Precinct Omega Podcast - News #48 - Sci-fi Skirmishes

EDIT: I forgot to include the script for patrons who don't have time to listen to the podcast or who don't like podcasts. Added now, at the end.

Deadzone 3rd edition appears, as if from nowhere! What's going on and is this genius or a horrible misstep by Mantic?

Meanwhile, other microenterprises are releasing cool stuff!

Killwager from Enemy Spotted Studios is on Kickstarter, whilst Eisenfront has released its first 2-player starter boxed set.

What does all of this mean for Precinct Omega? Well, it looks like I'm putting out a new game, myself, which you'll find available on Wargame Vault. Patrons should look for their discount codes, coming soon! But it also reflects back on the fact that I'm going to have to take a slightly different approach for a while and that will mean putting my tie back on and hitting the office for some short-term HR contracts.

The podcast isn't going anywhere, though, so watch this space for more!

SCRIPT FOLLOWS!

Mantic Games has dropped Deadzone 3rd Edition hot on the heels of GW’s own gothic sci-fi skirmish game, Kill Team. Deadzone is available now with a 2-player starter box from £90 - compare and contrast with Kill Team’s £125.

Enemy Spotted Studios has launched a Kickstarter for their game Killwager. It’s a hard sci-fi, near future skirmish game and if you’ve not seen it, I’ve done a review of some of their 3D printed minis. They’ve already comfortably broken through their funding target with three weeks still to run.

Centrefire Hobbies has released an ambitious boxed set for their Eisenfront mecha combat game. It’s $100, but for that money you get four 1/100 scale resin mechs, four cardboard buildings, dice, cards and core rules. Centrefire is a one-person business a lot like Precinct Omega, so I’m impressed with what he’s achieved and am watching with interest.

Remember how I mentioned that Freebooter’s Fate was still alive, a couple of weeks ago? Well, it seems like maybe there’s more booty in that there leaky ship than even I had anticipated, because they have another new release in the form of a spooky spectral pirate captain: perfect for Halloween! And perfect, also, for Blood & A Black Flag!

What’s this?

Blood & A Black Flag is a new swashbuckling skirmish game from Precinct Omega Publishing and, by the time you hear this, it should be available on Wargame Vault for the extremely competitive price of just £5.00. So grab a brace of pistols and strap on your cutlass, because we’re off in search of treasure!

<Yo ho ho>

DISCUSSION

Now, before I get back to Blood & A Black Flag, let’s talk about the other releases that the last couple of weeks have seen.

There’s been a lot of new stuff out, by the way, that I’ve not mentioned but which I definitely could have. New releases from Scibor Miniatures; Westfalia running a Kickstarter to release their awesome fantasy Star Wars range as STLs; TTCombat doing an online-only special gang for Carnevale…

But let’s start with the number one news item, which is the arrival of Deadzone 3rd Edition.

Now, maybe I don’t keep my ear as close to the ground as I thought I did because I did not see this one coming. Deadzone is a game I’ve mentioned before as a design I admire and which I’d like to play but which didn’t quite make the cut in my plans for 2021 and 2022. And despite paying attention to Mantic, I had no clue that they were about to drop a third edition of the game, right on the heels of GW’s Kill Team.

Whatever you think about Ronnie Renton, the guy has some testiculos. But it’s also pretty genius. Lots of people are going to be thinking about skirmish gaming again, thanks to Kill Team. And if the early reviews are anything to go by, a lot of people are going to take it for a spin and find that Kill Team is… surprisingly dull. As GW’s studio’s bid to get their games recognized for being innovative and cutting-edge, Kill Team has been a bit of a flop - whilst, without question, also being a commercial smash.

Kill Team is the box office sell-out that’s still rating at 30% on Rotten Tomatoes.

Given the lack of visible build up to the Deadzone release - which is very unlike Mantic if you look at their pre-release hype for Armada and Overdrive - I am going to guess that they decided to pull forward their release precisely because Kill Team caught them by surprise. It’s not impossible that I just missed the hype somehow, but if I missed the hype, when I am actively staying up to date with new releases on a daily basis, then it wasn’t very good hype.

So regardless, is it a good idea to push out a sci-fi skirmish game at the same time as the big market competition?

On the one hand, you can kind of benefit from the hype being paid for by your competition, by being seen in comparison and alongside it. On the other, it can cast your product in a poor light when your competitor has super-fancy CGI animated mini-movies to promote their game and you… don’t. Kill Team also represented the first appearance in plastic of the iconic Death Korps, whilst Deadzone contains… no new minis at all. It does contain new street scenery and, don’t get me wrong, I do love me some sci-fi scatter terrain and I’ll probably but the scenery pack alone. But new scatter terrain hardly matches up to brand new HIPS minis.

So what about the quality of gameplay?

Well, I’ve not played either game yet, but I got to watch a game of Kill Team in progress the other day and I wasn’t impressed. Deadzone, meanwhile, still has Jake Thornton’s outstanding cube system for movement, which creates a far more narrative and cinematic tabletop experience even if it does require a specially-marked mat for play.

If I’d know a new £90 boxed set for Deadzone was on its way, might that have influenced my decision about my games for the next 12 months? Yes, it probably would. And I’m definitely more interested in buying that than I am the Octarius boxed set for Kill Team. But whether the move to counterpoint the two releases will pay off for Mantic remains to be seen.

So let’s talk about Killwager and Eisenfront.

I’ve been following the development of both of these games with interest and, to be honest, a little jealousy over the last couple of years. The folks behind them are really very talented artists and 3D sculptors and if they weren’t both based in the US I would certainly have thrown more money at them than I currently have.

Eisenfront is a one-man passion project. Sean Suchanya’s business started with 3D printed scale accessories for 1/12 and 1/24 collectible action figures. But on the side, he’s been quietly developing a range of 3D sculpted, resin cast 1/100 scale mechs - which is close enough to 15mm as makes no difference. What makes them particularly interesting is that they are designed around the use of soft plastic connectors for joints which make them astonishingly poseable for their kind of design.

A PDF of the core rules is available as a free download and I’ve had a good look through the rules. It’s essentially an action point system, with different skill levels of pilots giving the player more action points with which to activate their mech and do stuff during a turn. The rules… are not terribly clear in many places and Sean should have employed a proofreader as I spotted several egregious typos just on a casual read-through. But if you wanted to put the time in and maybe look for an FAQ or get some answers from Sean himself, I certainly see this being an entertaining game with shades of Titanfall.

Killwager, meanwhile, is more of a team effort, I believe. The Kickstarter is being run by someone called “Head Goon” rather than being clearly associated with Enemy Spotted Studios, although the Enemy Spotted website prominently mentions Killwager as being their work. So I’m guessing that there’s a distinction between the designer of the minis and the designer of the game.

However, there’s a pretty good - albeit lo-tech - introduction to the game’s mechanics on the KS and it’s definitely an interesting concept with shades of Infinity and other games. At its core is a simple mechanic of “roll 4+ on a d10”, but you get degrees of success for every 3 points by which you exceed that target, with various skill and situational modifiers to your roll.

What Killwager and Eisenfront have in common is being an independently-developed skirmish wargame with a supporting miniatures line.

Of the two, I would be inclined to bet more on Killwager turning into a commercial success in the long term, but both games are worth checking out.

And talking about worth checking out, let’s talk about Blood & A Black Flag.

<Arrr, Jim Lad.>

PRECINCT OMEGA

If you follow the podcast regularly, you’ll be aware that I’ve been struggling with the direction of the business in recent weeks and, if I’m honest, for a few months, now.

This all kind of came to a head in a 48-second livestream that was supposed to be an hour long in which I had a small emotional breakdown.

<There. There.>

I’m fine, really. My troubles are professional, rather than personal, which means they are firmly within my power to address and one of the ways I’ve decided to address them is to release a completely new game. Well, kind of a completely new game. It’s completely new to most people.

I wrote and released Skrapyard about ten years ago and, in doing so, came face to face with the scale of the task I had inadvertently set myself and gave up. But it’s been languishing in my slush pile since then, as I’ve learned and developed and grown stronger. And I’ve always been conscious that, although I made a lot of mistakes and bad assumptions about the business when I started, it was still - at its core - a good game.

So a couple of weeks ago I dusted it off, stripped out the things that I thought weren’t good - which wasn’t much - and patched it back together in a new form. And that form is Blood & A Black Flag.

I want to be clear, by the way: this game is pitched as a pirate-themed game, but it is very much a precursor to Horizon Wars and, as such, it is super generic. There’s almost no setting or context in which you couldn’t play it. You could play it with Ancient Greeks or Romans. You could play it with Napoleonics. You could play it as post-apocalyptic. You could switch up the scale entirely and play it with mechs.

I’m not going to say that this was directly intentional. In some ways I would’ve liked to have made it a little more thematic, if I’m honest. But I also wanted to honour its origins and I wanted to release a new game as quickly as possible and you can waste a lot of time navel-gazing when what people want is just a new way to roll dice and play toy soldiers.

I do have plans to expand the options for Blood & A Black Flag into more specific directions, but if you like your games flexible enough to skirmish with anything from shortbows to railguns, you should enjoy Blood & A Black Flag.

I have several other games I hope to give more attention to over the next few months which will all serve to give me a bit of a creative break from Horizon Wars, put some new products up for sale on WGV without the pressure of high production values, art and photography, and showcase some of my design breadth as much as depth.

However, the other thing that I’m going to be doing is take three months to do some less… wargame-y stuff. It looks like I’m getting back on the HR horse to do some contract work. Depending on how this pans out, this might mean I have to go to a fortnightly podcast rather than weekly for a little while, although I’ll try not to. Alternatively, it might mean fewer scripted episodes like this one and more... extemporaneous stuff, which could be interesting.

But projects like Killwager and Eisenfront are really inspiring to people like me. They are projects developed to a high level of production values by people who believe in their visions and who think they have something new to offer the world of miniatures wargaming. They have skills or resources I don’t, of course, but I look at entrepreneurs in this business whom I know well, like Jamie Tranter, Annie Norman or Chris Nicholls, and I can see that whilst I can admire the things they can do that I can’t, I also have skills and resources that they lack.

Going back to an HR contract isn’t something I should see as a failure. It’s an opportunity to leverage my skills and experience in a creative way that will, ultimately, help keep Precinct Omega moving forwards.

PROGNOSTICATIONS

I don’t know whether I’ll be talking to you again next week or the week after. At time of recording, I’m yet to hear back about a contract.

But when you do hear from me again, I’m going to talk about 3D printing.

I’ve recently heard a surprising number of people talking about how 3D printing “isn’t a problem” for Games Workshop and isn’t going to have a significant impact on the industry. And they are wrong.

I’ll try to explain why… next week.

Or, possibly, the week after.