APOCALYPSE!
Ahem.
On Saturday, Games Workshop put its entire Apocalypse range up for preorder, including the Apocalypse box set, cards, data-scrolls, trays and the all-important army box sets. Some of these box sets offer outstanding value; the Tau vanguard set alone is an almost 50% saving compared to buying each part separately. We watched the website (and numerous third party seller websites) slow down (and in one case, crash) on Saturday morning, so we suspect that Apocalypse might end up being pretty huge. How much are you going to spend? Or have spent? We're trying not to think about it.
But it's not just Games Workshop; we had the general release of Malifaux Third edition from Wyrd games. This felt like a soft release; the rules and cards were made available for download, and purchase, but there are no major new miniature releases - yet. These seem to be hitting shelves around the 1st of August, and from what we've heard, it will usher in a slew of major releases over late summer and early autumn. Malifaux has always been a slow burner when released, becoming massive a few months after general release, so this should be fun to watch.
We also got an interesting video from SFG giving us a release schedule for their new resin Guild Ball miniatures, and some explanation about the production cycle and the future of the game. We appreciate this kind of openness, as it gives us all a chance to prepare our hobby (and finances) to be able to give releases enough time to get assembled and painted and used, without suddenly finding ourselves swamped with numerous releases that we want all at the same time.
Kickstarter offered some interesting things; Super Fantasy Brawl, by Mythic Games, is entering its final hours - a game that seems to have captured the attention of everyone who plays it. I do wonder if there's space for another card-focused, moba-inspired, hex-grid game at the moment, but I've heard good things, so it's definitely worth looking at.
There's also Middara: Unintentional Malum, which is an unashamedly anime-influenced game, that seems to include a huge wealth of components. This seems to be quietly amassing a huge fortune, so it's definitely one to keep an eye on. Particularly if you're a weeb like me. ;-)
Finally, we've got the latest kickstarter offering from Awaken Realms (who did the frankly phenomenal Nemesis boardgames); Etherfields. This is described as a dream-crawler, which is immediately awesome, and includes some of the most interesting miniature renders that we've seen for some time. We'll definitely look at getting our hands on this, as Nemesis is a favourite in the studios.
That's all we're covering for now; if we tried to comprehensively cover everything, we'd be here all week, and OnTableTop does much, much better job of that than us!
Until next week - try to avoid spending too much on Apocalypse!