As we enter into 2015 Ronnie wanted to bring you guys up to speed with what was happening at Mantic this year and address an issue that needed resolving……..

Hi and glad to blog again as 2015 kicks off. I hope you had a nice break, and got some hobby time in alongside all the food and presents! I made a little progress with my Dwarf army and my DZ terrain – but not enough!

An Apology…

Before I talk about all the great things we have coming up I want to start with an apology. It was only 6 years ago that Mantic was created. It set out to be a company that hobbyists could feel affiliated to, interact with and ultimately be proud to support.

In those 6 years Mantic has developed and grown, and now we have trade partners, hobbyists and retailers around the world. I hope it is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what it will become – a big global community, based around what I think gaming means – having fun, playing games, collecting models to paint and game with, socialising. Overall whenever you interact with Mantic, or one of our games, it should be a pleasant, enjoyable experience.

Last I year felt our customer service fell below the standards a Mantic hobbyist deserves, and ultimately that is my fault.

We had a good team in place last year, with Chris Nichols, Kai, James, Chris and Sarah all working really hard on customer service. We had the biggest warehouse team we have ever had, and we developed new systems to cope with the growth the company was undergoing. We even moved to a new site to give us the room to hold more stock and ship everything. But ultimately we were not good enough getting back to every query and missing items form quickly enough, and that responsibility is mine.

We pride ourselves on great customer service

I am not saying what we did last year was a disaster – actually far from it. I think the team did a colossal amount of work and sorted out almost all of the issues brilliantly. However, I think there were too many mis-packs and errors, and I don’t think we had a big enough team to pick things up when they went wrong. That meant we did not deal with all the issues early enough. It meant everyone didn’t get their models as early as I would have liked, and when issues did arrive we did not sort out the problems quickly enough in each and every case.

We have added to our customer service team, we have settled into our new business and brought on new skills to help us deliver right first time. I am sorry we fell short, and we will do better. Thank you for being patient with us.

Right, thanks for letting me get that out, now on with the show…

2015 will be the year of the hobby! I have never been so excited about gaming and my painting table is a colossal mess because of all the projects I have on it!

Over the next few weeks we will post a few blogs that look at each game systems Mantic has, and the projects, support and efforts each will be getting in 2015. It is a pretty amazing list! It bodes very well for everyone who has played a Mantic game and all those that want to!

Kings of War hits with new beta rules ahead of the 2nd edition, Mars Attacks gets the rules to turn it from a skirmish game into a tabletop wargame (and again available free online!) and we will have the free intro rules for Deadzone out in a few weeks, with a new race later in the year…

Teaser snippet! A lone Pathfinder surveys the carnage on Exham IV…

DreadBall gets a refresh with the Season 4 book, 4 new teams and 7 more MVPS. The underground version DreadBall Xtreme hits the shelves too – and all those things happen in the next 12 weeks!!

DreadBall Cheerleaders and Fans – new to Season 4!

And what about Dungeon Saga?

This year one of the most exciting developments to the Mantic range will be Dungeon Saga. It’ll give existing hobbyists a fast, fun, narrative-led dungeon crawl based around a set of stunning models. It is designed to also offer new players an affordable miniature game of the highest quality. The print run is already double the total number for the first edition of DreadBall, which we printed just 2 years ago. That total does not include any copies for our retail partners yet – so it could well be double that again, probably more. I will be surprised if it not the largest print run we have ever done. Fingers crossed.

The development is well underway. In the next few days we will be sending the core rules and quest book from the core game to our rules committee. Once the play testers have had a go at it we will get the beta rules out to all our backers to have a look and read through. As always comments welcome.

Work-in-progress Ba’el, Undead Demon Lord

Work-in-progress Ba’el, Undead Demon Lord

I spent today going through the Adventurers Companion and that too is shaping up into a fantastic product. It will offer anyone that loves Dungeon Saga a way to dig much deeper into this gaming space. They will use this to create their own adventurers and see their heroes develop and grow into true legends! This will also be a stand-alone product so if someone has lots of figures and a big set of tiles they could use the DS system to play through in true tabletop style!

For anyone who backed this project – quite a few of you if I remember correctly – we have rebuilt the pledge manager from top to bottom. This has taken a little longer than we would have liked but it will be with you in the next week or so. It will also be the pledge manager we will use for Kings of War and other projects in the future, so once you’ve signed up you’ll not need to do it again. And please do read the next few updates for Dungeon Saga that we think you’ll love!

Best wishes, have a great 2015.

R

PS: Let us know what the number one thing you’re looking forward to from Mantic this year in the comments!