If you have questions concerning the transfer to Fantasy Flight Games, please head to the FAQ on our forum.

We anticipate a large number of questions and/or comments regarding this announcement, so please post your questions directly in the BattleLore forum, not on this blog where threads are much harder to read and maintain.

Thank you.

–

Eric Hautemont
CEO – Days of Wonder

The Epic Adventure series is an exciting new way to experience BattleLore, making it fast and easy to setup and play BattleLore Adventures.

For Troll and Country is the first release of the Epic Adventure Map series for BattleLore. It includes a large scale Epic map featuring two Epic Adventures – For Troll and Country and Troll Bridge. The paper map is 47 x 34 inches (120 x 87 cm) and comes ready to play with terrain, obstacles and unit positions pre-printed. Players can just place their BattleLore units and start their adventure.

This volume also features the new Troll Creature figure, perfect to use with these or other adventures.

For Troll and Country is expected to be available in October from the Days of Wonder web site and your local game retailer. You can preorder your copy now from the Days of Wonder Web Store.

The Battlelore Troll Map Epic Adventure will debut this week at GenCon in Indianapolis. A limited number of copies will be available at the Days of Wonder Booth #121.

• 49A – All Along the Watchtower
• 50A – Lone Outpost
• 51A – Attempted Breakthrough

A fourth one will follow in issue # 101 of Game Trade magazine, which will be available at your local retailer in July (and eventually posted here online for those of you living abroad or without easy access to a local game store).And on a separate note… to celebrate the release of the first User Pages, and encourage you all to migrate (or develop new!) Memoir ’44 content for them, in the coming month we will select the best User Page in each language and give its author a special, not-available-in-stores, Winter version of the upcoming Memoir ’44 Campaign Bag, featuring a Tiger tank on its front flap!

First, a month ago, we released a much-improved set of tools to browse the Scenarios from the Front, complete with an interactive display that makes finding the Memoir ’44 battles you want to play much easier.

This week, we are introducing our first release of the User Pages. These are devoted to M44, with three goals in mind:

1 – providing fans with a venue to share their many contributions to the game with the thousands of players that visit our web site every day.

Over the past few years, hundreds of valuable posts, strategy and painting guides, house rules and playing tips were developed by the user community - yet little was done to make these widely available and too often great resources ended up buried in a hard-to-track thread somewhere in our forums…

The User Pages should now fix this and we look forward to your feedback on how to continuously improve them to make them the place of choice to post and share your contributions.

2 – beginning to put in place the tools we’ll need to run our Organized Play programs, later this summer.

Memoir’44 Organized Play programs will be team based, centered around quarterly events in Overlord and Breakthrough format and make good use of your User Pages. The BattleLore Organized play program will be more focused on living Epic Adventures rather than encouraging outright competition, but should prove equally fun and be the venue where a certain Troll makes its first official appearance.

3 – last, but not least, the User Pages will pave the way for the Computer version of Memoir ’44.

The next tangible proof of progress will be the release of complete, from-the-ground-up rewrites of the scenario editors for both Memoir ’44 and BattleLore, later this summer.

So, while it may not be apparent yet, there is a method to our madness…

To get a replacement set of these 10 Specialist cards, please click here.

Please note that these cards do not change gameplay in any way, and are thus not necessary per se. All they accomplish is provide you with a set whose back matches the back of other Specialist cards, such as those available in the various Figure packs released to date.

Enjoy!

The Goblins at Days of Wonder

In December ’06, the game launched and immediately surpassed our wildest expectations, becoming our fastest selling game ever (with the notable exception of Ticket to Ride in the months that immediately followed the winning of the Spiel des Jahres).

While a pleasant surprise, this wave of enthusiasm quickly strained and even temporarily overwhelmed our support capacities. As a result, we spent the better part of the next few months catching up, answering product related questions and putting the proper infrastructure (Online compendiums, etc…) in all three languages (English, French, German) to manage this better and more efficiently going forward.

Starting in Q2, we began releasing expansions for the game, in a format that, for most of these expansions, differed significantly from our initial packaging plans of releasing new units, creatures, … in individual blisters.

This change was the result of feedback from distributors and resellers who made it clear they did NOT look forward to supporting the blister-type of packaging we had initially envisioned. While it may not seem like much, this left us scrambling from an operations and production standpoint.

We did manage to hold to our original schedule and release some key expansions (Call to Arms, Epic, …) on time, but the packaging changes, compounded with the initial wave of support required, had significant repercussions further down the road; a few mistakes were made (wrong banners in one pack, wrong card backs in another) in the rush that ensued, making things worse for us again (sending out those replacement banners does take time from all of us as we’re still a small company!) and for you, our customers.

As a result, some of the other BattleLore expansions we had hoped to introduce later in the year (including the Heroes expansion we’d alluded to as a possible shipping candidate for late 2007) began to slip.

A female Sorceress

This delay highlights the reason we don’t like to pre-announce products or discuss our plans ahead of time – it seems like every time we do, delays or changes occur and we come to regret the frustration it causes for all of us.

In late September/early October, armed with feedback from customers’ likes and dislikes regarding the expansion packs already released, we made the internal decision to significantly revamp our expansions plans.

We took the fateful decision to shelve our then-current design of the Heroes expansion, and revamp it into something better aligned with the oft-stated desire from customers on the forums to see more complete ready-to-play, background rich expansions, as opposed to the toolkit based approach we had been pursuing up to this point.

While we are convinced this is the right step for the game’s long term future, there is a price to pay for this decision and we are by no means done yet; this transition and product redesign is still ongoing. We do not even have a shipping date we feel we confident we can share with you yet.

We realize this is not the news you were looking for, but we would rather be upfront about where we stand and the reasons behind this delay.

When we release an expansion with plastic pieces, there is often a year that elapses between the original sketches and the final, in-your-hand game pieces that reach your store…

As an example, the Scottish Wars’ figures that are just now reaching your stores were designed at the same time as the entire first wave of expansions (Goblin skirmishers, Dwarven Battalion, ….) in January of ’07.

Doing individual, monthly or even quarterly mould designs and productions are prohibitively expensive so to keep costs and prices down we have to plan far ahead when we make these design decisions.

The fact that some of these expansions may only be coming out now doesn’t mean we don’t care about product or packaging feedback we’ve received in the interim.

A mounted Thief

In other words, we do care about the game, its future and our ability to fulfill the promises it holds. The road to get there is, and will continue to be, a somewhat bumpy one (and we also won’t ever be able to fulfill everyone’s wish for it, which is why we were initially leaning more toward a toolkit-based approach for the first couple of years, a decision we’ve now partly reversed).

To keep things in perspective it was just 6 months ago that the Memoir ’44 community was “up in arms” about how we had “abandoned” that game to the benefit of BattleLore.

While amusing (in an ironic way) for those of us who were deeply involved then in what has arguably been our most important expansion for that system (the Memoir ’44 Air Pack), it is a reminder that a bit of perspective will help us all keep our sanity while we work to deliver you new games and expansions.

2008 is full of surprises for the core system behind Memoir and BattleLore, some small, some rather large. We will undoubtedly make additional missteps (hopefully small and hopefully not the same ones!) during the course of the year. But through it all we will strive to keep improving the quality of all our releases and the games we love.

As many of you had already noticed, we’ve had no communications of late on the BL blog; going forward, minor updates will be announced informally in the forums for their respective games, and major announcements on this blog. This will free up some valuable web development time as we keep integrating our company blog better with the new online tools we will unveil in the coming months.

We will make additional, product-related announcements (BL related and otherwise) once we have them ready. In the meantime, and most importantly, we wish all of you and your families a very happy new year 2008!

Eric Hautemont
CEO – Days of Wonder, Inc.

Click on the picture to zoom

Click on the picture to zoom

We just received new sets of Blue long sword banners for your Hyena riders. Note that these are the exact same banners that are already attached to the Blue Regular Cavalry units in your base game of BattleLore. You can either use those, or click here to get our customer service department to send you some new ones!

The Specialist cards with a matching back will take a bit longer to arrive. We are currently at the mercy of lengthy lead times at our printers, who are busy ramping up for Christmas. Current ETA for these sets of replacement cards is mid-November.

What we opted to do is reprint the 10 Specialist cards that came in with your Call to Arms expansion, and give them the same back that is featured on Deployment cards and on all current and future cards in Specialists packs.

Before someone jumps the gun and says this wasn’t the Designer’s intent, it actually was ! We unfortunately made the mistake of deciding to get fancy and give the Specialist cards a different illustration than the Deployment cards for no other reason that because it looked neat, and that decision came back to bite us

So we are reverting back to the original design. The benefit is that you do not have to worry about any of your Specialist sets not matching going forward; furthermore, if you are not bothered by the visual difference, this will then give you another set of these 10 cool generic Specialist cards to play with!

Please do not call or e-mail us individually regarding any of the above, as we will not be able to tell you more than what is written above until the cards arrive. As for the banners, clicking on the link given above is the best way to ensure you receive them promptly.

Last not least, with the 100 Years War and Goblin Marauders now shipping, we have added the adventures that came with them online. We have also included a new web adventure titled “Abandoned Tower”.

Enjoy!

To learn more about these exciting new figure packs, visit the Specialist Pack Expansion page.

To purchase Goblin Marauders, The Hundred Years War, or any other BattleLore expansion, visit our Online Store.