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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pramas" data-source="post: 929292" data-attributes="member: 995">The original plan was as follows. The skirmish game would be released with six different starters. Each starter would contain 3 minis from a different faction, rules and counters, and retails for $12.99. The idea here was to give people some choice right away (even if all that choice was was "these gnolls look cool.") and to make the starters so affordable that lots of folks would give it a try. Even if you didn't like the game, you still got 3 minis (one of which was a larger fig, like a centaur). The skirmish game was only meant to stand alone for three months. At that point the full mass battles game was to debut, in a big ass box stuffed with plastic figs and terrain. I still have copies of the sketches Sam Wood did for the contents of this box and it would have been very cool. The plastic figs were to have included an undead dragon, hobgoblin archers, and human knights, amongst other things. The idea was that you could play the game on its own, or use it for mass battles in your D&D campaign. It would have been supported with new units, in both boxed sets and blisters, and rules add-ons like army books. I could probably write a book on why this plan never happened and why Chainmail ultimately took the form it did (including calling it Chainmail, which every member of the design team opposed). Of course, someone would need to pay me for it. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> The biggest thing working against the above plan was WotC's conviction that the game must be idealized for organized play. You can play 3 rounds of Magic in an hour, but you sure can't play 3 mass battles in an hour. That was one of the main reasons the "skirmish only" format developed.I was disappointed that the varied starters idea was kaiboshed in favor of one $30 starter with fixed factions. Old WotC hands (from the early days of Magic) argued that you couldn't possibly give people only three figs from one faction. That would only be half a game! Yeah, no one has ever had any success with a game in which you and a friend both have to buy a starter. Oh, except that pesky Magic game that put WotC on the map! Anyway, water under the bridge at this point. I'll be curious to see how the new game performs. Like others, I believe upper management at WotC has extremely unrealistic expectations on what this game can do for them.</blockquote>

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