Federation Commander

[midharana35]

SVC, et. al.,

Have you heard of Battleground Fantasy Warfare by Your Move Games?

The business model is to allow people who can't afford miniatures or who hate painting miniatures to have tabletop miniature battles. The cards also function as measuring devices for range and movement.

I love the idea of miniatures. I really am interested in a Call to Arms. However, I really can't afford to buy miniatures, and I detest assembling and painting miniatures.

If ADB were to produce a similar product, I'd be able to play a Call to Arms with them and use them for hex-free Fed Commander games.

The market for these would be your current customers (some new customers?) who cannot afford miniatures or just don't like the painting/assembling.

Honestly, ADB would probably have a little reduction in miniature sales but those would be the folks who are buying 1 or 2 miniatures every now and again. However, in addition to gaining sales from these cards, ADB would probably gain a lot of Call to Arms sales from the customers who haven't bought because they don't have minis. Games Workshop isn't losing money to Your Move Games, so I don't think this would be a money loser for ADB.

I suggest selling them in Empire Packs (Fed Pack, Klingon Pack, etc.).

I suggest making cards similar to Star Fleet Battle Force, but lose the weapon information and add 6 hazy "shield" lines so players can determine the shields hit. The back side could be half picture and half text about the ship.

It'd be a plus having marks along the long side of the card so players can use other cards not in play for measuring movement and range. Some explanation for using those hash marks to make a 60 degree turn would be very helpful. I'd assume range would be measured either from the center of both cards or the nearest edge of both cards. Cards with any overlap would be at range 0 and cards in contact would be range 1.

I think this would expand your Call to Arms and Armada customer base while giving your Fed Com and SFB customers who aren't buying miniatures a product to buy.

Happy New Year

[Steve Cole]

We already have die-cut counters which many players use instead of minis, even in tabletop hexless warfare. We had those years before we had minis. Being smaller (half inch or one inch, your choice in the spare parts department of the web store) they make it a little easier to play the game.

I doubt many would pay for larger print outs of the ships but if I became convinced that some number of people would do so they would be easy to print. I will drop the ACTA team a note and see what they think, but they're all minis model geeks. To use it with their system would take different arc/shield things than SFB/FC would need.
_________________
The Guy Who Designed Fed Commander

[Steve Cole]

Battleground Fantasy Warfare by Your Move Games is doing fancy playing cards with color images. Playing cards are out of the question (the minimum print run is 1000 times the size of the possible market). We can, in a few minutes, create PDF black and white images you could print and cut out. (Send me an email and I'll email you back a sample I whipped up.)

Color is another question entirely. What it boils down to is "do we already have color images on file?" which we do have for some ships in some empires but some empires we have no color art at all and other empires we have some of the ships but not all of them. In either case, without any kind of proven market there is no way for us to invest dollars or man-hours (which are the same thing) in creating color art just for this. If it exists, fine, but if we have to create it, the market for such a thing would have to be proven first. Doing color art for these things would delay other products by the exact amount of time it takes to do them, and we decide what to invest time and dollars in based on proven markets. And anyway, I am pretty much booked through July. I can whip up the B&W PDFs in a couple of minutes and I get a tiny bit of "play time" each week which could do those.

Tough as it is to understand or accept, some ideas just don't have enough demand to be worth doing. There are dozens of products we "could" do which would sell one or two copies. Expensive tests have proven that we cannot make money on posters or calendars, just to give one example.

From another direction, I really seriously want to own a particular pistol, but it hasn't been made since 1945, copies from back then costs thousands of dollars, and the company that made them (still in business) just laughed in my face when I asked them to produce new ones for the current pistol market. They said that their analysis of the market was that very few people would buy a new production copy of that pistol and it would not cover the cost of the tools and dies to produce it, so I don't get what I want either. That is just the realities of the world we live in.
_________________
The Guy Who Designed Fed Commander

[Scoutdad]