Designing the Impossible! - A Perfect 40K Intro Box

foreign [Music] ER podcast episode 54. on today's episode we're going to figure out which is going to give out first my knees or Eric's back I hate the fact that it's likely my back we're having a wonderful week here we lubricated our minds before recording this and are ready to come up with the ultimate idea so buckle in and get ready for the perfect intro box that we're going to make exist sounds good so the perfect intro box that's like combat patrols right so okay let's let's roll it back for the audience and so you have to catch them up on the conversation here and what we've been spitballing for the last couple hours yeah so this morning I had a pair of people come in and replace my water heater because being an adult is terrible in doing so one of them looked at my Warhammer models in the basement that were not finished being painted and we're not going to talk about that and he was like oh you play Warhammer I play Magic but I never got into Warhammer because my playgroup thinks the barrier to entry is too high he didn't say it like that because he's not a game designer nerd also he was just like randomly talking and not trying to give a dissertation but that's what I got out of what we had a discussion about and I mean I think that's come up a decent amount of time so we've talked about like the barrier to entries fairly large but comparing to Magic the the extended version of you know how much you want to keep spending doesn't have to be quite as much yeah it's something we've talked about on several episodes I'm sure we're going to bring up a hundred times in the future is with magic the Gathering you can walk in a Target pay forty dollars buy an EDH deck you can now play Magic the Gathering yeah like it's not going to be optimal if you're not going to tournaments and winning with it but you have it it's a deck that you could actually play and if you play with people that got similar other decks it'll be really fun there's no equivalent to this in Warhammer so let's talk about our current entries into Warhammer you've got the recruit edition of the starter set which has five easy to build assault intercessors a lieutenant 10 easy to build necron Warriors the Royal Warden and three scaras because they're on the sprue it comes with cardboard matte to lay it all on I don't even think it's cardboard in that version I believe it's like a fold out like instruction manual map yeah and paper rulers and 10 dice okay you can upgrade them to a hundred dollars to get a couple more units into the box then you can upgrade to a hundred and eighty five dollars and get the same box as the 100 Elite Edition but you get some pipes and two buildings to act as terrain that's a that's a rough starting point and these are like the best way to get people in yeah kinda I mean like there also are the combat patrols and stuff like that but like let's not even get into that these are going to be pieces of gray plastic on Spruce yeah they're not gonna look like the ad that's on the cover here where it shows all the painted models that are done heavy metal style and yeah that is one of the problems where it's like okay I spent 150 or whatever it is and I don't have a finished product like I have to go buy Clippers I have to go buy glue a paintbrush paint again it's not that undoable like that it really isn't but it's where we get the high barrier to entry and now previous to like two three weeks ago whenever it was there was a secondary problem of even if you pay all that you're paying for what is essentially a fourth of what most people consider to be a full game mode right like you get maybe 500 points out of like the biggest box and I'm not gonna do the math to figure out it's 200 points but you get maybe 500 points out of that box for each of the people yeah and most people will get Warhammer 40K now as a 2K point game is like that's where things are balanced around that's the expectation I mean I do think that 1500s are really fun games I am of the mind that a thousand point games are faster and play better and have more reward for good decision making than 2k games do the problem is they're swinging and the game rules are designed for 2 000 points which makes a thousand point games a little iffy yeah but the point is it's something that a new player will find out full games are 2 000 points and then do the math on how much money they're gonna have to spend to get there and feel like this game is impossibly expensive to get into yeah this is where probably 80 of people drop out like just at finding that out when they're looking at getting in boom they're gone yeah and again it makes sense it's that initial sticker shock emotional no way am I spending that much money to get into this whereas you and I both know as magic players yeah boy is Warhammer cheap I was like I've spent way more money on magic cards than Warhammer I have spent more money on a magic card than Warhammer armies those duels are expensive yeah and even if up with like standard yeah or modern a modern deck costs more than like 3 000 points of most armies yeah or four thousand points of most armies now that I'm looking God modern decks are expensive right now oh my God what no okay I mean oh my God yeah I haven't looked at prices in a while magic cards have always just gone up so like um but off topic let's get back to Warhammer he brought the idea that magic has the intro EDH deck it's a full deck you can play it there really isn't something for Warhammer and to be honest Commander is an alternative format in magic for those who don't know right think of it like for Warhammer players it's the equivalent of playing uh Crusade so using that as an example it came up as a like player defined sub format thing that became incredibly popular and is now just the way 80 of magic is played yeah I was like it's the most popular format Now by far now if you look at the average price of an EDH deck it's comparable to a Warhammer Army but that's something that you invest into over time just like with Warhammer everyone knows that you don't just jump in paying 600 you grow your way there yeah you buy the 40 intro Jack and then two months later you buy a few singles that are gonna really upgrade no no no because you're starting out you're buying the loot by booster packs yeah you are but then you're buying a lot of them you would very quickly understand that that's not the right way unfortunately you're already out of grand by that point yeah so what's not I have loot boxes like that in 40K or more hammer in general so the point stands they both have the same endpoint similar pricing in that way but one has that low low barrier to entry to get you in to bring that into Warhammer we now have the alternative game mode boarding actions which is one of gw's little let's make an excuse to sell 210 dollar terrain packs that can't be played in Warhammer yeah that's it's got some weirdness to that aspect but fundamentally ignoring the cash grab boarding action is interesting it's a small form game it doesn't have vehicle goals at infantry only like these are a lot of bypasses to the difficult barrier to entry yeah just being 500 point games already means okay combat patrols or as they continue to come out these boarding action boxes yeah make for an Army in a box it lowers your barrier to entry which is a great start it is assuming you're not paying 210 for a Terrain set in order to play the game in addition to the boxes you're buying yeah and rules and everything else but we won't get into that part of but we don't have time for a brad thinks the rules should be free argument I do want to keep this all positive yeah so we kind of have a bunch of ideas on like what would a product that GW could realistically make that would lower this barrier entry to make it so that like one you don't feel like the sticker shock's gonna send you to the hospital and two it also allows you to expand like once you buy it you can expand further into a 2K game eventually kind of thing and importantly I think part of this is not just you can expand into a 2K game obviously for GW that is something they want you to do but you don't sell that to your Market that way no no you want to sell them this is the game yeah you can do stuff Beyond this but you are playing the full intended experience when you purchase this yeah and if we're gonna do this it has to be cheap so there's obvious tiers of what does cheap mean we have to be realistic like ten dollars not gonna happen just not possible yeah no I'm aware that we could pour ham or something out for ten dollars but GW is not going to do that no I mean you just can't make the money back on just Logistics to selling it around the world like it just doesn't make any sense but like five hundred dollars probably a bit much so let's target we want this to be something where we're making people buy it for a two two digit price tag in America once you cross that hundred dollar line you're in the uh this feels like a bad decision to get into this it's too much at once too much sticker shock yeah it is tough I think that there might be ways to get like 120 ish but at that point you have to get into like a versus box yeah but if we're only looking at like one Army of it okay yeah under a hundred dollars eighty bucks maybe yeah 60 to 80 I wanna say 6 but video games are now turning into 70s so yeah that range somewhere in there doesn't seem so expensive that it's unreasonable kind of thing and for example like the Warhammer Commander decks when they came out they were 60 bucks so like we're looking at about that range for what we can put into a box I will point out that this is a box for one of the players right so terrain wise I do think there needs to be some basic Terrain in this but it only has to support half of a game if it's 1v1 because the other player will bring theirs and it doesn't have to be overwhelming kind of thing like it can be kind of stripped down a little bit I am going to recommend some stripped down options yeah so in our theoretical dream world here we're looking at trying to get 60 to 80 dollars for 500 points of models a bit of terrain and you need a little rule book for your army throw in 10 stupid bad cheap dice like bulk special cost you five cents on the back end right your chest X yeah it's not balanced in any possible way but who cares so I think the primary concern here is to get that price point for 500 points of models is going to be difficult given what else they've already done and what their current expectation of what plastic costs and I'm going to go a step further these have to be when you open the box your game piece is ready this needs to be your intro level you open the box and you can walk up to the game table and play okay I completely agree I like that idea there is a good number of people that are kind of like me where like the hobby aspect not that exciting at least initially like when I I looked into Warhammer many many years ago I was like I don't really want to build it I don't want to paint it I just kind of want to play so yeah let's get that barrier out of the way you open it up and it's a playable model you don't need glue you don't need Paint you can play it and importantly when we're talking about these we're not saying to replace all GW models with this no God no this is to make an intro set that is legal you could take it to lvo and be just fine GW sanctions this is real GW approved game pieces that can be played in any Warhammer game that come in this vanilla box set that you can just do iterations of overtime and Rebrand a little bit Yeah the expectation being that like people aren't really gonna do that but you want to have it as a it is legal it is a valid list you can play it so to kind of get some of these ideas there's a bunch of different ways that like you could make models that are playable right out of the box kind of thing you could fully fill in the model you know just like a cheap Alibaba toy doesn't look great but you can get different colors on the actual plastic and call it good yeah like plastic dinosaurs and crap yeah no customizable poses no customized customizable options this is what you get barely recognizable as a unit [Laughter] yeah you want it to be there's minimal part of the hobby aspect for people to get into the game and it's one of those like if they want to paint it hey you can nobody's stopping you so that's one solution we can do my problem with this solution is it starts to feel a bit like you're playing Warhammer but you're poor not just that it feels like the I didn't get what's on the box like with the starter set yeah we're still stuck at that you're going to advertise this with beautiful colored like yeah it's going to be fully painted and then someone got paid for a full-time job to be painting this model and then they're gonna open it up and find a blue plastic space man we're a step closer but it's not probably the one I pick for the solution here so the one that I would push for as a solution would be to do what I'm going to call the convention special anytime you go to like any sort of nerd convention you can go to like the fan art Gallery area and by your favorite anime figure or your favorite character from a video game is a little little chibi keychain where you can spin it and it's the front side of the character in the back side of the character and it's in like a clear plastic resin plastic thing yeah clear resin whatever it is that it's surrounded by yeah and it's like a keychain that has a nice colored image in the middle of the front and the back of this character yeah two dimensional and you can just slot that into slot bases yeah which GW already makes yeah those are really actually I think they're kind of cool for pop together sets but that would be perfect for this type of idea of have the bass that's the right size so all rules is great and we can do like slotted necromunda looking bases where you make them out of that plastic that has that little shine of like micaflex in it so it's going to look like it's a metallic base already you don't have to do anything to the base you slide your perfectly colored model into the base yeah I mean it's it's only a like 2D kind of thing it's not fully three-dimensional it's just a portrait but that's still cool like and to be honest rules wise you don't even have to change boarding actions for this because everything measures like based off how the base is right so I think this is the route I would go with it where it's like you get some really nice art of like a sergeant a couple of normal Squad members maybe some Terminators and a captain you do the same with every other Army so that you hit like 500 points yeah you can even do it where the Arts have specific loadouts if you wanted to go that deep into it although if it's an intro set I still argue that you should probably make it where the loadouts are all the same for a unit type I think yeah you you could though and it wouldn't be that difficult um but realistically I think you would choose armies that have like generic Squad and the squad would be all the same basically so then you don't you just don't have to worry about it and yeah I mean you could make some really cool art I mean I've seen some like custom like people have done this with their own like origami type paper where it's like you know they draw on it and they make it like not really 3D but kind of like pop out in certain areas it looks honestly it looks really cool and I think I think people would enjoy playing that without feeling like oh I'm just playing the poor man's version I know what you're talking about where people do like the 3D magic cards where you take like yeah 18 of the card you cut it up and layer it so that it looks like when you move it at different angles the arm is actually slightly forward it's not just flat but it's not like it's not like actually 3D you know like it's a 2d like perspective yeah it's 3D but it's like you're talking a millimeter of difference to cause the change to your eyesight so you see the parallaxing yeah and like there there's actually like legitimately cool things that can be done with the style and it doesn't have to be expensive to make yeah we're a company doing this and mass so you can set this up as a production line knowing your inputs and your out like it's not like when someone has to custom make this and sell it on Etsy one of the interesting things with this style is it's also fairly portable yeah because things could lay flat very easily you could just like pop it out of its base and then stack them all together and we haven't gotten to our terrain solution yet but that would also work actually yeah it would make it very easy for portability for smaller and tournament stuff which also works for putting together the Box you don't have to make this giant box that fits giant sprues it's like no this is what we got it's okay they layer on top of each other yeah which will help with one of the things we were thinking of while being our scummy businessman selves was hey as a company you're still going to want to make money on this yeah you are the long-term goal that your vice president doesn't care about because they care about their bonus next quarter your long-term goal is going to be trying to get more players into the game so that they start buying the full model so they start painting so that they start buying your Citadel paints and wasting money on terrible white paint that is never going to work once you've gone home you own their soul right but your short term is still going to require that they sell for a profit even if it's not your most profitable item per item sold at least selling a lot of it can make up for it the margin is potentially not as high as you know your single models and your remote custom stuff but like you still want some it's no pumping out a space Experian Lieutenant with a different bolt gun in his hand and a slightly different angle on how he's holding his arm and ripping people off for 35 US dollars [Laughter] gonna be that good no no not quite that good but I do think that like especially if we're going with this like kind of 2D style it should be at scale quite profitable of you don't like you don't have to figure out how to put the screw together so that it actually fully fills in all the spots without breaking anything like all of that just that doesn't exist anymore so it it honestly like it should be doable to put something like this together for 60 to 80 dollars and you had actually brought up like we want some train as well you had a really cool idea I'm sure you've stole from somebody indeed I did this whole thing comes from the fact that boarding actions was a hot topic for a whole two weeks but people of course like me are not fools and do not want to pay 210 US dollars for terrain you cannot use in 40 K's rule set I want to repeat how stupid it would be to pay 210 US dollars for terrain you cannot use in any format other than boarding actions however since people are not stupid they found alternative Solutions and there was a viral video that I'm sure everyone has seen by a guy named Mark Dickey where he took children's toys that his daughter had that are like magnetic tiles and realized you could just build perfectly scaled terrain for boarding actions out of it because obviously toy manufacturing if it's for a 55 year old man or a three-year-old girl is the same yeah a toy is a toy plastic's the same but these magnetic tiles you can just throw some extra detail on which if you were making them for this you would just sculpt on a little bit of bumpiness to be the detail I mean you don't even have to do that you can just run it through a generic like sticker type covering on top of it oh yeah you could do it that way too true because we're talking about an industrial scale we're making these so we can just bring out a sticker roller that rolls right over the top of the sheet of these being made it slaps on like 2D art of a hallway of a Gallow dark ship or whatever we're calling this stuff yep yeah and like it's not going to be amazing looking but it's gonna look pretty cool yeah that's a great solution I hadn't even thought of that that's perfect but we do the same thing where it's magnetic tiles and get people in you can start selling them new rule packs for new layouts for New Missions for their new Crusade they're probably starting up in boarding action it also if they're if we're going on this magnetic style snap together it works really well for multiplayer like you have some that you got with your set for 80 or whatever your opponent also has some you put them together and they actually swap together instead of like oh you have duplicates oh no you know like it's one of those like you can scale up you can scale it up and use everybody's terrain to make things more unique yeah so I I love this idea and like looking at toys that are sold for profit already like not as part of a box set where we're discounting everything to get in the Box to get you to play our game the tiles that Mark Dickey used in that video are he called them Picasso tiles they're forty five dollars for a hundred of them on Amazon right now which is enough to to make like a whole boarding action board and we only have to shove half of that into each of these boxes yeah and like honestly you could probably cheap out a little bit like you don't have to go to the full like half of it you know give them like instead of 50 you give 20. yeah it depends maybe you have it where you don't need floor tiles so you can do even less this this gets into the weeds of like if we're actually looking at this for prototyping yeah because like I mean you wouldn't need the base ones to step on if you had the you know fold out cardboard that would just be the base but again yeah a bit of the weeds basically what you're saying is these snappable modular terrain probably 10 bucks 10 15 I mean on the back end it's probably cheaper than that if we're being honest the the profit margins on plastic toys is massive right but I'm just saying like 10 15 is not an unreasonable price for having at scale but also still maintaining profit yeah we we value the terrain at 25 bucks or something yeah and tell them that it's discounted in here yeah right we're not getting away with perfect lovey-dovey GW they're still going to have to make a profit off this and that's okay so this box idea we've got everything we need now to make it we can play boarding action with it pushing this game mode forward we now have let's say four starter armies that you can collect immediately and just be ready to play out of the box you know you'd get like Imperium chaos Space Marine that's not Imperium yeah or necron Tau whatever then you can do the old hey it's been six months we'll change out what we toss into our resin for our little models and sell it as a new set yeah and we'll change the PNG that we're using to load on to the sticker printer and we've got a new season yeah we're basically printing magic cards at this point I was like it sounds very similar to Magic at the moment and they have ridiculous profit margins and suddenly you have a lot of ways to do intro sets and now we can talk about the ramifications of this for those who may be worried on that end because now God forbid instead of having to paint up your own Imperial fisters you could technically show up to lvo with what GW has sanctioned as a legal painted army that GW painted and poured resin over yeah being basically just a 2d PNG that they printed out but whatever but that's not legal to show up to a tournament winning list with and that gets into the hole now there will be debate on is that good or bad and of course competitive players aren't going to give two shits they just want to see who is the better player preferably to find out it's them but to be fair there is some of that when watching working Games Live you get to see some cool painted models and it's always nice where you're like oh that's nice but if this is done Tastefully and well done yeah exactly these models will still look cool and at the same time like these are intro things so you're not gonna have the you know the silent King you're not gonna have bellacor you're not gonna have these like the face of the army kind of thing like that's still gonna be a full sculpt that's cool yeah we're talking about some necron warriors with some flares or a yeah a group of intercessors no one's going to care and if we're gonna continue with the boarding action that also means that you don't have to worry about like Vehicles being a problem or or any of that type of like oh it's not really right like I don't want the vehicle to look like it's 2D I need to actually see like where the line of sights are well you don't have to worry about that because it's all infantry and to be honest like we're kind of going a bit further on this than I thought we were but this gets into solving some of my problems with competitive as it currently stands as someone who wishes competitive was less of a joke like it still kind of is guys that's okay it's okay we we can do a long episode on the current issues with the design of the game as far as competitive play goes but if we were to take boarding actions forward evolve it into this starter set box thing that we've invented here which is totally free for you to use GW I would love for this to exist yeah go ahead but if you go forward with this you end up with boarding actions becoming again like with Commander where it was an alternative game mode that became incredibly popular this may solve a lot of our issues with 2000 point games take hours to finish yeah right where you can't have like an actual tournament on a you know after work on Friday night you can't run a real tournament like you just don't have time and on a two-day weekend you don't have time to figure out who actually wins if 500 people show up to a big tournament yeah that could solve those issues and if we limit it down and start making this like a Limited Format like in Magic you can go you can only play with the units that were released in these you can bring your 3D Real Models but this is the list of units that are legal in the format and then you can start doing bands from there or whatever for balance reasons uh yeah I mean I see I see what you're saying where like this could be an interesting format for competitive nature and its idea and this intro box would actually help push that and at the same time if you just want to play a full 2K game like that's cool if that's what your tournament wants to do that's okay like and that will probably be the main way things still get done most likely but this opens the door for Alternatives where maybe this does take off and competitive players just end up liking this more for a balanced short game mode where it's easy to you know play even best of three God forbid oh my God I'm not saying there's no negativity that could come from this I definitely see first and foremost elitism there's going to be elitism there's going to specifically from the art community be pushed back on any idea of getting to skip over their favorite step and I mean gw's kind of been pushing like oh they're a model company not a rules company except they sell rules yeah and without trying to get into all of the consequences that could evolve out of having a starter set like this I think we've discussed enough of our idea that now we can toss it out to everyone else to further give input on and see how crazy we are for dreaming this up I would actually be really interested to hear what people who maybe aren't really into the hobby aspect and those that are because I I really want to hear if there's any concerns with the idea of doing this as like a future product that GW could sell or if there's more positivity towards the idea for new players then maybe I'm expecting to get from this I'm actually like the longer we've talked about the subject the sadder I am that it's not real yeah because this is the type of thing that would get certain people to play the game Who otherwise flip it off as I don't want to get into trying to put together my toys and then have to paint them just so that I can play with them the more we talk about it the more it is disappointing that this isn't a thing to me at least but we've probably rambled enough about it all right then on that note let's get out of here for the week sounds good [Music]

Channel: Poorhammer

Views: 74,043

Keywords: Warhammer, 40k, Warhammer 40k, Intro Box, New Player, Boarding Actions, Space Marines, Necrons, Tyranids, Chaos

Id: TlxnpXC45Z4

Length: 31min 29sec (1889 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 24 2023