In the US, GW is selling at Target Games Workshop Space Marine: The Board Game box set with rules, gameboard and 23 figures for $40. What I thought was originally only to be available online I now see it's available in stores. They claim fast-paced gameplay – about 30 minutes per game.

Off hand, I could see a LOTR box with a Last Alliance battle company of 6 figures battling some orcs.

C'mon GW, give us some love.

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"Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer."

I'd wager that the standalone Mines of Moria board game they did a while back would have sold well there. Surely more casual gamers have heard of The Lord of the Rings than Warhammer?

When the LOTR trilogy came out the three Starter boxes (FotR. TT, & RotK) were all widely available in US bookstores. The game did not find traction and they ended up in bargain bins along with the $7 blisters at 50% off. I bought tons of Minis then as a result. LOTR turned into a specialist game without widespread availability. GW even tried to replace it with the WoTR mass game. Without the momentum of any films, wide distribution is unlikely. That said, I would love to see GW give it a go, if it did not kill SBG if it fails.

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Lost Pict

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I hear that, and wish I could have taken advantage of the bargain bin rates. I remember seeing the FotR box set back when it first came out at the local game store, and thinking $35 was way too much for what you got. Ah, innocence....

But I see the board game as being a different sales proposition from the minis game. The board game has no need for measuring tape, no need to make terrain -- literally everything you need is right there in the box other than an opponent. And even that is not strictly necessary, in my own experience .

Those "bargin bin" sets left me with the majority of my plastic mountain, so many uruk-hai and mounted rohan to paint. I knew what I was getting for Christmas three years in a row, it was great!

The Space Marine set had all the pre-order sold out, and now most of the stores near me are sold out. Within fifty miles only 8 sets are left, four in one store.

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"Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer."

I bought 60 of the metal Easterlings for $60 bucks in Wally's Basement at Cold Wars or Historicon during the SBG collapse around 2012. I also bought a pile of the old 1st age metal orcs. They had pretty much all the blisters in the product line for $2 each. Of course the word on the street was SBG was dead and GW could not afford to keep the license. You could buy huge armies on ebay for dirt cheap which always came with metal Heroes. I ended up with 3 or more of most of the metal heroes released during the first ten years. I was gifted boxed Mumak and a Two Towers box set by friends dropping the game. GW did not help themselves with finecast also happening in that time frame. I went to a US GW store and we had to open three or four of the Great Beast to find one that had mateable halves. All of this most have cost GW a fortune.

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Lost Pict

http://sfdfsfd.wordpress.com/