So taking CLASH of Spear to fruition has been a long journey. My brother and I have been wargaming since the 80s but had never ventured into the business/publishing side of the hobby beyond maybe a LGX back in the day in Argentina.
CLASH started after we decided that it would be nice to get to play ancients in 28s, something we used to do back in Argentina but we had not done in the US due to space and budget, and so we thought about coming up with a set of rules for small actions in ancients. It was July of 2018 and nothing was there in the horizon so it seemed like a good idea.
Being thorough as we are we took our time in development and internal playtesting before even extending it to the big group of playtesters that we were able to recruit around the world. This meant that in the meantime other alternatives came out, yet we decided not to give up as we believe CLASH offers a perspective different enough worth taking to print.
The process of going to print was not easy, with every step we would make mistakes and learn, but given a strong online wargaming community support we persevered and the game grew. It grew to the point that we reached an alliance with Victrix to release army boxes specially thought out for the rules... This took the project to another level..
Well, now we are here, everything is ready, as you can imagine this is a true stat up and as a true start up we ended up in the path of Kickstarter, which we were reluctant at first but in the end proved to be the best path forward.
Yet, this will be a short kickstarter because we have already done all our homework and prework, and we are ready to push the button. Boxes and materials are ready to print, the book has already been test printed so nothing needs to be done... just select # of copies and push print
We just need to understand the size of the investment that we need to do and this will allow us to get better pricing as we are trying to position the rules to sell. We do want to make money but we see it more as Wargame than as a product, so our main objective is to convince as many people to try the rules..
( In KS the book will be U$ 29, and later in retail it will go for U$ 34 )
This is why the kickstarter will run through Nov-Dec but shipping will start in January. The kickstarter itself will be very simple, there will not be lots of add-ons, there will be some stretchgoals but everything will be aimed at simplicity to insure that we can ship in January. So it will be more of a targeted kickstarter and fast turn around. We want to see battle reports by the end of Jan and start of August !
With that, we hope that you will give us a hand by joining us, we open next Wednesday Nov 13th at 10:30 AM ( US Eastern time )... As I mentioned it will be a very straight forwad KS, get the book, or the book and minis only... and it will ship in January... we will have some early bird options which will basically be slightly better pricing but the whole KS will be at a discount to what will later be retail pricing. Retail will follow quickly after, hopefully in Feb or March, depending the size of the KS effort, since we will not get to retail before we finish sending the KS, but be sure that we will get to retail, we like LGS gaming.
So, that is it.. give us a try, we hope that you'll enjoy the rules...
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/clashofspears/clash-of-spearshopefully you've been following along but if not you can find more info here:
http://www.thewargamespot.com/category/clashofspears/