HeroScape is coming back!

[GromBloodboy]

Originally Posted by Nukatha

Miniature Market has the unpainted sets for $88 (AoA), $32(Wellspring) and $35 (jungle). Are prices just made up?

Just like some of the character bios....

[wriggz]

Like hasbro taking on less risk with licensing to renegade, getting game stores to buy more product to sell at a better price takes the pressure off renegade for unsold product.

Also flgs are likely all the advertising to new folks you are going to get. Renegade is not paying for Google ads for skirmish game keywords.

If you want to sell product you do it through distribution. This is all standard business stuff.

[Alexandros]

Originally Posted by Nukatha

Miniature Market has the unpainted sets for $88 (AoA), $32(Wellspring) and $35 (jungle). Are prices just made up?

Unsure what you mean by made up, here- once a retailer buys a product from a distributor, they are generally not under any obligation to adhere to the MSRP unless that distributor has rules stating otherwise. So, yeah, I guess MSRP (manufacturer's suggested retail price) is "made up" in the sense that the manufacturer suggests it, but for board games they usually set it up so that cost is around 50-60% of MSRP.

So a distributor may charge a store- I don't know- ~$70 USD per master set. The store can charge whatever it likes. Usually these stores like Game Nerdz, Miniature Market etc all move a lot of product, so they are comfortable making smaller margins. Your local game store probably can't move as many copies, so they're going to want to charge closer to that $125 USD MSRP.

[wriggz]

Yeah my flgs is amoung largest boardgame outlet in Ontario - likely Canada. They are selling the AoA at 114 Canadian. For comparison I would pay 169 CAD plus shipping to get it from renegade.

[Just_a_Bill]

Originally Posted by IAmBatman

The pirates (abilities, sculpts) are a bit of an all over the place mismash

Originally Posted by Lord Pyre

Fia Bonny is definitely a miss of a design for me.

My dislike for Bok-Bur-Na is growing, for several reasons. Of course there's the unintentionally comical pants business, and I can't figure out why a bladed weapon needs to be hosed into a Marro's body like a Drudge pistol. Worse, the folks who made the artwork and the ones who painted the figure don't seem to know that the recessed areas on a Marro's body (where the wash would collect) are red, not black.

It also bugs me that they're screwing with the canon by taking a name ending in -NA, which should be a Hivelord, and making it a Captain instead. Now maybe they could have patched that with some well-crafted lore, but what we've seen so far paints the picture that they seem uninterested in, or maybe incapable of, making the bios actually good. Instead of a real Heroscape Marro, we're being offered a squishy, egalitarian (what?) Captain Crybaby in little-boy pants who -- literally -- misses his family oh so terribly. He's so sadly sad that he feels like he wants revenge on Utgar, but he's such a wuss that his gameplay doesn't do anything about that; it just makes him yet another loyal servant following his general, wielding the general's special cutlass and proudly marching under Ornak's flag. I'm not sure what was the point of even making him a member of Heroscape's coolest proprietary species if he doesn't have an actual Marro class so he can synergize with the others.

Is there nobody on the team that knows what the heck a Marro is? It feels like maybe somebody was trying to toss us a bone so we can't complain about there being none of this species in the reboot, but it really just changes the concern to "no real Marro." Getting a fake one in the reboot is actually worse than none. At least all the design elements are consistent that this is a Marro in name only. So many things are wrong that it will be easy to headcanon it away. Sadly one of the figures I should've been most excited about in this release had the opposite effect. No real Marro, no real Pirates, just awkward jumbles. Hey, but a fried Twinkie hotdog counts as an entrée AND dessert, right? We should rejoice!

Even the goofy way the Product Producer pronounced his name in that Youtube video -- "Bock Burna" -- tells the same story that this character was just not worth anyone's time to get the details right. The human-sounding name made me wonder what his human-sounding job would be. "Thanks for that shocking report, Linda! And now with the weather, here's meteorologist Bock Burna. Bock...?"

[Lord Pyre]

I've never cared much for the story in HS, but does feel weird that there's a marro pirate. I thought they all were a hive like bees or whatever.

But regardless, the marro pirate is a pretty cool card at least. That's most important.

[Master Roshi]

Originally Posted by Just_a_Bill

My dislike for Bok-Bur-Na is growing, for several reasons. Of course there's the unintentionally comical pants business, and I can't figure out why a bladed weapon needs to be hosed into a Marro's body like a Drudge pistol. Worse, the folks who made the artwork and the ones who painted the figure don't seem to know that the recessed areas on a Marro's body (where the wash would collect) are red, not black.

It also bugs me that they're screwing with the canon by taking a name ending in -NA, which should be a Hivelord, and making it a Captain instead. Now maybe they could have patched that with some well-crafted lore, but what we've seen so far paints the picture that they seem uninterested in, or maybe incapable of, making the bios actually good. Instead of a real Heroscape Marro, we're being offered a squishy, egalitarian (what?) Captain Crybaby in little-boy pants who -- literally -- misses his family oh so terribly. He's so sadly sad that he feels like he wants revenge on Utgar, but he's such a wuss that his gameplay doesn't do anything about that; it just makes him yet another loyal servant following his general, wielding the general's special cutlass and proudly marching under Ornak's flag. I'm not sure what was the point of even making him a member of Heroscape's coolest proprietary species if he doesn't have an actual Marro class so he can synergize with the others.

Is there nobody on the team that knows what the heck a Marro is? It feels like maybe somebody was trying to toss us a bone so we can't complain about there being none of this species in the reboot, but it really just changes the concern to "no real Marro." Getting a fake one in the reboot is actually worse than none. At least all the design elements are consistent that this is a Marro in name only. So many things are wrong that it will be easy to headcanon it away. Sadly one of the figures I should've been most excited about in this release had the opposite effect. No real Marro, no real Pirates, just awkward jumbles. Hey, but a fried Twinkie hotdog counts as an entrée AND dessert, right? We should rejoice!

Even the goofy way the Product Producer pronounced his name in that Youtube video -- "Bock Burna" -- tells the same story that this character was just not worth anyone's time to get the details right. The human-sounding name made me wonder what his human-sounding job would be. "Thanks for that shocking report, Linda! And now with the weather, here's meteorologist Bock Burna. Bock...?"

I think that the pirates should be their own faction, instead of being assigned to various generals. By introducing factions that formed on Valhalla outside of the generals then we can get some more interesting additions to the lore, i.e. these factions wouldn't have access to a wellspring.
Another faction could be a marro swarm that formed on Valhalla that doesn't follow Utgar

[Nukatha]

Originally Posted by Just_a_Bill

It also bugs me that they're screwing with the canon by taking a name ending in -NA, which should be a Hivelord, and making it a Captain instead.

I get 'Captain' Jack Sparrow vibes from the -Na name.

Davy Jones: Yew have a debt to pay. Ye've been Captain of the Black Pearl fer thirteen years. That was our agreement!Jack: Technically, I was only captain for two years, then I was viciously mutinied upon.Davy Jones: Then ye were a poor captain, but a captain nonetheless! Have ye not introduced yerself all these years as Captain Jack Sparrow?

I expect -Na is not his given name.

[chas]

What do you call a Marro Hivelord who sings Doo-Wop?



Sha-Na-Na.

[Just_a_Bill]

Sorry, in all my lunatic rantings I forget to mention a new terminology issue introduced by meteorologist Bock Burna, since he synergizes with Captains. Those who use C3V and/or Marvel units in their games will have to debate the pros and cons of whether Capt. John Varan and/or Captain America are or are not Captains. (And possibly Ranjoro, with his Captain of the Guard ability.)

I would expect Renegade to not want to make a ruling on this since those units are not canon to them, but a ruling will be needed nonetheless. I suspect the eventual consensus ruling would be that the design intent was probably that you have to have Captain as your class or you aren't a captain. As adults we can understand how some rules are just logically backwards for gameplay reasons, but it sucks to have to tell a kid who knows his favorite figure is a captain that, sorry, he really isn't a captain in this game.

All of which brings up whether or not it was wise to use "captain" as a higher denomination of "pirate" in the first place. Certainly if the game continued indefinitely there would eventually be some more new captains that are not pirates. (For several years I've had a custom Captain and two Corporals that are Vydar Soulborgs -- arguably the faction whose established classes already laid claim to the army ranks a long time ago.) So from my perspective this was a design mistake. They all could have just been Pirates, and if you really, really needed to have a higher rank of pirate so you could exclude the deck-swabbers from some boss-pirate effect then it should have been something else not already overlapping established game mechanics, like Commodore. (Or even just "Unique Pirate Hero" might've been a sufficient callout in boss-pirate abilities, if commons and squads are also on the way. This certainly has worked for other factions.)

Anyway, game designers need to be careful not to create future problems for themselves, and in this case it's hard for me to envision how having two pirate Classes would really be necessary.

Originally Posted by chas

What do you call a Marro Hivelord who sings Do-Wop?

Sha-Na-Na.

Ooh ooh, is he a double hivelord? Take my money!

[Lord Pyre]

Yeah classes are classes. If something does a synergy callout for a class, you don't assume its going to look at a name.

[boromir96]

Originally Posted by Just_a_Bill

Sorry, in all my lunatic rantings I forget to mention a new terminology issue introduced by meteorologist Bock Burna, since he synergizes with Captains. Those who use C3V and/or Marvel units in their games will have to debate the pros and cons of whether Capt. John Varan and/or Captain America are or are not Captains. (And possibly Ranjoro, with his Captain of the Guard ability.)

I would expect Renegade to not want to make a ruling on this since those units are not canon to them, but a ruling will be needed nonetheless. I suspect the eventual consensus ruling would be that the design intent was probably that you have to have Captain as your class or you aren't a captain. As adults we can understand how some rules are just logically backwards for gameplay reasons, but it sucks to have to tell a kid who knows his favorite figure is a captain that, sorry, he really isn't a captain in this game.

All of which brings up whether or not it was wise to use "captain" as a higher denomination of "pirate" in the first place. Certainly if the game continued indefinitely there would eventually be some more new captains that are not pirates. (For several years I've had a custom Captain and two Corporals that are Vydar Soulborgs -- arguably the faction whose established classes already laid claim to the army ranks a long time ago.) So from my perspective this was a design mistake. They all could have just been Pirates, and if you really, really needed to have a higher rank of pirate so you could exclude the deck-swabbers from some boss-pirate effect then it should have been something else not already overlapping established game mechanics, like Commodore. (Or even just "Unique Hero Pirate" might've been a sufficient callout in boss-pirate abilities, if commons and squads are also on the way. This certainly has worked for other factions.)

Anyway, game designers need to be careful not to create future problems for themselves, and in this case it's hard for me to envision how having two pirate Classes would really be necessary.

Ooh ooh, is he a double hivelord? Take my money!

FWIW this already exists with the Death Knights. They do not receive Knight synergies, as their class is not “Knights”. The ruling is already in place.