Collins Epic Wargames Releases Frontline General: Spearpoint 1943

It is my great pleasure to release Frontline General: Spearpoint 1943 by Collins Epic Wargames. After many months developing and playtesting the design with the help of playtesters as far away from us as Italy, I’m confident you will enjoy this fast, tense, and FUN WWII-based card wargame. If you haven’t already ordered, please order through your FLGS, online retailer, or direct from CEW to begin enjoying the action in Spearpoint 1943 right away (MSRP $29.95)!

Please join me at Origins Game Fair 2010 to demo the game and take home a copy of your own! I’ll have plenty on hand next week at the show in Columbus, OH.

If you are one of the many new owners of Spearpoint 1943 in the coming weeks, you’ll want to download all 8 initial Situations from the Spearpoint 1943 downloads section of www.frontlinegeneral.com or the files section of the game's Boardgamegeek page. I recommend playing a few Standard Games before trying the Situations in order to become familiar with the game. If you have any questions on anything, please let me know directly.

As you play, I encourage you to develop and submit your own Situations to CEW. The first 8 are exciting and challenging and I hope they spark some design ideas of your own! With your permission, I’d love to share selected Situations of yours with others through our website or newsletter. More Situations are also on the way.

For those of you who preordered Spearpoint 1943, I thank you very much for your support in advance of production. Without your preorders, production of this game would not have been possible. Your preorder should ship by this coming Tuesday. Also, I want to thank Uwe Eickert (Academy Games) and Mark H. Walker (Lock N’ Load Publishing) for their design insights early in the development of Spearpoint 1943.

The battle for the Frontline begins!

It's just cool to order 8800 dice...

Production of Frontline General: Spearpoint 1943 is officially underway. I'm in pre-press on the artwork files and busy prepping them for print- even modifying the "final artwork" a bit based on some feedback- adding some Mark Mahaffey-supplied textures to the backgrounds of the various cards. One fairly easy component to take care of is the single non-custom component in the game- dice.

Most people probably don't put much thought into dice, but they're as important as the artwork, game mechanics, and box. The cost of the dice can really vary among suppliers based on what is available, what is popular, and other factors. I went with "good" dice for Spearpoint- a bit of a polished touch for the game- by "good" I mean a 'non-opaque' color, a standard size, and something that matches the card colors in the game.

In the game, the German cards are a (surprise) textured German gray color, and the US cards are a textured blue color. So for selecting dice, I wanted two D10 gray dice for the German player and two D10 blue dice for the US player. Talk about choices- there are hundreds of D10 dice out there in all styles and colors and a few different sizes.

I chose dice supplied by Chessex for this game (http://www.chessex.com/), one of the industry suppliers. Quite simply I got a better price from Chessex than other suppliers, and as a publisher, I have to shop around for good prices on components or I'm not doing my job. The savings get passed on in the form of a lower MSRP for customers.

I don't personally like opaque dice. Maybe I'm picky, but I wanted something a bit more stylish for the game. Opaques are certainly functional and would have done the job - maybe for a few pennies less - but I went with speckled dice instead. For the gray dice, I chose Chessex's Ninja style. The blue dice are also in the speckled line and are called Stealth. Both are pictured below:

Dice, like any component, are cheaper in quantity. To support the planned initial print run of the game, I had to order 8800 total dice - 4400 of each color. This supports the print run as well as potential overages.

They arrived at the printer the other day and I couldn't help but think, "It's just cool to order 8800 dice..."