Horses

I'm 8 rough riders away from completing my Tallarn army. Here's an excellent article on painting horses.

Of course, when I say "complete" I refer to having enough to play, not the almost instant changes that will happen when the army hits the table. Plus I still have those Forge World models coming, which means I'm painting at least one more squad.

Resistance is Futile

Battlefront Miniatures and Alliance Game Distributors are proud to announce that they are partnering to bring the award winning Flames of War®: The World War II Miniatures Game to independent hobby stores in North America and US Territories.

Painting a Tallarn

Since I'll be finishing painting individual guardsmen in the next couple of days, I wanted to document how I'm doing it for my own records. It might be interesting for others to read. Heck, you might find a step I could skip. Anyway, here's how I'm doing it for future reference:

1. White primer. I've tried black and white is much easier. In the end they look the same, but with 50% more effort with black.
   
2. Brushes: Sable 10-0 for detail and #2 for base coating. Two of each so one can dry while the other is in use. Clean brushes with Tamiya acrylic paint thinner X-20A.
   
3. Basecoat 1: Mechrite Red.
4. Basecoat 2: Khemri Brown. Note that I stopped using a second coat of Graveyard Earth since the wash made it the same color as Khemri Brown.
5. Details: Codex gray for canteens and base coat of knives.
6. Chainmail for all metallics. Boltgun metal was too dark. A base of Boltgun metal with chainmail over it made no difference once the wash was applied.
7. After details are applied, go over reds with Terracotta. The blochy effect is fine, plus the Terracotta coat fixes a lot of mistakes.
   
8. Skull white for head scarves. Bleached bone makes a nice drybrush afterwards but is hardly worth the effort.
9. Add special detail spot colors for goggles, meltaguns, scopes, etc.
   
10. Wash: Devlan Mud. Avoid those special detail areas.
    
11. Basing: Base coat of Mechrite Red with two coats of Terracotta.
12. Apply PVA glue to base with grunge brush. I've noticed the PVA glue has a better viscosity than Elmers white glue. Base with mix of Woodland Scenics iron ore ballast, half fine, half regular.
13. Varnish.

I'm missing some finishing steps, such as highlights. I'm open to suggestions.

Voila!

Tallarn Weekend

I've spent most of the 4th of July weekend painting my 40K Tallarns. I've got about half a dozen left before I'm done. Then I've got 8 rough riders and the army is complete. I'm breaking up the painting by watching movies on the laptop and reading Commissar Cain novels by Sandy Mitchell. So far these are the only 40K novels I've enjoyed.

I just finished watching Lawrence of Arabia. It's especially interesting because it's basically about European powers attempting to drive out the Turks and extend their colonial empires in the Middle East. One of the minor characters is an American reporter who talks about how Americans are against empire and for the struggle for all peoples to be free. It's kind of ironic to hear that now. Then again, the movie came out in 1962, ten years after the US engineering of the coup against the Shah of Iran, a government elected democratically. Those who track such things consider that event to be the beginning of American empire building. Anyway, great movie with an excellent soundtrack.

Game Industry Logistics

"About fifty percent of the human race is middle men and they don't take kindly to being eliminated." Malcolm Reynolds

I finally got a working copy of Visio on the laptop so I wanted to give it a test drive. While thinking about the Days of Wonder change, it reminded me that I had no idea how the game industry worked before I started learning about it to open a store. Most of the rancor nowadays is about how the system works, or should work. As a customer, you want you stuff, which is understandable. How you get it is debated endlessly. If you were curious how it got to you, here's how it works:

The most direct route to your hands is from the publisher (pink lines). The publisher cuts out all the middlemen, you order directly from them to your door, and happiness is maximized. Most retailers have no problem with this, provided the publisher maintains their own MSRP on the item. When they discount to the customer at the expense of the retailer, there is trouble.

Without going direct to the customer, some publishers cut out the distribution tier and sell directly to the retailer (green lines). Retailers are usually happy with this, provided the game is popular enough to warrant special orders and the margins are good. Ironically, most companies who ship direct to retailers, reduce the discount to retailers, a kind of double dipping, since they charge more to the retailer compared to distribution while cutting out the distribution costs. Games Workshop is a prime example of this (they use every method).

Most publishers sell through distribution (red lines). Distributors estimate orders based on retailer pre-orders, place orders with publishers, and publishers send product. Wash, rinse, repeat. It can be an infuriating process, due mostly to lack of retailer pre-orders, the occasionally retarded distribution purchaser, and the tendency of distributors to be slow in paying their bills. It's the driving force that makes many publishers look for alternate avenues to get their product to market.

If distributors don't want your small quantity of product, you can go with a consolidator (blue lines). Say a distributor wants only 5 of your product, which is probably not worth the effort, but you think it's still worthy of selling through the distribution chain. A consolidator will charge you a percentage to "rep" your product and efficiently ship it to the distributors. Distributors now get a big shipment of 20 different things instead of 20 shipments of a small number of items. Everyone is happy. Folks like Goodman Games use consolidators to get their product to market.

Most companies use two or more methods. Some swear off one method or another. For example, Wizards of the Coast sells direct to retailers and through distribution, but they don't sell direct to customers. Games Workshop sells direct to customers, direct to stores, and through distribution. A company like Days of Wonder sells direct to customers and through distribution, but hopes to maximize the value of the distribution tier by focusing on one distributor. Rather than shipping their product to ten distributors and waiting and wondering, the advantage of one distributor is lots of feedback and information and the ability to identify and market to retailers who have their product. In exchange, they pass some savings onto the retailer, to assuage their concerns and hopefully have a more predictable revenue stream.

There are other options, like "flooring" or making one distributor the "master" distributor. For example, say I'm sitting at home and come up with an idea for a cool widget. I have some guy in China make me a prototype and then find a factory there to get it made, also paying a quality control company to ensure it's properly manufactured. Now I've got 10,000 widgets. Where do I put them, my garage? Heck no. I "floor" the product with a distributor using a flooring agreement. Product is shipped directly from the factory in China to the distributor. They take an additional percentage for warehousing my goods and shipping them around to other distributors. I could even have them fulfill my Internet online orders, shipping directly from the distributor. Everyone is a middle-man and you can do amazing things if you're willing to share the wealth.

Ticket to the Death Star

Days of Wonder signed an exclusive deal with the biggest game distributor this week, Alliance. All of their products will be distributed by Alliance in the future. These are the good folks who brought us Ticket to Ride, Memoir 44, Battlelore, and many others. To put the deal in perspective, Alliance is a small division of Diamond, the comic book distributor. They're the de-factor comic distributor because they've got an exclusive deal to distribute Marvel, which is close to half of the comics market. It would be as if Alliance signed a deal to solely distribute all Games Workshop and Wizards of the Coast products. All other distributors would become niche suppliers and all game stores would become their 1 hit point minions.

The DOW deal is a sizable blow to smaller game distributors. We use Alliance as a secondary distributor, but mostly because we get amazingly good service from a smaller distributor, ACD. Alliance, ironically, is a more technically up-to-date, cutting edge distributor, but this is an industry where ordering on the phone and personal relationships are more important. My point of sale machine can do electronic purchase orders, something that Diamond is rolling out by the way, but most game stores create their orders on the back of napkins or off a log of what they sold the previous week.

The decision to go exclusively with Alliance shouldn't have an effect on how we stock Days of Wonder products in the store, but there could be more out-of-stocks as we wait for a big enough Alliance order. DOW games are heavy, and we need to hit a high order level to get that industry free freight.

The game trade claimed the sky was falling when WizKids signed an exclusive deal, but look at them now. WizKids laid off half their staff, put games on hiatus and haven't had a successful product launch since. It's not exactly a recipe for success. Exclusive distribution appears to me to be a last ditch effort to consolidate and improve efficiency. That's just my impression, if things are as bad as these companies are claiming.

The last thing I want to see is a Diamond monopoly in games. Alliance is fairly easy to work with and has a lot of bright people, but in a monopoly environment, I'm sure you'll see service slip. Competition is a great motivator for innovation and improvement, and you can see it clearly in the small game industry, as each distributor tries to outdo the other. Diamond on the other hand is an automated behemoth that could care less whether I live or die, provided I pay my bills on time. I stopped carrying comics not because I couldn't sell comics, but because Diamond wasn't worth the trouble for such a small part of my business. I would wish for the game distribution tier to implode in a Death Star like twinkling of lights before I see an industry monopoly. The toy industry does just fine with direct sales and toy reps who represent multiple companies.

Five Editions

The latest White Dwarf has a history of 40K. It's an interesting article worth reading. For me it explains why the game doesn't have a hold on my imagination, having been published the year after I left high school. It's not a game of my childhood, like it is for so many people I know. It's a game that emerged the moment I began exploring my adult life, the editions marking my beginning of college (1987), grad school (1993), career in IT (1998) and starting the game store (2004). Dungeons & Dragons stuck with me, and mostly 1st edition, which I started playing as a 12 year old. I stuck with that edition, playing sporadically in my adult life, until the twilight of 2nd edition, when I got back into it seriously with Planescape.

D&D is on a path of revisions every 8-9 years, with 3.5 being a blunder which gets pasted over in WOTC marketing materials and will likely be admitted to one day with more time and perspective. Omitting 3.5 would put D&D back on the 8-9 year release cycle, and would have inspired a lot more good will towards 4th.

40K revisions are a bit quicker at 5-6 years. In the White Dwarf article, I found it interesting that customers were disappointed with previous edition codexes because of their small page count. Future editions, we're promised, will be beefier. It sounds like a D&D supplement strategy to me. Bigger books, preferably hardcover, with an obviously higher sticker price.

Both games have accelerated their pace in the last decade. Both are among the handful of game companies that are publicly traded corporations, WOTC being owned by Hasbro. Both companies are under the gun to increase profits in the short term. When you run a corporation, the primary goal, which you can be fired for for not completing or even criminally prosecuted for not executing properly, is maximizing shareholder value. Everything you do is aimed at that bottom line, more so than other businesses.

Is that bad if you're a customer? It might feel like a betrayal if you're under the misguided impression that these companies exist to enhance your fantasy life, rather than maximizing shareholder value. The main thing to remember about hobby games, is that they can only exist if customers are actively engaged in the hobby; buying, building, playing. I can tell you that D&D sales flagged over the last two years, as the writers mined the depth so what was possible with the game. 40K sales are dependent almost entirely on new releases, which are always just a tad better than previous releases (or else they tend to do poorly). Like any product you consume, decide your level of engagement and proceed.

Date	D&D	40K
1978	1st Edition	-
1979	-	-
1980	-	-
1981	-	-
1982	-	-
1983	-	-
1984	-	-
1985	-	-
1986	-	-
1987	-	1st Edition
1988	-	-
1989	2nd Edition	-
1990	-	-
1991	-	-
1992	-	-
1993	-	2nd Edition
1994	-	-
1995	-	-
1996	-	-
1997	-	-
1998	-	3rd Edition
1999	-	-
2000	3rd Edition	-
2001	-	-
2002	-	-
2003	3.5 Edition	-
2004	-	4th Edition
2005	-	-
2006	-	-
2007	-	-
2008	4th Edition	5th Edition