With the “leak” of a credible looking version of the (supposedly) upcoming 6th edition of 40K, I am prodded again into thinking about the curiosity that is False Flag Marketing.
It’s a term I made up rather than read, though the principle is an ancient one. To explain what I mean: “marketing” we all know as the planned relationship between company and customer of which advertising, brand management and so on all play a part.
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Tears of Envy is no more.
If you didn’t know, Tears of Envy is the brilliant graphic artist who designed the tiles for all the Dwarf King’s Hold series as well as the upcoming Project Pandora. She’s also worked for loads of other people designing logos and board art as well as books and other graphics. Quite apart from her undoubted skills as an artist, she’s a lovely lady with a lively and somewhat eclectic mixture of interests.
She’s not fallen under a bus or been abducted by aliens, instead she’s been snatched up by Games Workshop to do her thang for them full time rather than working for the rest of us as a freelance artist. Good for them; bad for us.
Personally it’s a mixed blessing, because it means that she’ll be up in Notts for a game or two rather than at the other end of the coutry. On the other hand, we now have the rather tall order of finding someone else who can live up to her graphics if we want to do any more Dwarf King’s Hold or Pandora tiles. The lengths Workshop will go to undermine me!
Anyway, enough whining. I just though this might interest a few of you, and explain in advance why things might have to change in the world of tile games.
Good luck Tammy!
Oddly, given the title, I wasn’t really intending this to be a series, but here I am. Today I’d like to bring your attention to the unjustly ignored:
I’d have hoped that more would know of this excellent site, but judging from some recent conversations I’ve had it would seem that they’ve snuck under a lot of radars. Anyway, if you don’t know them, Under the Mountain is an outstanding site for news on top quality figures in general, and Rackham’s Confrontation range in particular (plus Legacy Miniatures’ continuation of the same).
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I spent this afternoon playing Project Pandora: Grim Cargo with Ronnie. After some awkwardness to start with, she’s suddenly decided to behave herself. Yay!
I’ve talked before about the variable helpfulness of different game designs, and this was another variation of awkward. I could always see the game lurking within the tangle, and it’s nice to see it finally doing what I wanted it to from the start. We’ve been playing the first training mission a lot. Like the first scenario from each of the Dwarf King’s Hold starter sets I’ve aimed to make it a scenario that you can play again and again as you fine tune your tactics and (in this case) go for a high score. It’s proving very popular with the testers who keep asking for “just one more go”, and this is exactly the response you hope for. Once you move onto the other scenarios you get some extra features and the game gets a little more involved, so it’s a really good idea to get a firm grounding of the basic tactics on the training ground, before they try to rip your head off for real.
When I got back from the carnage (and after snaffling some of the splendid Mantic ghouls for my upcoming undead army project) I found an email from Foundry telling me that Tribes of Legend has survived the Somali pirates and escaped the dastardly clutches of customs, and even now is ready for pre-orders. If I’m really quick I can get one of the first 50. Apparently they’re signed by the author!
Really?
Anyway, my gaming year’s starting off nicely. It also looks like I might be visiting the Beasts of War chaps again, and heading off down to Salute. This year I’ll be trying to sneak away from the stand to have a bit more of an explore around the rest of the place and perhaps do one of my event reports. If I can smuggle in a file to get through the chains…
Well it seemed like meanness to keep you in suspense, so here I am with a proper look in the box…
The Titan Dragon is the largest of the (re-)releases of ex-Rackham miniatures from Legacy Miniatures via their exclusive distributor: Coolminiornot. It is cast in resin and comes with the 6 cards you’d need to play it in Confrontation 3, not that I expect you’d see it in a game very often. At 750 points it’s much more pokey than a normal 400 point warband could dream of coping with (and I had a good giggle to myself reading the unholy carnage it can wreak). I suppose you could have a game with one player taking the Dragon and two more taking a normal warband each. That might be fun. Rich? Are you reading this?
Yesterday I looked at what I’d been up to in 2011. Now we’re in a brave new year, what’s on the agenda?
Well 2012 should start with a bang as two games from me come out in January: Dwarf King’s Hold: Ancient Grudge and Tribes of Legend.
Ancient Grudge was a rather tricky project as it opens so many cans of worms all at once: variable warbands, new adventurers, multi-player games, swapping sides for scenarios… It’s all self-inflicted though, so I have nobody to blame but myself. I wanted to make DKH really flexible and offer endless replayability. Perhaps I was overreaching myself. Perhaps, but I don’t think so. It’s ended up with loads more options and potential combinations of new adventurers and match-ups in scenarios than I could possibly play, so you’ll be discovering new territory in your adventures đŸ™‚
Following on from the success of the Dwarf King’s Hold series I’m now working on another board game for Mantic, this time set in their Warpath universe. This “Dwarf King’s Airlock” (as Geoff insists on calling it) will be out early next year. Not sure when though. It’s real name is Project Pandora: Grim Cargo. Expect to see more cool Mantic models, more striking tile art from Tears Of Envy, and more layered tactical challenges from me. But in spaaaace đŸ™‚ Continue reading
As we come to the end of the year (Gregorian calendar) I wanted to look both back at the last 12 months and forward to 2012. I’ll do my crystal ball gazing on New Year’s Day, which seems more appropriate. Today I’d like to look back at 2011, and rather than focus on what I’ve been playing, look at what I’ve been creating.
For me, 2011 has marked a big push and a major ramping up of my attempts to get some of my games published. As you may have gathered if you read this blog regularly, designing games comes very naturally to me – getting them published is always the challenge. Over the last 18 months, and particularly the last 12 I’ve focussed increasing amounts of effort into making this happen, with some success.
I have a quick little question for your ranting pleasure ;P
Have Warhammer tournaments died?
I know that GW now prefers the term “events”, but what about the real world? 10 or 15 years ago there was a thriving scene with a number of different event types, though Swiss style competitive tournaments were by far the most common. I have heard that some of the big event organisers are dropping the game from their multi-system events because of lack of interest. Does anyone know more?
I’m intrigued as this reflects on a number of issues, possibly that the system style or ethos has changed, and equally possibly that it has been broken for tournament play. One could read a lot into this if it is true.
So, is it?
As I said a few days ago, I’d ordered a couple of presents for myself from Foreign Parts. Choosing them spoils the surprise of course, but it doesn’t diminish the excitement!
Before I mention the first of those to arrive, I’ve also got to mention a gift of the Island of Blood Warhammer 8th set. Lots of goodies in there.
The somewhat contentious 8th edition of Warhammer has been mentioned in various debates on this site, but I haven’t played 8th yet. Now I’ve been given a set I can join in the comments with a better understanding rather than having to extrapolate my knowledge of the first 7 editions. On first skim I have to say that I’m not seeing the disaster that the doom-sayers have been touting. Perhaps I’ll find it when I get into the detail and put some armies on the tabletop. We’ll see.
A couple of weeks ago I told you that the new Corporation figures were rather nice, and looked very like the concept pictures. Mantic’s Christmas present to those signed up for their newsletter was some photos of the troopers, and they’re up on their webstore for pre-orders too.
Like I said, they’re pretty close to the art, but why take my word for it?
As you can see, there are some minor differences, though some of that is simply the different limitations of the different media. Overall though, I reckon they’re very much in the same vein, and it’s fair to say that the “feel” is what we were led to expect. It’s possibly also worth saying that I think they look even better in person than in the photos of the greens đŸ™‚
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