"OGRE in my mailbox" Topic

at the retro price of $2.95 USD!
Thanks Evil Stevey
SJG has republished its mega popular game of OGRE and kept the original 70's pricetag.

So they finally released it. Cool.
Thank you for the heads up.

Here's an order link if folks wanna buy it direct from the source.
link

Shame they couldn't keep the miniatures in print (or even announce here sjgames.com/ogre that they were going out of print…).

I bet if each OGRE mini had a rare Munchkin card attached, OGRE minis would have zero issues.

Munchkin, like Will Ferrell's success, eludes my understanding.

in their defence, publishing games, card sets and rpg thingies is a lot different than manufacturing miniatures.
comtracting the work lessens the profit margin even further.
perhaps print on demand will change this in the future but I doubt that time is today.

RC,
Good point, which is why many companies that specialize in other games produce their minis in conjunction with a 3rd party. Why SJGames refuses to do that is beyond me.

The short answer is that you are either a miniatures gamer or you are not.

SJGames is just not made up of people who are miniatures gamers, nor will they EVER be. That is not a bad thing one way or the other. They make other kinds of games that many people like.

But no real miniatures gamer would have made a chipboard ogre. That decision alone tells you that Ogre/GEV will never be the miniatures that even a recent entry like "All Quiet on the Martian Front" is. SJGames simply does not do high-end, high-production games.

Again,that's ok. After watching sporatic efforts to make Ogre miniatures a real game since I bought my Martian Metals Ogres over three decades ago, it is time to let go. They just aren't miniatures gamers, and the world has moved on. Unless there is a Kickstarter to raise money to buy out the franchise and give it to Fantasy Flight, the game is a dead end – the coelacanth of wargames, if you will.

Anyone else recall that one of the Kickstarter's stretch goals was to "bring back the miniatures".

Well they did…for nine months…

When I asked if this is really in the spirit of the KS and 'bringing them back', I got told, slightly rudely I thought, that I had two chances to place an order, otherwise too bad.

Glad I stayed out of Ogre miniatures.

That's a great example of the difference between a miniatures gamer and a non-miniatures gamer. Like chipboard, bringing back a miniatures line for nine months just would not have crossed a miniatures gamer's mind. Ever.

Again, it is just a different way of looking at the world.

The Ogre Kickstarter was a million bucks. Alien Dungeon got a third of that for All Quiet on the Martian Front, and has more high-quality large plastic models in a year than SJG made in three decades. They are miniatures gamers. SJG are not miniatures gamers, nor will they ever be.

I agree that SJGames is not a miniatures company, but that's no reason to alienate the many gamers who are, by withdrawing the line, when it could easily be subcontracted out to a third party.

As a case in point, ADB, publishers of Star Fleet Battles are not (and never will be) an RPG company. They have strengths in board wargames and miniatures but RPGs simply are not their area of expertise. Yet they realized there was a market for an RPG based on SFB and published a (not especially good) RPG.

ADB's leadership realized that in spite of the of the initially poor execution the concept of a SFB RPG was sound. They also realized that simply updating the initial edition was not going to succeed. So they published a new edition using the the (then new) D20 system, and licensed the material to SJGames to produce a GURPS version of PD (and later did the same by licensing the material to Mongoose for a Traveller version).

In short ADB looked to other companies that do specialize in RPGs for collaboration and produced a game that has been successful. Why can't SJGames contract out the casting to Reaper (or ADB with whom they seem to have good relations) and make the minis available again? Why do they insist that because they cannot do it economically in house that it is impossible?

A friend jumped on the kick starter. Nice enough I suppose. Was it worth $100 USD? To him it was. I thought about… but just could not spend that much on a board game. I just don't play board games that much.

I wanted to be able to get the Ogre minis. I like many others thought they would be around for a while. I guess SJG has a different concept then the rest of the world.

I would have thought that if SJG were going to limit the amount of time that the minis would be available then there would have been some kind of announcement. Or have words to that effect on the order page.

So instead I will be making my own updated version. Picked up the base of the Ogre Ralnai Medium Tank "Slinking Killer".

tin-soldier.com/ral2.html

Micman,
From what I understand the "limited time" nature of the minis availability was announced on via KS update and on the message boards. I emailed and asked why it wasn't announced on the OGRE section of the main SJGames website and was (more or less) told "oops."

Steve Jackson has successfully taught me to never put any money into any kind of crowdfunding.

Zandris IV already makes better proxies for Ogre armor units than Steve Jackson ever dreamed of. If he expands to do cybertanks and the couple of missing types (GEV-PCs and superheavies, mostly, plenty of other infantry on the market) then we wouldn't need SJG for figures at all.

link

Coelacanth,

Not all KS go the way of the Ogre. I would put SJG in the made the initial goal succeeds, but failed at the stretch goals. They did re-release the game after all.

There are others that did not even get as far as their initial goal even with proper funding.

Then there are the ones that do very well in meeting their promises. I have THW Hospital 911 here on the desk in front of me.

It could be worse. We could be talking about Mongoose.

@Micman

I dunno. After seeing Jackson get away with murder, I don't think I could trust any KS.

@Chief Lackey Rich

Would it be a copyright infringement to put "conning towers" on not-Ogres?

Hmmm….

Kinda torn here. I played Ogre for over two decades without even thinking about miniatures (admittedly, I did purchase some Martian Metals (Ral Partha?) minis as collectors items in the mid-80s). Then, for some bizare reason I purchased Deluxe Ogre and Deluxe GEV – it might have been a fit of boredom.

In any event, I painted them up and used them with some success getting my son interested in wargamming as he likes to push metal around rather than chits. When he expressed an interest in the ODE Kickstarted, I went in for two sets and a bunch of extra maps and counters.

The new counters are nice, if different. My son and I had a lot of fun building the 3D counters. The maps are beautiful and would/will work nicely with the miniatures. But, the miniatures, to me, don't have the same "feel" as playing with the classic chits did.

There's talk about plastic Ogre miniatures. I guess we'll see.