Painting Space Marines

 Army Painter has posted a tutorial for painting Space Wolves on their blog.  Here is the link.

Restocks

 If you are a miniatures painter and collector, Next time you are in the store, check out the paint racks. We have restocked the Games Workshop, Army Painter and Vajello paints and supplies and restocked the D&D miniatures wall with over $2000 worth of figures. Only a few Aasimar figuers though and almost no Dragonborn

New Collectiable Miniatures games

 Remember the Pirates of the Spanish Main Collectable miniatures game? You got everythig you needed in one pack and could assemble a miniature pirate ship. Well coming out later this year:

Snap Ship Tactics:  Constructible Miniatures Games Launching in 2023—I fondly remember the Pirates of the Spanish Main collectable ship line of a decade ago. Although the collectable miniature product mix has collapsed to Dungeons & Dragons blind box miniatures and HeroClix, I would like to look at a new product line entering the market.

Army Painter

 OUr suppliers have notified us that Army Painter has increased its prices so, as we get items in from the company with the new pricing, ours will increase as well.

Miniature Painting

 Come paint miniatures with us from 1 tp 3 today and again on Jan 30. Sydney will be painting and offering help on making your miniatures pop.

Ogre Zombie Painting Contest

 Just in time for Halloween, it's the Ogre Zombie Painting Contest. Pick up one of our Ogre Zombie Paint Night kits, paint it up and post a picture in this event by 9p.m. On Oct 30. People will have until 6 p.m. on Nov. 1 (All Saints Day) to vote for their favorite paint jobs by liking the pictures. Figure with the most likes receives $20 in store credit. 2nd place gets $10. Gentlepainters, grab your brushes.

Painting Contest

 We will be announcing our next painting contest this week, featuring the WizKids Ogre Zombie. You will have until Halloween to purchase and paint up one of them in order to win store credit.

Miniatures Painting

 Since a number of people have picked up painting miniatures during the epidemic, we will start offering painting workshops on the last Saturday of the month. This month's workshop will be led by Syd and will run from 3 p.m to 4 p.m. this Saturday, after Teen D&D

Confrontation Miniatures

We have seen an increase in interest in the Confrontation miniatures line from Rackham Miniatures. For those not familiar with it, this was a fantasy themed line of figures from the French company Rackham, suitable for play using the Confrontation rules system. For those unfamiliar with the line, you can see a number of the figures listed in our eBay store. They are pewter and have very, to quote a player of the game, "amazing sculpts".

Online Miniatures Contest Winners

Here are the winners in the online miniature painting contest. Congratulations to them all!! Take a look through the pinned post at the top of the page to see all of the entries.

1st Place Bill Sweidan $30 in GW store credit
2nd Place Krystin Calhoun $20 in GW store credit
3rd Place Kim Arena $10 in GW Store credit

This is good on instock merchandise, not on special orders, esp since GW is shut down for the immediate future. .

Steve Jackson Games Hot Lead and Space Knights Rules

Back in 1993, Steve Jackson Games announced a set of miniatures rules titled Hot Lead, designed to encompass many different genres, much as its GURPS RPG system did. Ral Partha secured a license to produce miniatures to work with the rules and released a Space Knight series, reminiscent of the Aliens movies and Games Workshop's Warhammer 40K figures. Unfortunately, SJG never releases the Hot Lead or Space Knight rules, leaving the Ral Partha figure line miniatures without a setting or rules.

New WizKids Miniatures

WizKids just announced a partnership with Hasbro to make miniatures based on GI. Joe, Transformers and My Little Pony in painted and unpainted versions. Since the press release does not say so, I would bet these are simply miniatures and not HeroClix figures. The D&D figures WizKids created last year have done so well that Hasbro likely saw WizKids as a good partner to come out with another line of figures. No indication as to what scale the figures will run.  Just imagine, painting your own MLP or Transformers figure. 

WizKids Adventurer's Camp

In case you purchased the new WizKids Adventurer's Camp, the listing of items on the package is different from the correct list on the website and what is in the package.  WizKids is preparing a "Make good package" to provide the missing pieces to those of you who purchased one. 

Online Survey Bones

One comment from the online survey we are conducting was the lack of the Bones line of figures from Reaper. Agreeing with the respondent, we got in the top 100 figures in the Bones line today as well as a box of the new figures Reaper released this month.

Tomb of Annihilation Miniatures

the D&D Miniatures Tomb of Annihilation set arrived yesterday and we have plenty of boxes and single figures.

Bring the heroes, villains, and monsters from the jungle of Chult, as well as the Tomb of the Nine Gods to life in this latest series of fantasy miniatures!

Collect all 44 figures from Tomb of Annihilation, the newest set of randomly sorted monsters and heroes in our exciting line of D&D miniatures, Icons of the Realms.

Adventurers have been sent to the jungle peninsula of Chult, where they must face all manner of dangers in order to find the lost city. Adventurers will need all the help they can get to get through the Tomb and the Dungeon’s evil architect – The Lich Acererak.

Why We No Longer Carry Historical Miniatures

Every once in awhile I hear from someone that the brick and mortar store is dead or that stores need to evolve into new models. I have to smile every time I hear that as the game store has evolved and will continue to do so.

For example, back in the 1990s, we used to stock a full 8-12 feet of historical miniatures:  Napoleonics, ACW (American Civil War for those who don't speak acronym fluently), Civil War Ironclads, etc. However, over the years we saw a shifting in demand. Customers wanted specifically posed figures for specific units for specific eras of specific wars. To satisfy the demand would have required us to drastically expand the amount of space devoted to historics without a significant increase in sales. We are talking several thousand dollars invested  for a few hundred dollars increase in figures sales as most people only wanted 1-2 figures at a time. Unfortunately, we had to put in orders of $400 to $500 at a time in order to satisfy those 1-2 figure purchases, leading to extensive inventory creep.

Slowly, in order to get exactly what they wanted, customers turned to mail order purchases, first from catalogs in the early 1990s, then as the Internet became more familiar, to online purchases. The store, we slowly cleared out the remaining historics and replaced them with the bludgeoning Games Workshop, Ral-Partha and Reaper lines.

The downside of this to historic miniatures is that, as stores like ours moved away from historics, so did public play space devoted to them. Most historic miniatures games are played either in homes or at conventions such as Little Wars and Historicon, where you play with people already familiar with your preferred genre of history but have little chance to introduce outsiders to the game, one of the benefits of playing in public. In the 1970s, miniatures wargaming WAS historics, now they are a fraction of the industry.

Unpainted Minis from WizKids

Taking on Reaper's Bones line head on, WizKids announced a line of unpainted miniatures licensed from Dungeons & Dragons and Pathfinder and featuring sculpts of characters and monsters from both lines.  Here is more information:

UNPAINTED MINIS: DONE THE WIZKIDS WAY!
 

As many of you may have already heard, only a few weeks ago we announced a brand new line of unpainted miniatures, featuring more than 150 unique fantasy sculpts, set to be released in Q4 2016. With this release, we plan to raise the bar on collectible miniatures and blaze the trail for an era of highly detailed, desirable and affordable minis. We’d like to take some time to delve deeper into what you can expect with this upcoming and highly anticipated release, and hopefully answer any questions you may have.

We plan to roll out our new unpainted minis line with a number of our distinguished fantasy licenses.  Additionally, there will be a WizKids house brand of unpainted minis available in our offerings. Where fantasy licensed branded minis will focus on famous creatures and characters, WizKids house brand minis will focus on environmental set pieces to enhance our player’s and collector’s game experiences.  

Our team is working hard to ensure WizKids unpainted minis are highly detailed, incorporating scaled features with deep cut details, so your customers can look forward to easier hand painting.  

The unpainted minis line will not follow our historical collectible business model. Instead, it will focus on single repeat purchases, displaying the high quality minis in striking, yet visible, packaging.  Customers will be able to see what they are buying on your shelves.
The collection will include characters, creatures, and even scene-building elements, all available in three types of specialty packs that will each contain a variety of sculpts (most of which will come fully assembled):

• Level Up Packs will contain both a standard and advanced sculpt of the same featured character.
• Designed with army-building in mind, Monster Packs will contain 1-3 miniatures with different poses of a single monster.
• Item Packs will contain scenery and items for detailing adventures. 

 

Level Up Packs will include two (2) figures per pack, one standard and one advanced. Here is an example of a standard and advanced character. Note the level of detail in each figure and the many facets and intricacies between each.



Standard character has decent armor to protect him in battle. But just wait until he levels up…

 

Advanced character features improved, exciting and impressive battle armor! 

 

 

There will be a vast assortment of both male and female characters from a variety of classes and races in the initial release of unpainted minis. For example, look for generic and iconic heroes, monsters and more!  

Prices tend to vary widely when it comes to unpainted minis in the marketplace. Most of our unpainted minis will be priced at $2.99-$3.99 depending on the pack, making them a great value for your customers. 

Our unpainted minis will come pre-primed with Acrylicos Vallejo primer so they are ready for hand painting right out of the box. Acrylicos Vallejo is a long running industry standard, known for their specialized high-quality paints. 

The unpainted minis line will not be exclusive to a single distributor. Instead, we are taking a multi-distributor approach with this release. A full list of distributors carrying the line will be announced in the coming months. 

Consideration has been made in the packaging design, ensuring it is sized to fit on existing slat wall/peg systems. Packaging can also be placed on shelves, or any easily accessible location for your customers. 

Here is a sample of what’s to come! 

 

Look for this set to hit your shelves later this year.  Until then, we encourage you to offer plenty of opportunity for pre-orders within your store.

All Quiet on the Martian Front

Blaine Pardoe has a detailed look at the failure of All Quiet on the Martian Front from Alien Dungeon, as well as some comments on the care and feeding of Kickstarter campaigns.

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.

Origins Awards Nominees

The 2015 Origins Awards nominees were announced earlier this week. Mildly bemused to see that, given how the historical miniatures aspect of the hobby has retreated to online and convention sales, making up such a small segment of the industry, how many nominees there are in the historics category.