Mantic Games Begin Previews For Kings Of War: Vanguard
October 17, 2017 by brennon
Mantic Games have recently shared some artwork from a new project of theirs, Kings Of War: Vanguard. Take a look at this large art piece they popped on social media not long ago...
Launching on Kickstarter soon, Vanguard is a skirmish level tabletop game set within the world of Mantica that you've come to know over the past few years. Vanguard follows those who go ahead of the main fighting force for a larger army, scouting the enemy position and maybe harrying their advance to give their comrades the upper hand.
The forces will feature some of the most stalwart and resilient of warriors like this lady here from the Sisterhood.
The game is going to be scenario based and follows these various scouting forces as they look to waylay the enemy, assassinate important figures and more. It will be fun to see how the models come out for this game as the artwork certainly shows off some impressive Basileans and daemonic creatures.
Are you interested in Vanguard?
"Vanguard follows those who go ahead of the main fighting force for a larger army, scouting the enemy position and maybe harrying their advance to give their comrades the upper hand..."
Supported by (Turn Off)
Supported by (Turn Off)
Supported by (Turn Off)
I really like the concept behind this one
I m looking forward to see what they do with this. the fact that they are trying to link it to the larger game shoews promise. I am slightly concerned that I have started to regiment base most of my KoW minis however, might need a change of tactics.
They said the Vanguard minis are supposed to be useable with your KoW army. With square bases and as character models and such.
very small factions required, 5-10 minis so I can live with it, it’s not a massive expenditure in the grand scheme of things.
Good to know the size @avernos as it is I an modelling 16 troops out of 20 on a regiment base…. so I can snaffle my 4 spares if I need individual minis.
This might really be something. Interesting take on a skirmish level fantasy wargame. The vanguard troops as the hardiest and most able badasses in their force going on special operations of all sorts.
I like that they will focus on scenarios, give options to tie this to full fledged KoW battles and present a levelling system, too
Also, seems we can see some Nightstalker things…
When they time announcements like this around GW releases it gives one the impression they’re determined to never come out of Big Brother’s shadow.
GW releases something every week except christmas, I don’t think Mantic can wait and release everything once in december.
I think he means specifically around the release of Shadespire / Necromunda.
I think this is coincidence. I really don’t see how hiding in GW’s Shadow is what Mantic would deliberately be trying to do and I think they’re have moved a long way from their beginnings as a supplier of cheap GW alternatives. I also don’t think Vanguard is a direct competitor to any of this week’s GW releases
great cover art.
Don’t quite get why this needs to be a kickstarter, concept could be good and flesh out the world. Feels that Mantic need to move beyond ks particularly for small projects like this one.
They probably want it to become a big project! And that needs money and the best possible marketing. KS delivers that.
it’s not a small project per se, as far as I’m aware they’re planning on using this to jump start the Night Stalkers and to flesh out the Basilean range. I’m sure they have plans beyond that.
They need to totally redo the Basilean range. Some well dodgy sculpts in there
They need to totally redo a few of their lines. Elves spring to mind.
If a 5-10 man skirmish is not a small project I am not sure what is, However, if this is a expand KoW by a different means that is different.
I do think that beyond financing there are reasons to step away from the kick starters as well, in terms of lfgs relations and more steady income. However, it maybe they can’t escape the ks trap.
It’s not the number of miniatures used in the game that determines how big a project is, it’s the amount of product being produced. If they release only the rules on the back of this Kickstarter I will be amazed. I reckon they’re going to release quite a lot of new KoW miniatures as well which will make this a much bigger project. The Vanguard Rules are just a vehicle to drive the Kickstarter.
I have also not struggled to obtain Kings of War products in my local gaming store. Deadzone and Warpath are very hard to get (and the store has said they’re actually getting quite hard to source) but Kings of War and Dungeon Saga are relatively easy to get.
That’s surprising, my local store has been getting lots of the existing deadzone range and the new warpath related models, whereas I know mantic had been out of stock of dungeon saga for a while (they just got a new production run in).
Just different local demands i suppose.
Probably, but the fact that we can both get Mantic products from our flgs kind of says that Mantic are supporting flgs’
We’ve recently seen a couple of games companies go to the wall. I don’t think we can make assumptions about anyone but the biggest players’ cashflow.
Making no assumptions on that front, but ks didn’t save Spartan. I am not sure that bulk sales, massively discounted sales is a great sustainability model. I know CMON and other are doing very well with it but my gut in boardgames are a different beast in business terms.
Mantic seem to be doing quite well out of it as well, this will be their 15th Kickstarter campaign and they’re pretty good at delivering them.
I suspect if they wanted to release just a rule book they could do so without Kickstarter. However I suspect they are using Vanguard as a gateway to launching a sizeable number of new kits which they can only do via Kickstarter. If you look at the rate at which they develop and release models outside of the Kickstarter process it’s not particularly frequent. I think that really shows you what is and is not within Mantic’s means. They can drip feed kits over time but on order to rapidly expand the range they need to go to Kickstarter. I… Read more »
This is going to Kick Starter? Does anything from Mantic these days not go threw KS? Even though from what I have seen with Mantic’s record on KS is rather good in the fulfilling pledges, I over the years have become rather sower towards KS and other crowd funding sites.
When KS is a keystone in your business model always I wonder how stable the company is. It’s just my feelings about it, nothing personal against them.
Things wot Mantic have released this year that didn’t go through Kickstarter:
New Undead Wyrm/Dragon
Dwarf Steel Behemoth
Fire Elementals
Edge of the Abyss campaign book
Edge of the Abyss special character miniatures
Edge of the Abyss Dungeon Saga Campaign
There may be others. There’s no real problem with using Kickstarter as part of your business model. Like anything else it needs to be managed properly but if it is then for small companies like Mantic it can be very useful indeed.
KIckstarter is still a useful model for devolving new games lines. Mini wargaming is a niche market within a niche market. Without Kickstarter, Mantic would probably have to release a small starter box and slowly build out the rest of the product line. With Kickstarter they should be able to do figures and rules for all their factions and so will have a much bigger and better launch when it finally comes out.
Mantic… a poor mans Warhammer.
Not a Fan.
Given that Warhammer is no more, surely it’s now every man’s Warhammer
I hope that Sisterhood figure, when translated into a mini, doesn’t look like it’s wearing hockey gloves. Never know with Mantic: really hit or miss.
i hope the abyssal dwarfs get their own characters. Would be great if a vanguard could be ‘Just a character on a flying beast). It’s the perfect thing to send ahead of an army, and if they had to fight a group of warriors, that would be cool. It lands to scout out an area, and gets jumped by some rangers and other warriors. I can only hope.