July 18th New GW Releases

 The new Warhammer: The Old World Core Set offers customers the perfect way for two players to start playing games of Warhammer: The Old World right out of the box. Featuring a force of 22 brand new miniatures for the Warriors of Chaos pitched against an army of 31 Grand Cathay miniatures, this game-in-a-box also contains the Core Rulebook (revised edition) and all the essentials and accessories needed.

The new Battle March General's Companion expands on the core rules and allows customers to play smaller 400-750 point “Battle March” games - a fast-paced and accessible way to play.

GW Releases for May 31

 Here are the GW releases for May 31. Let us know by 3 p.m. on the 13 if you want any:

BATTALION: WOOD ELF REALMS

ARCANE JOURNAL: WOOD ELF REALMS

WOOD ELF REALMS: GLADE GUARD

WOOD ELF REALMS: GLADE RIDERS

WOOD ELF REALMS: ETERNAL GUARD

WOOD ELF REALMS ARALOTH LORD OF TALSYN

HIGH ELF REALMS: SILVER HELMS

HIGH ELF REALMS: HIGH ELF LOREMASTER

THOUSAND SONS: WARPFLAME THRALLBAND

CODEX: THOUSAND SONS (HB) (ENGLISH)

DATASHEET CARDS: THOUSAND SONS (ENGLISH)

COMBAT PATROL: THOUSAND SONS

40K Trades

 We are not taking trades on Warhammer 40K, Age of Sigmar or Fantasy Battle earlier than the current edition as there is little edition by players in older edition products. Nor will will take figures out of the box. We will gladly purchase or offer store credit for figures still in shrinkwrapped boxes or open boxes as long as they are still on the sprue. Unfortunately, we have had very little interest in loose figures and no good way to store them as bitz.

GW New Releases

 Looks like new War Cry items releasing on August 5. Let us know if you want any on the release date so we can make sure we have them.

WARCRY: ROYAL BEASTFLAYERS WARBAND

WARCRY: QUESTOR SOULSWORN WARBAND

WARCRY: CRYPT OF BLOOD (ENGLISH)

T-shirts

We are getting t-shirts made with the store logo and Warhammer Logo  emblazoned on them. Shirts will be Heather blue with the logos on them in white. We are looking at getting 40-60 of these made will make these available for free to Preferred Customers first, then to people who play Warhammer and Warhammer 40K here regularly, then to other customers. If you meet either of the first two criteria, let us know your size and we will get you a shirt

Games Workshop Boardgames

Fortress has an interesting look at the history of Games Workshop boardgames, especially given the current ending of the FFG license. I found especially interesting the fact that the boardgames that GW produced during the peak of their production during the late 1980s were never as profitable as the Warhammer and Warhammer lines of miniatures and miniatures rules, causing the company to shutter their production.

Also interesting was the two views of HeroQuest within the company, with one faction viewing it as a product that took time and attention away from GW's own product lines while the other viewed the game and its promotion by Milton Bradley as valuable in recruiting new customers into the shop. For those interested in Games Workshop, the column is definitely worth the read.

KIngs of War

Considering bringing in the Kings of War rules from Mantic. The main reason is that the rules work well with the existing Games Workshop line of figures, giving fantasy miniature players another option to use with their exiting fantasy armies.

Games Workshop Name Change

As you may or may not have noticed, last week, in its annual report, Games Workshop announced it planned to change the name of its retail storefronts from “Games Workshop” to “Warhammer”. As I noted in one of my first columns looking at the use of the “Wizards Play” name by WOTC in regard to its Organized Play program, this is a good idea from a branding point of view. Customers buy the brand, they don’t care about the company behind it. 

Games Workshop worked as a brand name for the company during its formative years during the 1980s when its primary purpose was importing and distributing the releases of a new company known as TSR which had this really popular Dungeons and Dragons game. Demand for D&D proved quite strong, enough that GW could survive as the official distributor of TSR products in the United Kingdom and, as demand for RPGS grew along with the interest in them, Games Workshop added on more product lines to their distribution offerings. Games Workshop worked as a name for a distributor because, although I think they did do some direct to consumer sales, most of their imports sold to other retailers who then sold to consumers. However, I have never known a RPG player who didn’t think they could make a better system than the one they currently play and Games Workshop proved no exception, Launching Citadel Miniatures as a separate company in 1979, releasing the rules for Warhammer Fantasy Battle in 1983, the first edition of Warhammer Fantasy Role Play in 1986 and Warhammer 40,000 in 1987. After all, businesses certainly make much more money by selling their own products than by reselling someone else’s publications. 

However, the company retained the name “Games Workshop” as main brand, with each game line a separate product category and expanded quite aggressively into retail, launching Games Workshop stores worldwide, with each store selling Warhammer Fantasy Battle (or Warhammer:  The Game of Fantasy Battles as it was later renamed), Warhammer 40,000, The Lord of the Rings (and later The Hobbit) Strategy Battle Game, Citadel Miniatures and paints as well as other game lines such as Blood Bowl, Necromunda and Inquisitor. This practice of expanding game lines put a lot of games into Games Workshop’s product portfolio but also meant the company has to spend time and limited resources promoting all of those brands plus the overarching retail Games Workshop brand.

Changing the name of the company’s retail outlets to Warhammer is a change that, had I given it any thought in the past, is 1) an obvious change to make and 2) probably 20 years overdue. Their customers don’t come to the store looking for that new Games Workshop Codex or figure, they come looking for the new Warhammer or 40,000 product. The company has created incredible brand loyalty among its customers; just look at the number willing to plunk down $50-60 for a new codex only a couple of years after the last one came out. Yes, they complain about the price, but they also buy. Other companies in the industry would kill for that kind of brand loyalty.

Changing the store name means that the Games Workshop brand can now recede into the background to appear in legal documents and on annual reports, while the Warhammer brand now does the heavy lifting of bringing new customers into the hobby and retaining current ones.

More on the Age of Sigmar

In case you missed it, and Games Workshop certainly hope you didn’t, the rules for Age of Sigmar released this past weekend on the GW website and physical copies of the game hit store shelves July 11. Age of Sigmar replaces the company’s flagship fantasy miniatures title, Warhammer Fantasy Battle, with what the company says is a completely new rules system, one focused more on single figures than on the unit to unit combat. Long a mainstay of WFB and still common in historical miniature rules, the new movement rules mark a movement (so to speak) away from WFB and closer to the company’s much more popular Warhammer 40,000 rules. 

The addition of “War Scrolls”, specific rules for each box set included with the figure or printable from the GW website and the replacement of points balancing each army with “objectives”, also long a staple of historic miniature combat are also major changes to the system. The last major change of which I know is the elimination of army lists. Instead of choosing figures from a set list limiting the figures in a player’s army, a player will now have the ability to mix and match any figures they wish, making a force of Empire, Lizardmen and Tomb Kings possible.

Why the change? Two reasons come to mind:

1.       Warhammer Fantasy Battle has never reached the sales level in the US that it has in the UK. Warhammer 40,000 sales have always (White) Dwarfed  Warhammer Fantasy Battle sales in the US. In our store Warhammer 40,000 outsells Warhammer Fantasy Battle by a factor of over 10 to 1 and this is not atypical throughout the US. Despite multiple rules changes and upgrades, Warhammer  Fantasy Battle shows no signs of every attaining anything close to Warhammer 40,000 sales in the huge US market. So, Games Workshop could either launch a 9^th edition of the game and see a slight sales increase, based on past trends, until the newness wore off, or it could launch what it perceives as a brand new game, using the company’s vast collection of already produced figures but give players a new and easier way to use them and look for the larger sales increases that accompany a “new” product.

.    Games Workshop is a miniatures company.  It produces games in order to give people a reason to buy its miniatures. Games Workshop has produced wonderful boardgames in the past, Talisman and DungeonQuest come to mind, but turned them over to other companies to produce because they did not fit the business model GW had adopted. Similarly, GW stopped supporting miniatures games it produced, such as Man o’ War, Blood Bowl and Mordenehim, because the number of miniatures the company could sell for each game did not hit the levels of a Warhammer 40,000 or even a Warhammer Fantasy Battle. New or upgraded rules  mean  more miniatures for players in the Games Workshop hobby (At one time, and it may still for all I know, GW viewed itself as its own “hobby”, distinct from miniatures games) to buy and as GW encourages WYSIWYG (What You See IS What You Get) in its game play and a new army list calls for miniatures somewhat different from miniatures from the previous army list, new rules and army lists mean a steady stream of miniatures purchases from its avid player base (I always tell customers looking to get into playing miniatures that, while it is less expensive to get into games such as Warmachine or Infinity, GW has the advantage in that it is played EVERYWHERE.

Will Age of Sigmar succeed? As someone selling the game, I hope so, as a successful AoS launch would certainly kickstart (in the original use of the term, not the modern capitalized use) sales of existing WFB figures. Reports from stores that received demo copies of the game early have been favorable, with customers  showing lots of interest and asking about a release date-July 11. So, Farewell to the End Times and welcome to the Age of Sigmar!

Age of Sigmar

In case you missed it, Games Workshop announced the release of Age of Sigmar next week, which completely replaces the Warhammer Fantasy Battle rule set and Army books. All figures in production are still usable with the new rules but the rules themselves consist of the 4  page set that you can download for free from the GW website and War Scrolls. figure specific rules sets that are included in the Age of Sigmar boxed set, downloadable off the GW website and will be included with each new set of figures that GW releases.  Hits the shelves next Saturday, July 11 but you can look at the rules on July 4.

The Relative Importance of Organized Play

I received a call from Wizards Customer Support last week regarding the change over to paperless entry of new players to the DCI system, but no idea if it came in response to last week’s column or not. I got a walkthrough the new system, which has not actually implemented yet, as well as help in merging my WOTC customer and DCI accounts, which turned out a whole lot more difficult to do than I had expected, apparently mainly because I had jumped on the bandwagon early and converted over the store DCI account to the new system already. I gather ‘tis easier to covert over the customer account first, then merge your DCI account with it, rather than the other way around (and does my WOTC account password really need upper and lower case letters, at least one number AND a special character? That is as secure a password as my bank requires and I certainly do not store any financial information on the Wizards website). 

This got me to thinking, again, about the importance WOTC places on Organized Play and comparing it to the utter lack of importance another pillar of the industry, Games Workshop, places on it.

Let us compare the two.

WOTC has a very structured OP program, with stores expected, or at least encouraged, to run OP events, either provided by WOTC itself (Friday Night Magic, Magic Game Days, the late Kaijudo Draft program, D&D Encounters and so forth and so on) or set up by the store (Magic, casual Magic, casual D&D). Stores can either schedule  events weeks or months in advance, with promotional materials and support often provided, sometimes hundreds of dollars worth of support) or set something up on the fly, as a group of players come in and settles down for an evening of Magic or D&D. The company has made the DCI Reporter software integral to its OP program and updates the software on a regular basis. The weekly sales tips sent out from Wizards Customer Support usually (but not always) focus on how to enhance a store’s OP program as integral to the success of Magic and, to a lesser extent, Dungeons & Dragons.

Games Workshop, on the other hand, has no Organized Play program. As a couple of my customers commented the other day, Games Workshop views its line of Warhammer products as “beer and pretzels” games. Very expensive beer and pretzel games certainly but still games meant for play between friends who get together for a casual afternoon, not those who get together for tournaments.  Though players do actively play Warhammer and related games in tournaments, these are player created rather than company created events. Games Workshop has even, as far as I know, eliminated their old “Rogue Trader” program. However, unlike WOTC, I get weekly sales calls from Games Workshop and up to $1500 in credit to apply to store armies, paint stations and other GW product used to enhance game play in the store. Both companies realize the importance of in-store play, they just approach it from different viewpoints.

White Dwarf Thoughts

Games Workshop’s relaunch of its flagship title White Dwarf as a 32 page weekly, cutting the page count of the magazine to a third of its previous size.  I felt rather leery about this when Games Workshop announced it a month or so ago but we had a surprising number of people pre-order it, significantly more than pre-ordered the monthly version of the title so upped our order significantly, to the tune of over double our regular order for the monthly version. Most of those, alas, still sit on the shelf. After looking at the first issue I understand why. 

Granted, White Dwarf is a house organ and Games Workshop uses it to promote new releases and armies. The company wants to hype whatever it releases that month.  Fair enough.  I do have to wonder why, given all the products the company has and all the armies it could chose to release a new Codex for, why chooses to go with Warhammer Fantasy Battle and especially, why Dwarfs?

In the US, Warhammer 40,000 has outsold Warhammer Fantasy Battle for over a decade.  In fact, Warhammer 40,000 has vastly outsold Warhammer Fantasy Battle for over a decade.  Coupled with the fact that years have passed since I have heard anyone enthuse about building their WFB Dwarf army (actually I cannot remember anyone getting enthused about building their Dwarf army, but the mind does forget things). Therefore, given the potential market for Warhammer Fantasy Battle in the US, compared to that of Warhammer 40,000, why did the company choose to launch the radically redesigned weekly White Dwarf with Dwarfs?

Why not Tyrannids? Tyrannids are popular. People buy Tryannids. People bought lots of Tyrannids in January, when the highly anticipated new Tyrannid Codex came out. Why not release the new version of White Dwarf to tie in with the new Tyrannid figures, especially if you want to introduce them to a new version of the magazine? O else, hold off the launch of the magazine until a new 40K Codex launches to drive interest in and get people to sample it?  Games Workshop has some very strong brands it could leverage to launch the new White Dwarf, so why it chose Dwarfs is a puzzlement.