I’m sure I can think of a few things myself. Thanks for the offer though. :-)

I don’t know, the way I look at it is their packaging is oversized and very involved and expensive to make. The first AT-43 box, well, I’ve never seen anything like it in my 12 years in the hobby. Regular Chinese made packaging is just more efficiently sized and uses ties.

Apart from the waste of resources which is inherently wrong in this day and age, I’d say the actual cost of the Rackham packaging is a very significant portion of the overall price point, and I just want the miniatures and rules, and I want them for less. Why pay good money for garbage?

And this is the age of the internet. I can look at pictures online. I don’t need to be able to see each wart through a 180 degree plastic display panel.

So I guess I still agree with your original points.

Holy journalistic integrity TGN!
More proof that a website can be professionally run by non-professionals.

It is honesty like this that makes me impressed with the TTG

As for the packaging, from a designers point of view, the size of the box is not going to be that great of a factor of the cost. The full color print has a bigger impact then the size of the box.

The way it looks to me is the size of the box is there to make the product stand out, and is intended for larger chain stores that have tons of product and shelf space.

I still don’t think that the packaging is the best idea and I doubt if the game will really work as a mass market item.

My FLGS is going to have the same issues shelving the product as penn mentions.

So not an optimal solution but not the environmental apocalypse that I was making it out to be :-)

As a person who has just purchased the AT-43 starter set, I kind of understand them needing to show off the prepaints. Also, the map poster thingy is pretty big and if they had to fold it up more than it already is, that’d be a problem as well. So the big box doesn’t bother me that much. What is the packaging like for the other squads and attachment boxes?

I hardly see this as an endorsement. It’s just being fair. When you have a gripe about something make sure it’s fair. If you find out that your gripe was not warranted the only fair thing to do is to retract it.

Just because you apologize for an unfair criticism of a product doesn’t mean you now endorse it.

Just because you apologize for an unfair criticism of a product doesn’t mean you now endorse it.

I understand that. I’m just extremely wary about somethings. And I don’ t think that Zac’s criticism, thus far, has been unfair. Regardless, I just had a very Something’s Rotten in Denmark moment, there. It has passed.

I’d like to see a review of the game, also. The demo I played did not particularly impress me. I wonder if an investment to bring my force into playable territory would be something worthwhile.

Just so long as you’re not a CAoR convert.

Still have to play the game so I can’t make a comment one way or another.

To get the full effect you really need to play the full game. The first 5 missions in the rule book really takes the player by the hand and introduces them to basic war gaming concepts.

I’m gonna write up a quick summary of the game in my blog later today for anyone interested.

Kudos to Zac for correcting himself. It’s the sort of thing we think professionals should do, but they seldom actually do without legal threats to persuade them (and then only on page 47 under an advert for pile ointment).

Rackham said all your miniatures would be playable, and they were (generally) right. They neglected to mention that most players would need to buy more to form legal units. Now Zac can generally muddle by cos he’s a lead magpie, like me. However, I also imagine that he still has plenty of models which are useless oddments and are either unplayable or need many new friends to be usable.

I’ve played CAoR, not lots, but enough to know it’s not something I want to play again. It’s not that the game is awful or broken, it’s just not the skirmish game I liked. If I want to play a mass battle game (which is what CAoR is) then I’ll play Warhammer or whatever. I already have armies for that. It is the change is type of game that upset me (and my gaming group), not the rules per se. Just because it uses the same background doesn’t mean it’s the same game. What do you think would happen if this next edition of 40k turned out to be Necromunda. Or Epic.

I played Confrontation because I liked the detail and the nitty-gritty of the tactical decisions of whether to put a dice in attack or defence, for example. It made a welcome change of pace to other games I play. Taking all that away and forcing me to play Ragnarok is, IMO, rude, foolish and treats myself and other customers like mindless cash cows. I will be intrigued to see if Rackham survive their current financial troubles. All I can say is that the amount of money I expect to spend with them this year will be very much smaller than in 2007.

Props to you for this, Zac. I also bought a lot of the remaining metal miniatures in the hope I’d be able to field a force in AoR. This wasn’t the case (Though I think I can field some minimum units of Thallions etc).

I’d be very interested to see your list since I’m unsure what would make a solid Griffin list. I bought a wide selection of Griffin stuff and a bunch of characters.

As others have said, well done Zac for correcting your editorial. And also for coming back to a discussion on the game. I’ve been surprised at the silence since CAoR came out before Christmas.

The packaging issue certainly has environmental/ recycling impact, but it also seems, as already commented, to be part of a business case. My impression is that Rackham have tried to follow the same approach with CAoR as AT43.

Now that makes sense for a new product. You will interest enough new and old gamers to make that first purchase. But that’s not the case with CAoR.

As Zac, me, and obviously many others have done, we’ve all been trying to work out if we can play with what we’ve already got. My project for today is rebasing my Griffin and Wolfen on to round bases and then to play a game with the downloaded rules. So we’re not out there buying the starter set and sitting down to play.

On the positive side, Rackham have been great in providing web material to keep players of the previous incarnations interested. That’s fine in the long term because some of us may continue to play.

But in the short term and bearing in mind Rackham’s financial situation, it makes me wonder just how many of the starter sets have been sold. I suspect older players like me with metal collections are waiting for the seperate sale of individual bits and pieces to see if we like them and if they fit in with our collections. So who buys the starter set?

With Battlefield and ST Evo looking to have bitten the dust, Rackham are at the forefront of the pre-painted for wargaming experiment. Having provided me and many others with some great products for over the last ten years, I hope this change in direction won’t be too much of a business challenge.

I’m not slamming them, but that doesn’t mean that, comparatively speaking, their packaging is not remarkably OTT. And I’m not slamming you either ;-) but I have to say that the volume of the boxes, in the big picture, has more environmental implications then you would allow. For example, it certainly takes a greater amount of container space, and therefore more fuel, insurance and other transportation costs to ship this product here from China then if it had been more efficiently packaged. And you can look at it pragmatically or in an idealistic sense. Pragmatically speaking, those extra costs are absolutely being passed onto us. Ideally, it uses too much resources.

Of course at some point environmental issues will be seen as matters of life and death for our species. When that happens we won’t have as much time to push lead.

This leaves aside the exploitation of Chinese labour and the ruination of that huge country to meet the insatiable demands of the first world consumer market for toys etc., or the fact that almost 20% of world oil consumption is used by merchant marine vessels, yadda, yadda….

Where I applaud your retraction of the fact you needed to purchase more figures to field an army - I am not certain your off base with your original thoughts on the packaging issue.

Where I would prefer that the packaging be recyclable, the actual size of the package and it’s contents matter more to me as a merchant. If I have a package that is 100% recyclable but 3″ tall, 3″ deep and 9″ wide just to display 6 figures - it’s too darn big. I’m guessing the dimensions from the pictures shown. I don’t know the real ones.

And if the package _looks_ empty becuase of the wasted interior volume and bad color choice, it’s grand I can turn it into new paper somewhere else… but chances are for the $25 or $30 my customers are going to have to pay for it they will feel cheated and not buy it to begin with.

Where the current AT43 packaging is a little wasteful, I can live with it because the product is well display within the package. The Templars box set is so badly designed from a display and value perception angle I can’t believe it. If that is the final packaging for the product I will be forced to analyze the actual sales that CAoR has had for me so far (small) the amount of space they want to take up on my wall and shelves (big) and only order in the bare minimum at a time and encourage folks to order ahead for it or just outright leave a catalog by the voluminous starter box and ask folks to order from that.

It was two teams of two guys running across the board at each other and then hacking each other to pieces.

Well that doesn’t sound like much fun and appears to leave out a heck of a lot of the game

The big box attitude is superficially in keeping with Fantasy Flight products, except that Fantasy Flight fills theirs to the brim with goodies.

I’m not certain what your Wolfen are made of, but the ones we got had flexible spears over 1/8″ thick. The Griffin spears are thin, but if they snap with a casual press of the box… how are they gong to hold up during game play ???

The Starter box is big. That’s fine. The Templar box shown is too large, has a bad choice of interior color (the templars get lost with the off white back blending into their white robes) and is far too tall. Overall it gives a very bad impression of what might be fine product. The same cannot be said of the starter box because you can see that there is more behind it including a terrain piece, rulebook and playmat.

If the templars box was half as thin (or thinner) it might not feel so empty. And subsequently worth the monies ($25-$30) that they will be asking for the 6 figures. Right now - I think it will be hard to sell because of the large quantity of Chinese air folks will be buying contained in that packaging. Never mind the shelving issues. :-(

Adding to the above points (particularly Keirof’s), recycling is a bit of a red herring - it ain’t the panacea to guilt-free consumption it’s made out to be. It’s very energy intensive and introduces some exceedingly hazardous chemicals into the eco-system.

Reduction at the front end, in packaging, is pretty much the only answer - but big companies just don’t care so customers need to vote with their $,£ etc to force them - so, in this respect, you were right all along Zac.