Boudicca of the Iceni:
Last Call for the Warrior Babe
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
October 2011

I expected great things from Rome at War: Queen of the Celts. And most of them were fulfilled: it’s a very fine game, produced good sales numbers, and gave us a good launch for the third edition of the Rome at War series rules.

Not all, though. I wanted the game to serve as the launching point for a revived Rome at War series. Toward that end, I wanted it to have a spectacular cover, and so contracted with Lorenzo Sperlonga to craft just such a piece. We discussed our thinking at the time in this Daily Content viewpoint.

As described there, we ended up launching the game with two covers. I wouldn’t class that as a mistake: additional sales I’m pretty sure we would not have garnered without it more than covered the added expense, and the very existence of multiple covers screamed that this game was a Big Deal. Even so, those resources really should have gone toward a different product. We did not have another Rome at War game even close to ready for a follow-on release; in fact, we haven’t released any new product for the series since then. I do think we could have built on the splash/notoriety, but any momentum gained was lost.

The usual pattern for a stand-alone boxed wargame (for us at least) has good sales at first, stronger for a few months after release, then tailing off over the following years. Series games will keep their sales strength much longer than stand-alone games; the pattern for Queen of the Celts falls somewhere in between.

As some of you know, we moved our office/warehouse in a great hurry in late July and early August of this year. As a result, parts for our older games are stacked pretty haphazardly in our new warehouse. I’ve been digging through them ever since, and it’s not easy and it’s outright painful when something falls on you. The space is stuffed full, and while we actually have the option to expand by about half again as much floor area, we’re not in the business of warehousing games. Clearing out Red Russia and Austerlitz helped a lot, but it’s still a pretty tight fit. Dragging out the parts for the new edition of Soldier Emperor and reprint of Bismarck was extremely difficult and time-consuming. Something else has to go.

As any game ages, its sales shift from individual sales to wholesale sales (through distributors and retailers). Queen of the Celts is unique in that; with one version for retail sales and one aimed at individual customers, sales of one box fell off faster than those of the other. That made the choice of the next space sacrifice pretty easy.

Queen of the Celts is a fine game, one we’ll keep in print as the Rome at War series expands. I’d like to see this series become the ancient-world equivalent to Panzer Grenadier or Great War at Sea, with many boxed games, books and even downloadable supplements to expand its coverage and keep it refreshed and fun. Designer Dave Murray has given it what it really has needed all along: a campaign system linking its battles together. The Ivy Division campaign found in Panzer Grenadier: Winter Soldiers is an outgrowth of this; the original campaign, for Rome at War: Fading Legions, is slated for the eventual release of a book supplement called King of Kings.

The campaign concept completely changes Rome at War, and I’m looking forward to many more games in the series once we have a few other long-promised titles out the door. I’d like to see it as successful as Panzer Grenadier or Great War at Sea. Queen of the Celts is an important part of that concept.

But only in its retail edition. The “Warrior Babe” boxes (retail-edition-artist Beth Donahue’s name for them) are going to feed the flames on All Soul’s Day, so we can have a little breathing room inside the warehouse. So this is your chance to get hold of William Sariego’s excellent game design, a core series game we’ll try to keep in stock for years, at a clearance price by October 31st. After that, the smoking hot babe bursts into flame.

Will I miss it? Not likely. I have the original on my office wall.