Precinct Omega
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Whatever Happened to the Outriders?
🕑 Added 2022-08-24 14:08:27 +0000 UTCThe subject of community volunteers in the miniatures wargaming market has been a controversial one over the years. I took a whistle-stop tour through its recent history, why companies love volunteers, what problems they can create and why Games Workshop, in particular, ran and then killed its Outriders programme and why it won't come back.
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Chillcon in Sheffield was a lot of fun. I spent pretty much the whole day running demos and although I only made a handful of direct sales (maaaaybe covered my costs) I picked up some new games to read through and analyze and met a lot of good people (including one patron! :D).
The day was slightly marred by the call I got, almost an hour away from Sheffield, to let me know that I left my backpack (containing my laptop amongst other things) in the hall. So that was two hours' of driving added to my day that I could, honestly, have done without. But a lesson learned for the future.
You can bet, now, that I won't be able to call my wife at the end of an event to say I'm on my way home without her saying "And have you got everything? Are you absolutely sure??"
Anyway, I threw this episode together a bit. Not my finest work, not least because it's surprisingly hard to find accurate information about these programmes. But it's a good example of how I'm increasingly using the miniatures wargaming market as a microcosm to study bigger issues in business and the economy, with the question of volunteering and its relationship with employment being the topic that's really at hand. I'm going to be doing a bit of an experiment with the next episode and trying to trace GW's impact upon the evolution of the Nottingham Lead Belt.
I expect my planned title of "How Games Workshop invented wargaming" might garner some hate, but I was inspired by one of my Chillcon purchases - a book by Donald Featherstone, written in the early 1970s, in which he charmingly observed that miniatures wargaming had, at that time, already entered "the mainstream".
Oh, how I laughed!
I suspect it'll be at least a couple of weeks for the next episode.
In wargaming news, I'm putting the finishing touches to a first draft of Horizon Wars: Midnight Dark and I'll be sharing it with patrons on a staged basis, with Mech level backers getting first sight in September. We'll have a chance to discuss its content in the Discord, make some changes and additions before it goes to the Heavy Elite crew, and then a few more changes before the Elites get to have a look.
This isn't just about trying to make higher tiers more rewarding, but more constructively about trying to limit the number of voices and make amendments in a staged method.
