very well cast but big lumps of lead. I was puzzled as to the low cost compared to friends who make their own models and find they have to sell them for a lot more due to material costs.
Indeed I am surprised they aren’t going for something like the spun cast plastics that are out. An indie blood bowl producer is managing to do it and it cuts their team costs from $80 to $35. http://www.impactminiatures.com/index.php?option=elfballteams
Comparison of metal to this stuff.
http://www.talkfantasyfootball.org/viewtopic.php?p=670210#p670210
A few acquaintances that have used the stuff confirm it is far better than the restic Mantic uses. After struggling with my project pandora models (ended up using some dwarves with guns vs elves) I am not looking forward to returning to the UK from Cambodia where my Dreadball set awaits and having lots of them to fiddle with.
I’ll see you there on Saturday, as soon as the train can deliver me from That Sheffield.
Groovy.
Foundry real does seem to be moving with some serious pace and determination to reform and rebuild its place n the market place.
And I think that’s a good thing and wish them luck. Spent some time today looking closely at the ranges again and they do have some cracking models.
Hi Jake,
David here, the Goblin leader of the first game you ran. Just wanted to say thanks very much for running Derek and I through a game. I really enjoyed chatting with you and it was a pleasure to see Foundry and meet Marcus and the team. My one regret is letting my willpower remain strong enough to only buy the book and not go home with a kilo of new lead! I should have at least bought some Goblin Archers. Look forward to the idea of regular meet ups.
I played GoB 3 times this morning. Looking forward to monthly meet ups too 🙂
Just got back in from the open day where I had a thoroughly good time. A big thank you to everyone there :). Was good to see another couple of armies in action, get to play one of them and to chat about tactics and whatnot.
Looking forward to the next time I can get down for some more GoB. Might be able to make the next one if I can persuade another couple of people to make the trip and split the cost. Definitely can’t make the next one if it’s on the first Saturday in April. Don’t think the intended would accept it as a reasonable excuse for missing my wedding reception lol.
Thanks for coming. It was great to see armies started and on the table, earning their paint jobs 🙂
Enjoyable day, and after a fierce battle came second, or is that lost…. 😦
Still enjoyable an my beastmen died tragicly and painfully.
There was quite a lot of carnage…