Precinct Omega Podcast - News #43 - "Starter" Sets

After discussing this with you guys not long ago, I thought I'd make the script for scripted episodes a Patreon-exclusive piece of content and post it at the same time as the episode. This also means that I'm going to stop making the podcasts public content via the Patreon (they'll still be available on Podbean and YouTube, of course).

Note that the script and what I actually say in the podcast may not always be the same thing. But it's close.

NEWS

New releases continue to come thick and fast from Wyrd Games for Malifaux 3e, causing me to wonder if the game is enjoying a resurgence somewhere I can’t see it, or if it never even went away. I particularly love the new Iconic Fate Deck, which looks so pretty that I’m tempted to buy one even though I don’t play Malifaux.

Westfalia Miniatures has previewed a new fantasy giant release, resin-cast and about six or seven inches tall, I’m guessing from the photos. This small company continues to add to its impressive fantasy range and although some pieces are fun riffs on pop culture figures they are still doing something new and interesting. These pieces show the continuing value of traditional sculpting over digital and are something to be seen.

Victrix has released a new plastic Norman infantry box that contains 60 minis for just £38, which is just an insanely good deal if you’re in the market for 28mm Normans.

And our friends at GCT Studios has announced that pre-orders are open for their new Bushido: Risen Sun two-player starter box with six minis, cards, tokens and rules for £38.00 - not quite the jaw-dropping bargain of Victrix, but for a game-in-a-box product it’s a decent offering. The box contains three minis each for the Prefecture of Ryu and Serpent Clan Ito but, interestingly, no dice, battle mat, terrain or measuring sticks.

Compare and contrast with the latest pre-order release from Corvus Belli for Infinity the Game: Operation Crimson Stone. This is not a cheap release. Clocking in at a full RRP of €119 - which is $140 or £100 pounds - this is a heavyweight release for CB. But for your money you get 14 miniatures - seven from each of the Ariadna and Nomads factions - a play-mat, some series printed cardstock terrain, dice, counters and measuring widget.

This week I’m going to take a look at the subject of getting started in a new game. What does it really cost and what should you look for before you decide to jump?

DISCUSSION

As usual, there’s an elephant in my wargaming room when it comes to my choice of topic, because I didn’t mention that recent days have also seen the arrival in stores of Age of Sigmar: Dominion, the new Warhammer AOS starter box, containing 60 plastic minis split between the Urruk Krule Boyz and the Stormcast Eternals.

I almost don’t want to talk about it because, as usual, bloody everyone is talking about it. But I will, at least, tip my hat to GW for again achieving a marketing coup with their pre-release plan. Whoever they have got sitting at the top of their marketing team is an honest-to-goodness genius at manipulating the community conversation to ensure it points due Lenton.

But screw them. I’ll talk about it. Because, despite appearances, not all starter boxes are equal and what might look like a good deal may, in fact, well… not be.

Let’s start where this week’s news began - with Malifaux. Because, if you wanted to get started from scratch with Malifaux, now, it’s surprisingly difficult. The core boxes are great little sets of minis, but they don’t contain any rules beyond the character cards for the minis in the box. If you want to get started in Malifaux, you’re going to need to make a minimum of four separate purchases: the core rules, a faction book, a fate deck and a core starter force. The core rules are $20, the faction book is $25, the fate deck is another $20 and then you get to the minis, which are $55 for a starter force. That’s $120 and you’ve got, probably, six minis. Odds are, your opponent is going to need to expend the exact same amount, although I suppose you could share a core rulebook. Being charitable, then, you’re getting started in Malifaux at a cost of $220.

Ouch?

So let’s look, instead, at Bushido. £38 is basically $50 and you’ve got everything you need, apart from dice which is a weird oversight.

Now, sure you don’t have any terrain or measuring sticks or a playing surface. And, yes, you’ve only got six minis. But the point about Bushido is that six minis is all you need to have an entertaining battle. Malifaux’s core boxes are built around the same idea that six minis is enough to have a good time.

Plus, when you get down to it, you’re going to build and paint six resin minis a lot quicker than the dozen plastics in your two Malifaux core boxes. Especially if those plastics are as fiddly to assemble as they used to be.

Which brings me to two interesting points surrounding getting started in a new miniatures wargame: content to table and time to table.

Bushido is what I call a low “content to table” game. It requires a very low investment of content to actually be able to play.  In simplest terms, you don’t need much stuff before you roll dice.

“Time to table” is a related idea. It asks the question of how much time is required between opening a box and starting the first battle.

The two ideas aren’t identical, because time to table includes the amount of time you have to spend learning the rules before you can play, as well as the time it takes to assemble your stuff. It’s easy to see at a glance if a game has low or high “content to table”. It’s a lot harder to work out, from that, what the “time to table” is going to be.

And that’s before we even tackle the question of whether a low content to battle or time to table is necessarily a good thing.

So I’ll tell you what, let’s put that to one side and look, instead, at Operation Crimson Stone.

And can I take a second to say how much I hate Corvus Belli’s naming conventions for these operations boxes? Yes, I also have the US government’s naming conventions for its public-eye military campaigns. DESERT STORM and ENDURING FREEDOM… just… ugh. Whenever a marketing focus group is involved in a plan to kill people I feel a particular kind of dirty just from general proximity… But my reservations about CB’s approach are less aesthetic and more, just, intelligence.

Do you know how hard it is to keep their different Operation boxes separate in my head? Operation Icestorm, Operation Kaldstrom, Operation Crimson Stone, Operation Red Veil… They just blur into an homogenous lump of… stuff in my memory. And maybe that doesn’t really affect anyone’s buying decisions, but it does annoy me.

But, that aside, their decision to include not only minis and rules but also counters, buildings, dice and a playmat are all geared towards reducing the “content to table” burden. Infinity, contrasted with Bushido or Malifaux, is a relatively high CTT game. As well as the minis - and seven is pretty much a minimum army size - you’re going to need a lot of counters, templates, cards, dice and a measuring device. And the game also demands a pretty dense selection of terrain. With a high CTT ratio, putting everything in the box is a smart call - it pushes the price up, but makes the process of getting to the table look a lot easier.

But, of course, Infinity is also played with white metal minis. Assembling these for battle is going to take a lot longer than either the resin Bushido minis or the plastic Malifaux ones. So Infinity is still struggling with a high TTT.

And then, Dominion. When it comes to a CTT score, AOS and 40K are right up there. These are games that demand and encourage large collections. Dominion has a lot of minis in it, but the reason for that is because the game literally can’t be played with fewer and still provide a decent experience. And GW knows this, which is why the minis in the Dominion box aren’t just plastic - they are push-fit plastic. By making each mini able to be assembled in seconds, they have dramatically reduced their TTT.

Which is why I find it curious that GW has chosen to exclude almost any other content from the  Dominion box. No dice, no tape measure, no terrain… The only thing in there besides the miniatures is a rulebook. And it’s a full rulebook - hardback and everything.

Operation Christmas Bone… sorry, Crimson Stone, only contains the Code One version of the Infinity rules - the stripped-down, simplified version with substantially fewer bells and whistles. GW has gone all-in on their AOS rules. Now, admittedly, the AOS rules are simpler by an order of magnitude than the full Infinity rules. But they still aren’t something a complete newcomer is going to absorb in a single sitting. And embedding them amid all the rest of the main rulebook’s content is an interesting decision - and I suspect it wasn’t one that GW made lightly.

You see, I don’t think GW really sees Dominion as a “starter box” in the same way that we might think they do. I think they see it more as a tool to win back people who are already engaged.

Dominion is a product aimed at people who already play 40k. Or who played Warhammer Fantasy but moved to other games when the Old World got blown up. It’s being pitched, too, I think, at people who maybe bought the first AOS boxed set but found its free-form concept too radical to grok.

Meanwhile, Infinity is also aimed at people who already play 40k. It’s use of white metal assumes a familiarity with the material, but everything else about it assumes that it is going to have to inoculate players against a lifetime of assumptions about how miniatures wargames work - which is what Code One is designed for: easing people who are already “into” miniatures wargaming over the learning curve of a system entirely different to anything they are likely to have played before.

And then there’s Malifaux.

I wish I could glean some kind of insight into how Malifaux is doing, financially. I’m afraid I find US federal government websites hard enough to navigate and state government websites are just a special kind of hell to me. So if any of my US listeners are in a position to send me any public documents relating to Wyrd Games business, revenue or funding, I’d be very welcome. Just reading into the company’s behaviour, my impression is that Wyrd Games is now exclusively pitching itself to people who already play Malifaux. There is no “two player starter set” in their catalogue because no one would buy it. Their desire is to keep those who are already invested, buying new releases.

This is a deeply risky tactic, because the community that isn’t growing is dying. I will freely admit that I have greatly exaggerated reports of Malifaux’s death. The game still has a strong and positive community and it’s doing better than almost any other in attracting 20- and 30-somethings into miniatures wargaming from loosely-related communities, like indy RPG fans, steampunk cosplayers and pirate metalheads.

<Pirate what?>

I don’t know. I’m told it’s a thing.

In any case, Malifaux is cheerfully doing its own thing and, if they can afford to keep releasing this many new plastic boxed sets, I kind of have to assume that they can afford it… somehow.

<It’s all that juicy pirate metal revenue>

Hey, look, apparently Malifaux is also doing really well appealing to more women and queer wargamers. I’m just saying that I think they’re doing something right. I just don’t know what it is.

Anyway, we need to talk about price.

You almost certainly know what a “loss leader” is already. But, if you don’t, it’s a product on which a company deliberately loses money or, at least, only breaks even in order to set a competitive price that draws customers towards making purchases that deliver a profit.

For Games Workshop, for years they have treated their two-player starter sets as loss leaders, or - at least - nearly loss leaders. Their core rulebooks, similarly, have often been priced only barely above the cost of sale. If you want to know what, just look at the many, many people simultaneously buying new minis and complaining about the cost of new minis. It’s the heroin dealer’s strategy: first time is free - or, at least, first time is cheap enough to feel like a bargain.

Now, I’m not going to question whether that does or doesn’t make sense, but I will say that it explains how GW can sell 60 minis for £125 and then sell one minis - Gardus Steelsoul, I’m looking at you - for £23.50. So you could buy five Gardus minis, or 60 other minis and a hardback rulebook for the same price.

Pretty much no one else in the industry can afford to do this. Every other starter box kit is priced to make a profit - typically of a minimum of 40% over the cost of sale.

Cost of sale, by the way, isn’t the same as “how much it costs to manufacture”. Cost of sale takes into account manufacturing, shipping, storage, handling, the work of the designers and every penny a company needs to spend to deliver a product to market. Cost of Sale numbers are why small businesses tend to rationalize their SKUs once they reach a certain size. It’s why GW’s bits service was wrapped up about ten years after it stopped being profitable.

40% over cost of sale leaves room for a manufacturer to offer bulk and retailer discounts at 20-30% and still turn a profit. So when you look at GW’s low, low price point for Dominion, remember that a huge chunk of their sales are going to actual sell at substantially less than that in order to get them onto retailer shelves.

But, at the same time, remember that GW has supermarket levels of influence over its independent retailers. Many small retailers can be persuaded to sell products like Dominion at cost because they know it will get customers through the door.

So when a company like GCT Studios pitches a “game in a box” product at a price like £38, you start to understand why it looks as it does.

Six resin minis and a book in a box is what we call an “achievable goal” for what amounts to a part-time business. A product of that scale is modest enough that they can be sure to keep up with manufacturing demand, create enough stock to fulfill pre-orders and enough surplus to get it onto retail shelves at a price margin that can still be competitive, but still make a profit.

Which one, though, should you buy? Which of these boxes is “the best deal”?

Well, from my perspective, it’s GCT Studios.

You see, when I’m looking to buy into a new game, I don’t really care about the CTT. What I want is the shortest possible TTT. Also, I’m a hobbyist and a painter, but I’m really, really slow. I don’t have a huge amount of time to paint minis that are just for me and, when I do, I want them to look as awesome as I can manage. Consequently, the fact that the Bushido box “only” contains six minis is a huge bonus to me. Six minis is a completely achievable target. And they also happen to look bloody awesome. I’d prefer white metal to resin, but resin is still fine. With the Bushido box, I reckon I could read through the rules and the character cards and grok how the game works and how the minis synergize in about the same amount of time as it would take me to get the minis in the box painted. And that’s just perfect. That it’s also under £40 is just a bonus.

For the record, though, I won’t be buying Risen Sun. Why not? Because I have absolutely no time in which to be messing around with yet another game on top of the ones I already play… unless someone felt moved to send me a free review copy, of course.

So before I descend into full-on shilling…

<Too late>

...I’ll get to the other two companies I mentioned: Victrix and Westfalia. Now, I mainly picked them out because they’ve got cool-looking mini releases and no associated game. I’ve recently heard that the casting quality that folks are getting from Westfalia is a bit disappointing - and that they are casting in resin which… is a shame, imo. Their designs still rock. I think they’d do better in white metal. Just saying.

The point being, of course, that the other way to get started quickly with any game, at a relatively low cost, is to just collect minis you enjoy. Buy them, build them, paint them… then put them away and wait for a game that would suit them to cross your path: ideally one that’s miniatures agnostic.

Which, obviously enough, brings me to Precinct Omega.

PRECINCT OMEGA

I love the idea of a game in a box from Precinct Omega. I’m certainly not going to say it could never happen. A Cringle Loan... I mean, Crimson Stone-type boxed set with a team of customizable heroes and a small Red Force, along with rules and terrain and counters… I think that would be a commercial dream come true if I had the capital and marketing resources to make that into a thing.

But for the foreseeable future, that’s not how Precinct Omega does stuff.

I’ve tried to reduce the CTT ratio for my games as far as I reasonably can. That’s why I use a normal deck of playing cards, and why, in Infinite Dark, I tried to write rules that would accommodate any size and shape of base. Technically, you might want a good number of counters in my games, if you want to play competitively. But you’d be surprised, I think, how much you can do with just a few pennies in any Horizon Wars game.

The d12 is the main addition to CTT that obstructs some folks from enjoying my games, but I refuse to be sorry about that. The d12 is absolutely crucial to how the Horizon Wars mechanics function. Without it, the game would be a structurally worse experience.

I like to think that TTT for Horizon Wars games is almost as low as it could be. At every step in the design process I have tried to come up with the most creative, positive ways to reduce TTT that I can and that’s going to continue to be how I write games.

Before I wrap up, I just want to talk about a final, key difference between CTT and TTT.

The process of gathering and creating content before the table ought to be fun. From assembling and painting your minis, to writing your army lists, to setting up the terrain… the interaction between the players and their content is supposed to be engaging. So increasing CTT isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as long as players can get there eventually.

You can see this in Five Parsecs From Home. There’s a very high CTT ratio in that game. But the content is part of the game - creating your crew and their backstory and working out where your ship is and what you have to do in each mission is fun.

Meanwhile, just trying to find all the stuff you need to get playing isn’t fun. If you have to have exactly five dice in five different colours, each with a different number of sides, that’s dull admin - Polyversal, I’m looking at you. That doesn’t mean you can’t do this. But if you do do this, you have to make it as easy for the player as possible. You have to practically place the correctly-sized and -coloured dice into their hands… as Collins Epic Wargaming did with their Kickstarter backers. And as Star Breach does with its custom dice sets.

But, trickiest of all, not everyone will have the same experience of content. What is content for some players is needless admin for others. So your experience of a game’s CTT ratio as opposed to its TTT ratio might be quite different to someone else’s.

NEXT WEEK

We’ll be back on the subject of design next week. I am, by the way, on holiday as you listen to this and, if all goes to plan, I’ll be on holiday next week as well. But I’ve pre-recorded this episode and next week’s. I say this simply because, if anything world-shattering happens in miniatures wargaming in the next two weeks and I don’t refer to it, well... that’s why.

My conversation with Gav Thorpe, last week, has had me thinking about emergent properties.

It’s one of those subjects I never get tired of, so you can expect the conversation to touch up some philosophical, political, social and technological areas along with good old miniatures wargaming. But it will be mostly miniatures wargaming, as we talk simply about how mechanics can be leveraged to create outcomes greater than the sum of their parts - and even outcomes entirely unanticipated by the designers themselves.

So I hope you’ll join me when I talk to you again… next week.