Widower’s Wood Coming To Kickstarter From Privateer Press In February
January 20, 2016 by stvitusdancern
Privateer Press has been in our news briefs quite a bit lately and for good reason. They keep the momentum going with a new announcement for a new board game coming to Kickstarter in February. The game is called Widower's Wood and it is a board game based on the Iron Kingdoms (of course!) and it has an interesting twist.
The story behind this game is that a big and nasty and particularly evil witch doctor and his crew of all kinds of nasty creatures are looking to take over the swamps by awakening a very bad, bad monster.
"In the dark wilderness of the Iron Kingdoms, an ancient evil stirs. Backed by an army of sinister creatures and terrible beasts, a merciless witch doctor plots to awaken a long-forgotten terror. Should he succeed, countless swamp-dwelling tribes will face a fate worse than death. Now a group of unlikely companions, each a monster in its own right, offers the only hope for the inhabitants of Widower's Wood."
To stop him there is an assembly of monsters (the players) who band together for the common good and try and thwart the witch doctor. The game will be for between two to four players where each hero will face off against some of the deadliest monsters in Immoren.
Inside the box you get...
- Campaign Guide with 7 Linked Adventures
- 43 Plastic Figures
- 4 Hero Character Sheets
- 202 Cards
- 202 Tokens and Markers
- 8 Dice
- 16 Map Tiles
- Game Board
- Villain Reference Sheet
- Rulebook
Interestingly it looks like you'll have to embrace some of your monstrous wild side in order to survive. The world of Hordes is all the more exciting for its strange animals and interesting factions and the role-playing game went down a storm. Hopefully this will do the same.
If you haven't already guessed, this is reportedly going to be fully compatible with their other board game, The Undercity to expand your playing options even more. The campaign is supposed to launch February 16th, 2016.But, why a Kickstarter?
With Privateer Press looking to grow their boardgame line they thought that Kickstarter would be the ideal place for exposure to other gamers that might not normally look at their games. It also helps them with capital to produce a top notch game. So keep an eye out for it and check back here on Beasts of War regularly for updates and news.
What do you think of this game?
"...a big and nasty and particularly evil witch doctor and his crew of all kinds of nasty creatures are looking to take over the swamps"
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A Farrow with punch daggers? Sold!
Huh? PP is a big company, seems odd that they would use kickstarter… Developing a boardgame should no hassle for then.
I agree that is odd that pp are doing this but if gw or forge world did s Kickstarter for Necromunda which had stretch goals of gangs, outcasts, bounty hunters, extra scenery, etc I would be all over it.
It’s not like there are other companies that have more money than pp not going onto ks to get things rolling.
I feel the same. A well established company using kickstarter just seems wrong to me. I have the same opinion with Mantic continually doing it and CMoN as well.
Yeah, I don´t get it either… They don´t need KS
Are they really? I’ve no idea of their turnover but I can’t think it’s in the multimillions to risk launching a whole new game and then see it fail. Kickstarter is handy for smaller companies. It helps not only bring product to market, but to understand if there’s demand. Kickstarter fails, no demand. Kickstarter succeeds and you’ve paid for the game. Anything else is profit. We forget just how expensive production is. It would be very nice – hint hint – if friendly games companies such as Hawk game us an idea of the costs involved of bringing, say Dropzone… Read more »
Looks cool, just don’t see the point of established companies with access to traditional funding routes doing a kickstarter, other than to have a me2 marketing exercise going on, still i dare say it would take less than two hours to hit the goal…
Especially if they put a ridiculously low goal on it like Mantic does.
Maybe they lost money on previous projects and this is making them play their cards close to their chest.
I didn’t really hear anyone give out about Hawk or Corvus Belli, or Wyrd with their kickstarters. Granted they are smaller companies, but it seems like a double standard.
Will we all be giving out about Privateer Press in ten years if they are a bigger name in the gaming industry, purely because they are big?
It might be a double standard- but then again, it might just be different opinions. In many of the kickstarters I’ve followed, people in the comments have talked about the decline of Games Workshop, and suggested that it was because they aren’t taking part in Kickstarters. Personally, I think that the large companies taking part in Kickstarter legitimizes the platform for smaller companies. It also raises expectations for some audiences (and ultimately, people who already have fans and years of experience will be funded better than newcomers). Now, as to why Privateer Press would use the platform? Probably to reach… Read more »
I imagine this is more like a case like Onyx Path Publishing and their books – the product will be released, but the KS helps establish interest and the final level of content for the product. I doubt failure to fund would stop production, just scale it back.
I understand why people would find it strange when an established company uses KS. But still, wouldn’t a KS give the company the very same benefits it gives smaller companies? No bank loan with interest, a gauge of player interest and so on? If so, then why not go via KS?
For me i see it more cynically, KS is great for startups and unproven ideas. But strikes me as a bit crass for established companies with vibrant IP’s who turn a profit to want to sidestep the way business is done. Its iron kingdoms it would sell, there are enough warmahoardes players globally that even if 2% of them bought the board game because they love the setting that it would be a success. For me having established companies using KS undermines its purpose, as every pledge they get could have gone to someone else’s project, i see KS as… Read more »
Would it though? With 2% of a player base of say, 200,000? You’ve got to recoup the cost of investment but also judge the time lost on your main product line. This is why Workshop stopped Fantasy: it was too expensive against the real jewel of 40K.
Kickstarter is for any creative product from any company at any stage up to and including pre-production. Whilst they have marketed themselves as a good way for start-ups to get going, they do not aim to be solely for this. Crowdfunding is just one way of raising capital. Nor is it the case that people would pledge on a smaller project of the larger ones weren’t there. That rests on an erroneous zero-sum assumption. Kickstarters own research has shown that many people pledge on their first KS to a large project. Some will go on to pledge on smaller projects… Read more »
@redben true, but i guess i expect companies to be self sufficient once the training wheels are off so to speak, and asking the general public to fund things especially when not everyone understands that its an investment not a purchase doesn’t sit well with me. Its an issue i have with crowd funding as a whole, especially when a company like PP should have no difficulty obtaining funding via loans or venture capital. If its purely a market research thing then there are also better ways of doing that, and my original point of dressing a pre-order up as… Read more »
You’re again imposing a personal moralistic view of what crowdfunding should be which has neither a basis in the reality of Kickstarter nor is helpful to smaller companies who also use KS. Crowdfunding is not a special form of acquiring capital. It is one route amongst many and any responsible business should always choose the one that suits a given project best.
@redben indeed i am, i guess im traditional in the sense that i feel for larger companies i.e. > 10 employee’s with more than one product in the market place that crowdfunding is the least professional way to go about obtaining funding, in this case i suspect the funding is not an issue and this is purely a marketing excercise dressed up in a community group hug of “we made this happen”. As for responsibility how is it in PP’s interest to pay KS a percentage of funds pledged when they could add a few SKU’s to there web store… Read more »
@nakchak- Privateer Press clearly feel that they are gaining something with Kickstarter that is worth paying the percentage.
Sure, they could just do it via their webstore- that would reach their existing audience of Warmachine and Hordes players.
However, there is a Kickstarter audience that is not already part of their audience, and the webstore platform would never reach those people- and they clearly think that it is worth the KS fees to reach that audience.
They’ve always been trying to make products for non-fans (ie their aliens and their gobber games). This is one more experiment in that direction.
I was really excited about this until I saw it was going through Kickstarter.
I find Kickstarter excellent for small companies to get projects made but for larger companies it really is getting to be an excuse to put out a sub-par product and to disappoint backers with sloppy timescales.
If all they need is a pre-order system to see how many copies to print, they could easily just run it through their existing store. Kickstarter for larger companies is simply a marketing gimmick and a crutch for poor project management.
what @redben and @odinsgrandson said. Again and again we see the assumption that Kickstarter is “for the small and startups” and not for bigger companies. Kickstarter is first and foremost an incredibly powerful marketing tool for those creators who understand how to use it, Any and all cries of “they could have just funded it themselves and released it in their webstore or their usual channels” simply have not grasped the point of such an exercise from PP. Yes they could have released this game in the normal way. but this is about reaching new customers, and getting their IP… Read more »
The last 2 Kickstarters I have backed (ok one was on Lanzanos) have had problems. Mantic’s Dungeon Saga – The Adventurer’s companion really is a sub-par product filled with errors. Some of the miniatures are crap quality sculpts / casts comparable (and in some cases worse, especially in the quality of the plastic) to the ones from the original Heroquest game which was made over 25 years ago. .. which leads me neatly on to… Gamezone’s Heroquest Classic – Still no sign of this one. Was supposed to be released for the 25th anniversary in December 2014. Now over a… Read more »
It is interesting to see them use KS and I have come to have no gripes with it no matter the company. Even if GW chose to use KS or any other big name company. It is an avenue that has many challenges and benefits at the same time. So see nothing wrong with the likes of CMON using this as a tool.
Heck, from what I see in the numbers, many people like profesional big name companies using KS for one reason or another they fly past the goal and hit astronomical heights.
I have mixed feelings about this. PP could possibly be taking away $100 pledges from other projects who have no choice but to go to KS but on the other hand, they may drive more people to KS, broadening the reach of the other available project, thereby helping them.
Either way, it will certainly be an interesting campaign to keep an eye on.
I don’t get all the moaning about ‘big’ companies using Kickstarter. If you don’t like the risks involved, or if you’ve had negative experiences with kickstarters, then don’t back them. But why complain why companies continue to use it? It’s obvious: it works. If done well, it allows companies to reach new audiences, test the market, build a market, fund improvements and long term expansions that might otherwise never have happened, reduces the risk to the company, etc., etc. And it’s not like most of the companies in our industry could really, honestly be described as big. So CMON, Mantic,… Read more »