Flames Of War Press Release
14th March 2006
Since its release over three years ago Flames of War has grown and evolved as we have added more intelligence handbooks to the range to cover all of the mid-war forces available. With the release of our tenth and last mid-war book we bring to a close the period and embark on the long anticipated late-war. As a natural opportunity for us to review what we have done over the last few years we have decided to tackle what comes next in a slightly different fashion and this release explains each of the key elements that we have planned for over the coming years.
* Mid-War
* Second Edition
* Late-War
* What else
* And there’s more
Mid-War
Given the success of the mid-war period we wanted to make sure that all the existing players and forces had ongoing support and availability. In trying to work out how to best maintain the period, but make it more readily accessible we have chosen to compile the ten Intelligence Handbooks into two theatre compilations. One for the Eastern Front and one for North Africa and Sicily-Italy. These two books will both be around the 180 page mark, similar to the current rulebook, and will be available from July this year.
We will continue to sell the current books until they run out but long term any new players looking to enter into the mid-war period will have these two books to choose from.
The Eastern Front book will also have the new Hungarian, Finn and Romanian lists to make the book truly complete. As always these lists will also be available as a free download from the website. These two books will allow mid-war to be easily accessable well into the future whilst we are concentrating on getting late-war, out into the market.
Second Edition Flames Of War
Over the last three years we have played many games and listened to the feedback from all of you and come to the conclusion that the break between mid-war and late-war is a great opportunity for us to update the rules and bring out second edition. Our goal with a second edition rulebook is not to change the game, but to refine and clarify the rules and in those odd places fix those things that we were never happy about from the start. The end result will be a 240 page full colour hardback book that covers not only the existing rules, but adds so much more material on campaigns, terrain, modelling, battalion level games and whole host of things we simply could not fit in the original book. The rulebook will not have any army lists in it as between the mid-war compilations and our late-war plan the choice of what period to play in will be yours. Second edition will be available from August this year.
Rules for Free!
As a thank you for the loyalty and support you have shown the hobby we are planning to give a smaller, A5, version of second edition, just the 140 pages of rules, to every owner of a current rulebook absolutely free. We will be providing this copy to you through our retail stockists and all you will need to do is bring along your copy of your current rulebook, get it stamped with a "I survived mid-war" medal stamp and the new rules are yours. These miniature rulebooks will be an exact copy of the rules pages from the full colour rulebook and will be available the month before the main release of the rulebook in July this year.
Late War
Our plan for late war is to cover a number of elements separately allowing us to make sure that we leave no area unexplored. Our initial release for late war will be a 180 page full colour book covering every late-war list for every country as at January 1944. This book has the new points values and organisational diagrams for all the forces so that getting started with late-war could not be easier. This book allows all players to get straight into the late-war period, but only allows them historical choices from January 1944 - May 1944. This book will be available in September this year.
To follow up the core late-war lists book we have a rolling five year plan that has five book releases in each twelve month period. Each year will begin in the last quarter with a campaign book setting the stage for a theatre and time period that we will follow up with divisional books for four separate forces. Normandy will be our first book and will probably come in at around 100 pages. This will then be followed by four books covering four divisions that took part in the Normandy period of the war. The following years will be Bagration, Market Garden, Ardennes and Berlin giving us a total of five campaign books and twenty divisional books going from the very first division at Normandy to the last one to defend Berlin.
The Normandy campaign book will be available in November this year and will be followed in January 2007 by the first divisional book. Currently this list is under review, but odds are good that it will be the British Para’s who will be our first late-war division.
What Else
Despite the year of book releases we have planned we have also been working on bringing to market some new projects to coincide with the release of second edition.
In August this year we will release the first four boxes of planes. Each force gets its first squadron of resin planes, flying stands and squadron decals. We will follow these up with other variant planes at a later date but initially these four codes represent the range.
As if planes were not enough we have also been working with our friends at GF9 to bring you "Battlefield in a Box" which is a new concept in gaming terrain. We have initially produced a selection of fully painted resin buildings and extras for two separate theatres, the Desert and the Eastern Front. Each selection will be sold in a box roughly the size of one of our current army deals. Rather than having a large range of separate scenery codes we thought a whole table full of special items to go with the basic hills and woods will give anybody the chance to have a great looking table. These first two sets will be out in August this year. We also have planned some Normandy scenery for later in the year.
And there’s more!
Last but no means least we are working on several other projects that many of you have been asking about. We have plans for 2007 to see an early-war compilation book released and a new figure designer is currently working his way through the range having just finished some great Polish infantry. We also are working on the Pacific theatre with a view to a release further down the road as well as a modelling and terrain book for FOW.
Finally, and despite the massive amount of work we have with FOW, we have also begun thinking about a second historical period to adapt the FOW game system to. The choices are huge and as we have a few things to still get finished this year before I am able to confirm which period it will be, however we are aiming for a 2007 release!
John-Paul[/b]
