Can WarCrow Save Corvus Belli [Script]

From now on, I'm going to release the scripts for my shows to the Heavy Elite and higher tiers. This includes any notes or annotations I make, unedited. Not much to talk about in this script, but you might interested to know that the bits in bold are those sections where I stumbled or stammered in rehearsal (yes, I rehearse!) so I emphasized them to myself to make sure I knew they were coming up.

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In 2022, I’m on a pretty strict “no new minis” drive while I try to get my epic backlog painted and somehow dealt with. I’ve made a couple of notable exceptions in the form of a couple of small Kickstarters I’ve backed - both of which were for single-person, UK-based indy companies that I wanted to support. But, frankly, I’d be more than happy if those would just wait until next year to turn up, because they ain’t going to see paint for quite a while!

However, few of the major companies really test my resolve to not buy new minis the way Corvus Belli does.

This Spanish enterprise isn’t without its flaws, of course. But when it comes to miniatures releases I just want to add to my hoard out of pure draconic avarice, nothing quite ticks my boxes like Corvus Belli. And the last couple of months have seen some interesting news and new releases from the company that it’s worth looking at in more detail, because I think they speak to the company’s long-term strategy, which can best be summed up as feast-famine capitalization and hyper-cautious growth.

Their latest news is the release at GenCon this year of the hotly anticipated Operation Blackwing boxed set that adds new minis to their Aleph and Haqqislam ranges and, importantly, adds these factions to the Code One rules set. AND, the release is creeping ever closer of their new miniatures venture, WarCrow, a fantasy miniatures game to match their sci-fi one - with a Kickstarter due to launch in September 2022.

But before we come to that in detail, let’s take a look at who Corvus Belli is, where they came from and how they ended up as one of the few companies in miniatures wargaming with strong prospects for the future.

Corvus Belli as we know it today was established in 2001 by three friends: Fernando Liste, Carlos Torres and Pilar Rivero. It was a classic garage enterprise, with the three collaborators being enthusiasts for 15mm historical wargaming who thought there was a niche in the market for certain historical periods that weren’t being served at this scale. And Corvus Belli quickly managed to stand out in that niche of a niche’s niche by producing some of the highest standards of sculpting and casting for historical 15mm anyone had seen at the time.

It was no coincidence that the business’s relationship with Angel Giraldez began at the same time. Angel is now a major influencer in the world of sci-fi and fantasy miniatures painting and his relationship with Corvus Belli hasn’t always been smooth but, at the outset, it was his exceptional paintwork on CB’s exceptional sculpting that helped them catch the right eyes.

And I think this is a good moment to pause and emphasise a few points about Corvus Belli that were established at the very beginning, that have been sustained to this day and that have probably contributed to its continuing success.

First, CB began as a miniatures company and it remains a miniatures company. There’s a persistent idea in the player base that companies like these are somehow games companies, but - even when they produce excellent games - the games are only ever a driving force to motivate miniatures sales.

Second, CB committed from the very start to producing eye-catching miniatures painted to the very highest standards. Now, whether that was an intentional focus or just the consequence of happy coincidence I can’t say. It might well be that the collaboration of sculptors and painters, both of whom were fixated on the highest quality they could deliver, was just chance. But, regardless, it is a combination that’s been sustained and a dedication to quality is a feature of Corvus Belli that sets it apart from other companies in the same niche.

Third - and, in my opinion, most important - CB began by serving a community with little to no interest in Games Workshop content. They began in a scale that GW doesn’t manufacture, supporting a genre in which GW has consistently shown zero interest. And they have, for the most part, continued in this vein. Although CB has benefited from people losing interest and/or patience with GW - and although they took some very subtle swipes at the industry’s most invasive elephant in their early years - they have, for the most part, ignored GW entirely in all of their planning and strategy.

But I paused the story of their development before we got to the most interesting bit! So let’s get back to Corvus Belli in 2003, when they released their first range of 28mm minis: War Crow.

No, I haven’t got stuck in a recursive time loop. Although War Crow hasn’t been released yet, at the same time it was first released in 2003, a full two years before the first Infinity miniature was seen.

War Crow, it has to be said, didn’t make much of an impact internationally. CB’s 15mm historical range was widely respected in historical wargaming circles, but the same people weren’t that fussed about 28mm fantasy, and perhaps we can talk about the dichotomy in our hobby between the historical and speculative wargamers, one day. However, War Crow was enthusiastically received by one group: Spanish miniatures wargamers.

In 2001, Games Workshop’s approach to translating their products for the overseas, non-English-speaking market was… hit and miss. They were awake to the idea that they needed to do it, but many products were slow to reach other languages and the coordination of translated products was haphazard. As a result, there was a slew of responses in France, Poland and Germany, with each of these countries producing their own small enterprises, like Taban Miniatures and Prodos Games.

Consequently, there was a lot of excitement about a Spanish company producing its own fantasy wargame, and the guys at Corvus Belli at the time took note… and then decided to do something completely different.

It was at about this time that Pilar Rivero decided to leave the business and, try as I might, I have no idea what he went on to. But he was replaced in the list of named Directors by Begoña Liste. And I’m going to be super clear here that I am making some assumptions because the Spanish register of companies is nothing like as accessible and transparent as Companies House in the UK. But given that Corvus Belli was a small business, I’m guessing that Pilar sold his stake to Fernando but, in order to keep the balance of directors, the share was officially sold to Begoña whom I think is Fernando’s wife.

But the switcheroo between Begoña and Pilar is pretty unimportant compared to the addition to the business of Gutier Lusquiños.

The story as I heard it, at this point, is pretty charming.

In 2003, Gutier was just a friend of Fernando, Begoña, Pilar and Carlos. They were - indeed, are - all gamers and, as such, would meet up to play games after work. And Gutier persuaded his friends to participate in a roleplay game he was developing, set in his own sci-fi world. They enjoyed the game enough that one of them - I think it was Fernando, as he’s the only one who publicly admits to being a sculptor - sculpted some minis for their characters.

I like to imagine that there was some kind of lightbulb moment in which they realised that Gutier’s game would make a much better skirmish game than a roleplay game, that there was a clear desire for a Spanish-language speculative miniatures game and that they had already started to develop the miniatures.

Another version of the story is that the miniatures were only designed later, after Gutier joined the company. But what’s pretty consistent is that some of the named characters in the modern game of Infinity were the player characters in that first roleplay version of the universe. And although I’ve done some digging to try to work out who they were, the only one that seems to be definite is Uxia McNeil, for those of you who already know your Infinity lore.

Anyway, in 2005 Corvus Belli released their first miniatures and a set of rules for the property they called “Infinity”. Compared to their modern products, the original releases were pretty crude. But by the standards of the time, they were revolutionary. There was none of the usual “heroic” scaling those of us in speculative wargaming were used to. The characters were slim, athletic-looking and clearly inspired by a manga aesthetic very much missing from other manufacturers.

But from the perspective of most potential players in the English-speaking market there was a problem: the miniatures were so different to their normal expectations that there was no way to run them as proxies or “counts-as” choices in their usual games. This problem was compounded by two other factors:

First, the miniatures line wasn’t large enough, yet, to be able to field whole forces for the game that Corvus Belli released and most crucially, the game they released was - in English at least - almost completely incomprehensible.

However, it does need to be said that the game had one enormously redeeming feature: it was completely free to download.

These days, we tend to see free rules downloads as a bit of a given for many games. Board games, obviously, embraced the idea early on for people who lost the rules to their game but had all the other components. Free rulebooks hardly lost them any revenue worth talking about. But, at this point - and I can hardly believe I’m talking about the 21st century, here - the idea that a rulebook was a marketing tool rather than a product in its own right hadn’t really been embraced by miniatures companies. There were free rules to download, of course. But they were mostly homebrew rulebooks with limited production values and no real market reach.

I’m cautious in suggesting that Corvus Belli were the first to release a free set of rules. But in terms of contemporary companies in miniatures wargaming, they were certainly the company who embraced the idea with the most gusto. And whilst the English language version of the first edition rulebook was almost unplayable, there was no arguing that it looked really good. The layout and formatting was top notch. It sent quite a significant message about the aesthetics of the game and it attracted a lot of attention.

None of this represented a significant breakthrough for Corvus Belli. I don’t know how much better the Spanish version of the rulebook was. I’m assuming a lot. And I’d like to think that sales, both in Spain and overseas, of the miniatures were at least sufficient to persuade them to pursue the game more diligently.

But even the release of the vastly-improved second edition in 2008 wasn’t enough to really catapult Corvus Belli into the spotlight of international attention. No. Credit for that needs to go to Warren Johnstone and the guys at Beasts of War.

Beasts of War, which is now OnTableTop and owned by Wayland Games, was an independent news outlet for miniatures wargaming that was pretty much unique at the time for being primarily video content. Since then, of course, wargaming media has exploded all over the place with this show being just one tiny piece of red-hot shrapnel in its aftermath. But back then, video content for miniatures wargaming was very unusual and Beasts of War was producing some excellent material - but they were also looking for partner companies with whom to work and Corvus Belli was among the first to benefit from such a partnership.

You see, the second edition of Infinity the Game was vastly better translated than its predecessor, but it was also a very innovative gaming concept with a player dialogue that was absolutely unique. Player dialogue is a topic we could talk about a lot more in a future episode, but for now let’s simply use a phrase that was extremely popular at the time in English-speaking hobby circles to describe it: it’s always your turn. What this referred to was a mechanic known as AROs or Automatic Reaction Orders. It sometimes surprises new players of Infinity that it’s actually an IGOUGO game, like Warhammer 40,000. In one player’s turn, they activate all of their models, then it’s the other’s player’s turn and they activate all of theirs. But AROs is the mechanic by which the non-active player - the reactive player - can respond to the actions of the active player, interrupting their turn to return fire, dodge or… well, there are a lot of options and they can get complicated, but mostly you’re either returning fire or dodging.

Anyway, a consequence of this and other features of the game, like camouflage and hiding, was that a lot of people - myself included - had trouble getting our heads around how the game was supposed to work. Although the second edition was published in 2008, it wasn’t until Beasts of War ran their Infinity Week in 2013 that the game really took off outside Spain.

Beasts of War worked with Corvus Belli to create a series of tutorial videos that used Angel Giraldez’s amazing minis, the studio’s own excellent terrain and some very clever graphical tricks of the trade to illustrate all of the trickiest and least intuitive rules.

These videos had a huge impact. They advertised the aesthetics of the game fantastically, putting the miniatures front and centre. They used graphics to further capture the manga cyberpunk feel of the rules. And they effectively demystified some of the game’s core concepts making the game look both accessible and innovative in one fell swoop.

Oh, and they also gave Beasts of War tens of thousands of views as people watched the videos over and over again to help them grok the rules therein.

It was a huge win-win for both businesses and a massive part of why each is in the comfortable place they are in today - although, to be fair to Warren and his team, more for Corvus Belli than Beasts of War, whose story I would like to tell in more detail one day.

But I do need to rewind a little. Because although it was Beasts of War’s Infinity Week that caused the game’s popularity to explode, it isn’t like the game was exactly languishing before that. The second edition was popular enough that Corvus Belli published a print edition of the rules that included a lot of extra narrative about the setting of the Infinity universe - a not-too-distant future in which the exploitation of wormholes discovered in the late 21st Century enabled humanity to expand into an interplanetary species. That, plus the creation of a singularity artificial mind - Aleph - led to the ability to digitally record human minds and re-upload the recorded minds of dead humans into vat-grown bodies called Lhosts.

And even though all of the rules themselves were available for free, people still enthusiastically bought the print edition rules - for various reasons. In fact, the print edition was popular enough that they were followed by two more books in second edition: The Human Sphere added additional rules to the game, most notably including fire teams that allowed a player to activate multiple minis in their army simultaneously. And the Paradiso Campaign, as the name implies, was a campaign book which also added some RPG-lite features to the game.

And I can’t talk about the growth of second edition without also talking about a factor that might have been almost as influential as Beasts of War in Infinity’s hyperbolic growth towards the end of second edition: Infinity Army.

I’ve tried to find out the name of who first developed Infinity Army, sadly to no avail. But I’m sure someone will tell me in the comments. However, Infinity Army was a fan-produced browser app to make army building vastly easier. Until Infinity Army was released, the inconvenience of assembling armies for the game was a major stumbling block for new players. Originally fan produced, then with its development continuing under independent ownership but with licensing and financial support from Corvus Belli, Infinity Army allowed players to pick their choice of minis from drop-down lists and compile them into an easy-to-print army list. In later versions, you could even create multiple lists and save them against a profile to print off or tweak as needed.

It wasn’t a perfect tool. Often it had mistakes in stats or missing options. But as Corvus Belli became more invested, so the designer was able to improve it over time, fixing mistakes and adding new features.

Eventually, Corvus Belli bought the platform outright and, I believe, brought the creator in-house to support and develop it full time. But that was still to come in 2014. At this point, Infinity Army was still an unofficial fan product that, nevertheless, was ready to meet people coming to Infinity for the first time from the Beasts of War videos to make their transition easier.

Oh, and did I mention that Infinity Army was and remains 100% free to use?

So far, so meteoric. And Corvus Belli capitalised on the massive new influx of enthusiasts from Infinity Week, to release - just the following year - an entire new edition of the game.

The third edition would be a high-water mark for Infinity and an important learning experience for them. The exodus of tabletop wargaming enthusiasts from Games Workshop was still going on, driven by poor standards in their new editions and high-handed treatment of their community, as seen in events like the Chapterhouse Studios incident and the Spots the Space Marine legal case, both of which I’ll look at in a future show. And one of the side effects of this exodus, supported by the third edition rules, improvements in the Infinity Army tool and the creation of an official Infinity Tournament System or ITS was that Infinity became a tournament game.

There had been tournaments in second edition, but as there were few to no official scenarios for most of that edition, the tournaments were isolated things built on fan-made content, such as the YAMS system designed by Ian Wood.

However, the ITS created not only a fixed set of official scenarios for competitive play but also national and international ranking systems, supervised by a network of community volunteers called “warcors”. And, for Corvus Belli and the tournament enthusiasts in the hobby community, this was exceptionally good news. The prospect of a balanced tabletop wargaming experience was irresistible and thousands of new players joined the community.

This, of course, meant a significant cash injection for Corvus Belli, but also a vastly increased demand for their products both in direct sales and from online and bricks-and-mortar independent retailers. Infinity - despite being in its third edition and over a decade old - was that most dangerous of things: “the new hotness”.

Being in this position is a double-edged sword. Sales, of course, are great to have. But when you work in manufacturing, the other side of the coin is the need to increase production, increase stock holding, increase headcount… all of which cost money. A company can invest heavily in growing its manufacturing capacity in order to keep up with demand only to see demand fall off and find themselves with capacity in excess of demand. Customers come and go, but a high-capacity white metal casting operation is forever.

And there’s also the second trap of the rising company: diversification. We saw this in the episode about Privateer Press, who pushed capital into new intellectual properties at the height of their success only to see those investments mostly fail to deliver a return just at the point that their market presence began to reverse. Corvus Belli also looked to diversify but, it has to be said, chose to do so in somewhat smarter ways than PP.

Rather than launching entirely new IPs and diluting their brand, they elected to use the opportunity to leverage their existing IPs into two directions: publishing and board games. The publishing side of things was the release of a graphic novel in the manga style, telling a story of espionage, betrayal and violence set in the Human Sphere. It’s… fine. It’s no Ghost in the Shell, or Bubblegum Crisis. But it’s not embarrassing. And they were smart enough to offer it with an exclusive limited edition miniature as well. And there are few things Infinity fans like more than a limited edition miniature.

The board game direction, meanwhile, was an interesting choice. In the 3rd edition era, they launched Aristeia!, which was essentially professional paintball with real guns - the hyper-popular extreme sport of the Human Sphere. It’s an extremely well done game, clearly pitched more at miniatures wargamers than board games fans, with some very complex synergies and tactics. And their follow-up games have been of a similar nature: Infinity Defiance and Infinity Tag Raid were even more miniatures game-y in that they included metal-only miniatures rather than the Chinese-manufactured plastic minis of Aristeia, and both Defiance and Tag Raid were launched as Kickstarter exclusives, with no retail release.

Despite its strengths, it’s fair to say that Corvus Belli has largely taken its eye off Aristeia in the last couple of years. But I think this might have been less to do with its lack of success than it was to do with the inevitable consequences of their own actions.

Infinity 3rd edition became a tournament game. And that has consequences that Corvus Belli didn’t anticipate.

A big problem with Infinity since its inception has been the steep learning curve involved in learning not only how to play, but how to play well. Every tactic has a counter-tactic. Every unstoppable force has an immovable object. But knowing that a tactic can be countered isn’t the same thing as being able to counter that tactic. Mass battle games, like Kings of War or Bolt Action, tend to smooth out this problem with numbers. But in a skirmish game in which players often have fewer than fifteen minis, a single miscalculation or minor misunderstanding can lead to a total collapse. And with tournament play being emphasised by the ITS, experienced players were deeply unforgiving of mistakes and miscalculations, which served to set the bar of entry for new players even higher than the learning curve otherwise already put it.

The short version is that new players were getting out of the game as quickly as they were joining it. And play time does not equal money for miniatures wargame manufacturers. No. What makes money is selling minis. But the speed with which players were abandoning the game was having a drastic impact on sales growth at a time when CB had invested in new premises, larger manufacturing capacity and increased headcount - a potential disaster in the making!

I also want to highlight, briefly, one mistake that Corvus Belli made right at the start of their journey that may have cost them in terms of visibility, which is calling their game “Infinity”.

Obviously, they couldn’t possibly have anticipated that there would be a Disney game called Disney Infinity that sold figures that could interact with a gaming console. Nor could they have anticipated that there would be a whole volume in the Marvel movie saga called “Infinity War”. After all, in 2005 the Marvel movies hadn’t even started yet! But they did pick a name for their game that is… a single word in common use.

And I need to say that I’m something of a kettle telling a pot how much it needs a scrub, here, because I managed to release my own game, Horizon Wars: Zero Dark, not long after Horizon Zero Dawn released and, yes, there has been confusion. But, in my defence, I published Horizon Wars in 2016. More importantly, “Horizon Wars Zero Dark” is four words. “Infinity” is one.

Just adding a second word to the name of their game would have been better than just “infinity”. But, honestly, I think it’s probably been a minor feature in what troubles they’ve faced. I just felt like I needed to call that out.

However, for all of its mis-steps and failures, CB’s saving grace has always been the combination of active community engagement and solid business leadership. The CEO is still Fernando Liste. And although Fernando is and always has been a gamer, he has also always been a business management and strategy guy. CB has sustained a clear-eyed understanding of what things in their business model are valuable and what things aren’t and have always been ready to cut things away. Fans do routinely complain when certain factions, whilst still playable, disappear from the shops, or when some army options are actively removed. But this represents CB taking decisive action in direct response to business pressures. The Cascuda mech was too costly to manufacture consistently, based on its retail price and, in any case, wasn’t selling well. So rather than raise its price it was removed from the line entirely. The Merovingian Rapid Reaction Force wasn’t selling in sufficient volumes to keep it in stock, so the stock was retired from manufacturing. And those are just two examples.

So when a whole edition of the game started, in sales terms, to underperform, there was no hesitation in identifying what the problems were and developing a strategy to address them.

Fourth edition - and its diminutive partner, Code One - has been out for a while now and, although it’s fair to say that Infinity’s time as the new hotness has definitely passed, based on the company’s subsequent actions it sounds like they have stabilised the patient.

Actions?

Oh, yeah. Because that brings us back to WarCrow.

Corvus Belli will be launching a new Kickstarter in September for the release of another board game - this time, a fantasy skirmish game called WarCrow Adventures, featuring an entirely new intellectual property: a high fantasy setting of swords and sorcery. And although I am usually, justifiably, dismissive of established companies using Kickstarter, I’m going to cut CB a little slack on this one because the idea is that the KS will just be the starting point for an entirely new game series: a proper, tabletop miniatures wargame with the same design ethos of Infinity, but the high fantasy setting of WarCrow.

If CB were to deliver a world as fresh and original as the Human Sphere for their setting, with the same quality of aesthetics, manufacturing and design, and with the same synergy between aesthetics and gameplay as Infinity, then I think they should have little concern for their ability to find an audience.

But I do have a few concerns. The first is that it feels little like they are making the mistake of targeting players of Games Workshop fantasy skirmish games, like WarCry and Age of Sigmar, when they should be looking for an audience among those playing Saga, A Song of Blades and Heroes, Dragon Rampant and even Dungeons & Dragons. The reason they gained any traction in the first place is because they were working within a market niche where GW had no power. It could be argued that, to continue to grow - as any successful company must - there is no alternative but to turn their eyes greedily upon the territory of the biggest gorilla in a very small room. But ours is a growing community and, even if most of the newcomers are snatched up by space marines and sigmarites, the non-GW miniatures wargaming community is also growing by proxy and Corvus Belli is well positioned to dominate it.

My other concern is that WarCrow simply isn’t… interesting enough. A few of the launch miniatures are now being seen in public and there’s no question that they are beautiful designs, but… are they really the radical re-imagining of a manga-inspired fantasy setting we were hoping for? What is going to set them apart from every other post-Tolkein world of dwarves and elves and goblins?

By way of contrast, I want to wind the clock back one more time. Because in 2006, the year after Infinity first launched, there was another miniatures game release out of an independent development studio in Spain, called Anima Tactics. Like Infinity, it had an aesthetic inspired by japanese animation and manga. But unlike Infinity, it was a fantasy game. Think Attack on Titan or Full Metal Alchemist, rather than Tank Police. The game was terrific. Players assembled teams of named characters based on a range of shifting alliances and loose alignments of interest, so you could easily mix and match different synergies. Teams themselves were only a handful of minis and play was quick, cinematic and decisive.

The main failure in Anima Tactics was miniatures design: they had a handful of absolutely brilliant sculpts, a large number of very mediocre sculpts, and a small selection of utter stinkers. They also had some issues with manufacturing and distribution. The game changed hands a couple of times, with different companies trying to get it the market reach it deserved, and it ended up with CMON, just as CMON was shifting away from minis games and into big box board games. CMON is the business formerly known as CoolMiniOrNot and I should probably talk about it in more detail in a future episode.

My hope for WarCrow was a setting as morally complex as the one in Anima Tactics, that bleeds into the game design and army building. My fear is that it’s just another game of elves and zombies. But, if we assume that CB isn’t pitching to the Age of Sigmar and WarCry audiences, then perhaps the decision makes more sense. After all, I’ve said repeatedly that companies like CB are miniatures companies that happen to make games. The game is only there to drive sales. So if you consider the enormous market for high-end tabletop miniatures in the Dungeons & Dragons world, where GW’s designs end up being too distinctly grimdark gothic and distinctive to easily slot into another IP, perhaps we should think of WarCrow as just a marketing vehicle to shift miniatures to a market hungry for high-end fantasy casts - a market whose needs aren’t being met by the relatively low-quality casts of Reaper’s Bones range and the dedicated D&D Nolzur’s range from WizKids.

And before anyone decides to jump down my throat on that, I happen to be a fan of minis from both of those companies - no hate. I’m just pointing out that Corvus Belli has a track record of extremely high quality casting and detail in white metal. And even Reaper’s white metal casting can’t touch them in that respect.

But let’s put aside for a moment the unavoidable reality that the game is only there to sell the minis and talk for a moment about games and Corvus Bellie’s history with game design. In short: it’s good.

Infinity has been through four editions but stayed true to the core principles of its design throughout. The ARO remains the seminal characteristic of the game and, whilst its application has been clarified and fine tuned over the editions it is essentially unchanged. And although fourth edition cleaned up what had become a bloated and over-complicated system in third edition it continues to be a game best described as “not for beginners”.

We saw a completely new mechanical system designed for Aristeia and, although Aristeia itself hasn’t been a runaway success, the system on which it was built was re-used in both Defiance and Tag Raid - and now a version of it is being tabled (pun absolutely intended) for WarCrow Adventures.

Very briefly, to give context, the core mechanic in what we might as well call the Aristeia system is dice based, using six-sided dice with custom faces. Now, normally I despise custom dice as a game mechanic but I have to concede that this one is super clever. There are three symbols used on each of the colours of dice: attack, defend and special. And each colour of dice has those symbols on it in different proportions but with the same distribution. When you try to perform a task, you roll a certain number of dice of different colours and have to get a minimum number of the relevant symbols to perform the actions.

What makes it great is that, because the colours of the dice relate to a specific distribution of the symbols, you can see at a glance that orange dice roll more attacks, blue dice roll more defends and yellow dice roll more specials. This makes those essential, split-second calculations easy and intuitive for the players. Things may not pan out in your favour, but you can at least have confidence that you rolled the right dice for what you wanted to do.

WarCrow Adventures uses the exact same system… except with 8-sided dice.

I could articulate why this annoys me so much, but there’s only so much time between now and the heat-death of the universe. Suffice to say that I see no reason why CB couldn’t have just used the same dice they had already trademarked. If I give them the benefit of the doubt, perhaps this is, in fact, a brave move taken because the d8 version of the mechanic definitely made play more interesting and balanced. But if I don’t, it’s a cynical attempt to make their most loyal customers - i.e. those who already bought Aristeia, Defiance or Tag Raid - buy into a game they could almost play for free given the assets that CB is already sharing online.

Probably, neither extreme is completely correct, but having been very much won over by the flexibility and mathematics of the original d6 version, shifting up to a d8 seems pointless. I remain open to correction.

Anyway, all of this brings us to the critical question of whether WarCrow Adventures and its big table follow-up, WarCrow, will be any good as games.

The three components of a successful commercial miniatures wargame are a strong aesthetic, married to a mechanical system that clearly evokes that aesthetic, supported by a large and evocative miniatures range.

My expectation is that, whilst I see the setting itself as a bit disappointing, I fully expect the play experience to evoke the aesthetic of a high fantasy world with a horror twist. Infinity’s success is built on a track record of quality - first in their miniatures design and manufacturing but also in game mechanics that don’t just work but speak to the very world in which their games are set.

The question will be whether Corvus Belli can make their miniatures sufficiently eye-catching to drive those sales and, I have to say, based on their initial releases, I’m not that optimistic. So far we’ve got:

Wood Elf Ranger

Dwarf Fighter

Human Cleric

High Elf Mage

And a roster of generic bad guys.

Maybe there’s great things to come. But a company like Corvus Belli knows how to lead with the good stuff. Look at their releases for Tag Raid! Right now, WarCrow feels like a half-baked concept riffing on ideas that have been riffed on ten thousand times before.

But does this mean that Corvus Belli is on the same path as that on which Privateer Press has found itself?

Well… I hope not. The company’s leadership has shown vision, restraint and good planning. They’ve established certain principles of quality in their development and manufacturing process that have paid dividends in longevity terms. But after the release of fourth edition and the gradual decline of interest in the community - which, again, is at least partly due to Games Workshop suddenly learning to be actually good at PR! - it feels like WarCrow was supposed to be a vehicle to rediscover some of the excitement and energy of the second edition and early third edition Infinity releases. But what I’ve seen so far of the game and the miniatures doesn’t fill me with confidence that this is going to get CB back in the spotlight.

And I think that would be a shame. Not only do I love their miniatures range and enjoy their games, even though I utterly stink at actually playing them, but I also have a lot of respect for the company’s leadership performance. I want to see more companies like Corvus Belli in the market, carving out a new space for tabletop wargaming that doesn’t involve anyone who lives in Nottingham.

I want to see mainstream games with truly innovative design.

I want to see miniatures manufactured in more sustainable materials using all-local labour in countries with good labour laws and fair wages.

I want to see more transparent leadership and dialogue with the community that recognizes and embraces the genius of independent developers.

Covrus Belli has done all of these things. I want more of it.

But, so far, WarCrow ain’t setting my heart aflame.

Before I go, can I just prompt you, first of all, to check out the Kickstarter I’m running myself to bring to market some original hard(ish) sci-fi miniatures in a style which is, if I do say so myself, pretty compatible with Infinity and inspired by Horizon Wars: Zero Dark.

Can I also ask you, seeing as you stuck around this long, to like this video and subscribe to the channel to get notifications when new videos are uploaded.

Finally, if you’d like to help make more videos like this happen and get some behind the scenes insight into what makes Precinct Omega tick, then please do consider supporting the Patreon campaign. Just follow the link in the comments or wait until the end of the outro.

I’ll speak to you all again… next time.