Secrets are hard to keep.
I hate them. They’re antithetical to our motivations for why we at Privateer do what we do.
We like to share! We love making art and games and stories and miniatures, and we love sharing them and playing them with the amazing people who we are lucky enough to be able to call our community.
Keeping secrets is hard. It makes us paranoid. We get stressed out. The only thing that makes it worth it is that at some point, we know we’ll get to see your reaction to what we’ve done when we finally let the cat—ahem, ’jack—out of the bag. And today, we were finally able to unleash the mother of all secrets!
In case you somehow managed to stumble upon this and haven’t heard yet, there are going to be all-new editions of HORDES and WARMACHINE at your favorite local game store on June 29!
Quick, take a selfie so we can see the expression on your face! Tweet it and/or post it to our Facebook! Let’s remember this moment together.*
Before the current edition released in 2010—Mk II as we called it—we were already talking about what the next evolution of the game might be like. Not that we weren’t thrilled with Mk II, but we knew a time would come when we’d have years more experience and data, and once again WARMACHINE and HORDES would evolve. So right away, we started listening.
Three years ago, work started in earnest. We code-named the project ‘Egg Roll.’ I don’t know why. I don’t know if anyone even remembers. But it was a shortsighted decision, for a couple reasons: 1) Typing ‘Egg Roll’ over and over again is tedious. It doesn’t look like it should be, but it’s tripped me up more than once, and I’m a decent typist. 2) It has forever changed the way I regard one of my favorite snacks. Once a crispy finger-food stuffed with savory goodness, the quintessential appetizer of Chinese cuisine will forever invoke in me the feeling of having to hold my breath for far too long. When you like to share things, three years is a long time to hold your silence.
Egg Roll—I mean, the new editions of WARMACHINE and HORDES, represent the biggest project Privateer Press has ever undertaken. Every model ever made for the games was redesigned, rebalanced, and updated to a revised set of rules. The sheer volume of work was, I think, at the time we initiated the project, something we couldn’t really comprehend. Like a black hole. . . or dinosaurs. We could do the math and we could imagine what it would be like, but the reality of what we had undertaken didn’t actually hit us until we were neck-deep in the ocean of work.
The new editions are very much an evolution of the game. We’ve been quiet about it, but our development did not happen in a vacuum. You were helping us the entire time. Egg Roll—damnit, that was an honest typo, but I’m leaving it—I mean, the new editions of WARMACHINE and HORDES are the products of our experience with our community. We have six years of data gathered over the course of Mk II, derived from thousands of convention and Organized Play events. We have billions (or some slightly smaller number) of forum posts filled with suggestions, discussions, and yes, even the occasional debate, on what would be best for the game, what works, what doesn’t, what would make it better, and what you [collectively] love about playing WARMACHINE and HORDES. Dozens of our staff, from Insider regulars Director of Business Will Shick and Creative Director Ed Bourelle to Graphic Designer Richard Anderson and Sculpting Manager Doug Hamilton, spend thousands of hours at conventions talking to the people who play our games, and many of them bring their own armies and throw down on the table with you. Lead Game Designer Jason Soles will play 15-20 games every year just at Lock & Load, and any other time we let him leave the office to go to an event. It might look like it’s all just fun and games, but that experience for us is invaluable when it comes to making a game that you will want to play.
And that, my friends, is what everyone here at Privateer Press—anxiously awaiting your Tweeted and Facebooked selfies—hopes that we have accomplished. It’s a simple goal, with a lot of math, imagination, dedication, and love behind it. We’ve got a ton of stuff to show you—from videos and podcasts, to developer articles, new characters, fiction, art, and models—all queued up to share over the weeks ahead. If you happen to be coming to Lock & Load in June, you’ll be playing the new editions of WARMACHINE and HORDES right there with us after we give you a peek at everything else coming up through the rest of the year. And that’s when we’ll know if we hit our mark, but I think you’re going to like what you see.
I have never been more pleased to be a part of Privateer Press, more proud of the people who have worked so hard these past years to make the new editions a reality, and more excited to announce to our community what we’ve been doing.
It feels good to breathe again.
