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View Full Version : Wargames Foundry - Rebirth, new management and brand new releases



Matt Adlard
03-07-2013, 07:25 AM
For those of you which have been gamers pre-dating the past decade, WF was one of the industry standards and a staple provider of figures and paints, a lot designed and painted by Kev Dallimore or the Perry Twins and Shane Hoyle.
Foundry is owned by Brian Ansell which for those in the know was the owner of GW before he sold his share off back in the 90's.

However over the years as new younger companies have started to take more of the market share, Foundry seems to have fell by the way side. Yet things are starting to turn around with a change in management, returning to family; Marcus Ansell. This new change has seen the release of their own fantasy system God of Battles and was released with two special open days, that saw the games designer Jake Thornton being there in-order to run both the players through the system and offered advice.

God of Battles is Jake Thornton's new fantasy wargaming rules, in which players command armies of model soldiers to battle against each other across Aren’s troubled lands.
Jake is the author of our own Tribes of Legend, as well as having written Dreadball, Dwarf King's Hold and Project Pandora for Mantic Games.* Jake has done design work for Warhammer 6th edition, managed Blood Bowl, Necromunda and Mordheim and was the editor for White Dwarf for two years.

The open day was a success and lead to anouther interesting development with the birth of Foundry Arena, the opportunity ffor people to game at the factory shop it's self.

Marcus the new manager of Wargames Foundry understandably has also expressed interest and excitement with this new project, and has agreed to not only offer the shop floor space and several tables for the games to be run on. Which for those with a sharp eye will recognise some of them from being featured on a Television show; But has even proposed an epic original Space Hulk game and an all day campaign of their wild west game system, The rules with No Name.

To quote Marcus as to what he is planning.


We've been running Foundry since last June. Our plan was to wait at least six months before we made any major changes. We felt it would take that long to get to the bottom of everything. We can't really claim to have actually got to the bottom of quite everything yet.*
However, we have now started getting on with those changes!*
*
Our Website
We have to put our hands up and admit to running a mediocre website: ugly, confusing and sometimes so slow it can make you want to weep uncontrollably with boredom and frustration. Our models look awful in the mean little photos, even though the majority of them are very wonderful castings indeed.*

Embarassingly, someone chose to pointlessly change the names of many of our models without any reference to historical accuracy or common sense. *
Our website must have lost us many customers over the past few years.
*
We can only offer our apologies, and our heartfelt thanks to all of you for sticking with us through the slow process of putting your orders together on our uncooperative website.

We have started to build a new website in the format that Kevin Dallimore designed for us back in about 2000: when we were in Guernsey.*

That was the one with eight life-size packs of models shown on each page. Clicking on them brought the images up massively in size.

]You may recall that our site was previously packed with historical information, articles, painting guides, banners, rules and suchlike jollyness. We will put all that back too.*This may turn into a big job. I should be able to do much of the legwork but this may take a month or three.

Removing Substandard and UnFoundrylike Models

From some point after 2005, a number of the new models made at Foundry were of either of a substandard quality or inappropriate in style.
It may seem strange to condemn a model soldier for "inappropriateness": but Foundry was originally founded when Cliff Ansell (my grandfather) took over the manufacturing of early Citadel historical models that would otherwise have been discontinued.

Foundry started with a selection of mostly models by Michael and Alan Perry, and various odds and ends from Alistair Morrison and Dave Andrews. Since then Foundry has always stuck to a style that reflects the work of the early Citadel sculptors: Adams, Andrews, Ansell, Bibby, Goodwin, Morrison, Naismith and the Perrys.*

Where a model obviously doesn't fit that style, we think that it really should be taken out of the Foundry ranges. *We think that our customers have a right to expect us to maintain a consistent general style.
We have already removed the hundreds of packs of Napoleonic models that were made over the last seven years to replace Michael and Alan's ranges. We currently have no plans to put them back in production.
*
We will shortly start taking down all the models on our website that we regard as "UnFoundrylike".*

We will continue to manufacture these models permanently, but will give them their own independent website with a new name. Until we sort a new website out we will put them up on eBay*("THE CASTING ROOM:*Budget Wargames Miniatures!"). As they go up on eBay, we will remove them from our main website.*
*
Substandard models*are a more serious matter. There is no fun at all in selling models that are not adequate in proportion, finish, detail, pose or historical accuracy.*
When we took over Foundry, we found ourselves in a painful situation.

Customers were buying models from us that we considered to be substandard. This made us very uncomfortable: our instinct was to just discontinue them, we didn't want to push relatively poor models onto our customers.

Yet we didn't want to be pushy newcomers who went about obstructing established customers buying choices either, or deny customers who have different tastes to us the chance to finish their armies.*
In the end, we decided that we couldn't just discontinue ranges that people were still collecting and we stuck with our six month rule.
*
As it happens, when we looked at the sales figures, it turned out that although we manufacture a number of models that could be described as substandard, they make up only a tiny portion of our overall sales. *Shortly we will permanently remove all those models from our site. We may offer them for outright sale (see below).

Pre-2006 Fantasy Models
We have a fairly large number of fantasy models in our ranges. My father had quite a few fantasy models made (well, actually over 300 wonderful Orcs and Ogres and Snorklings and Dwarfs and bits sculpted by Kevin Adams and great Elves and Dwarfs by Kevin, Mark Copplestone, Mike Owen and Shane Hoyle).
*
We have a vast fantasy range, but we sell hardly any of them: regardless of their quality. I suppose that as we are a company known for military miniatures, fantasy is just not what people expect us to be doing.

Foundry's last management reduced the price of our fantasy packs from £12 to £10 to try and get more sales in: but it made no difference.*
*
We have done a proper costing of the earlier fantasy models.*
It seems that for the big models which make up the bulk of the older fantasy ranges, we would have to charge closer to £20 a pack, just to break even.*

This being the case, we have decided to withdraw all those fantasy models that date from my father's time from our website while we think about things. However, we don't want to leave anyone in the lurch, so we will still supply any models you need to finish your collection or army over the next couple of months: you just need to ring us up.

However this doesn't mean that the new game system God of battles will not be figure supported, as this will not be the case.


Unreleased Masters *
Foundry's last management left us with surprisingly large numbers of masters of unreleased models. We keep finding more of them.
Some of the masters are rather sad: the underlying structure is fine, but the surface detail is quite poor.*
The sculptor must have been taking the piss (as we say here in Nottinghamshire).*
We plan to hang on to them and use them as training tools for new sculptors. Eventually they will probably be nicely sorted out and will see actual release.
*
Others will probably be manufactured and put up on the*"FlytesofFantasy"*eBay site.*
We have some very eccentric Steam Punk Orks that we will most likely put into production eventually.
*
Others (recently discovered Marlburian pikemen for instance, or power armoured science fiction warriors) are of little interest to us, so will probably be auctioned off on eBay.

If we do that, we will sell them complete with the rights to manufacture them. This might be the first time manufacturing rights for model soldiers have been sold on eBay.

So exciting times with Foundry.