Mantic Activity

The chaps over at Mantic are being busy bees at the moment getting various things organised; the general sense I get from their plan is that there is an ongoing business model to emulate what their major market target was like fifteen or twenty years ago, before it became sole purveyor and power went to its' head, like an insane Bond villain.

Anyway, there is a strong hint of yet another version of Kings of War coming out later this year, a tweaked version of last years £5 rulebook, which I would imagine will contain basically similar rules, but with more armies and perhaps a hard back.  A new boxed set would be probable, though not new models.  You have to applaud their willingness to keep their rules under rapid development, whilst not simply using it as a method to grift customers for repeated editions, both previous editions are less than two years old and are available freely (and legally) at various points on the net.

Figures wise, they are dropping some of the smaller units, but not the models themselves, whilst the latest armies for KoW are being released in hybrid forms, like their Abyssal Dwarves were, or initially with metal only releases.



KoW Goblins in metal, pretty nice looking if you ask me.


Twilight Kin (Dark Elves)  Plastic/Metal hybrids

As to their other game - Warpath - their third army, which looks to be all plastic is about to see its first releases.  I have issues with the first two armies for this games, their being basically space Dwarves and space Orcs was frankly lazy, and I do hope they exercise more imagination in future than simply ripping off their competitors IP concept.  But the next force is at least stealing its ideas from different sources, so I'll give them 5 out of 10 for effort and hope they improve.

Coming up they are at a lot of shows and are organising an invitational KoW tourney at Maelstrom, which I may yet attend - undecided as yet, though KoW is a much nicer tournament game in my opinion.

One wonders if there is an ulterior financial motive behind their crazy sales prices, I remember GW only ever having one sale, back in about 1987-88 when they needed to raise enough cash for what at the time were staggeringly expensive plastic toolings.  Where might Mantic go in the next year?

I'll be interested to find out.