Can Games Workshop’s ‘Cursed City’ Break Into the Board Games Community?
Cursed City is upon us, Games Workshop’s latest boxed Warhammer Quest title. But can Games Workshop breakthrough into the boardgame market in a big way?
Cursed City is here and it looks amazing. Game’s Workshop’s latest entry into the Warhammer Quest series takes us back into Age of Sigmar’s mortal realms and it’s all vampires all the time.
We get a giant set of 60 Citadel miniatures – from 8 awesome heroes, to a fistful of stunning vampires and their undead minions. The overall theme is familiar, as the game is built on the shoulders of Blackstone Fortress and especially Silver Tower. It’s got a small but heavy dense box filled with books, cards, and those 22 extra thick beautifully-illustrated dungeon tiles. Take a look back at Silver Tower to see the clear lineage of this one:
It will be a quest/mission based adventure game with your handful of heroes against the undead baddies. On the hobby side of things, the miniatures look to be push fit with no glue required. Don’t forget your snips.
Welcome to the Boardgame Universe
Which leads us to our next question. Can these big-ticket boxed boardgames break into the broader boardgame market – and does GW even want them to? Much has been made of Cursed City’s price, but other have noticed that other top tier boardgames are in the same general range. Take a look at 2020’s Kickstarter mega-success Frosthaven, which brought in a record $12,969,608 in funding! Now look at its components, which are roughly equivalent, and its default bare-bones price clocked in at $145, and went up from there.
GW’s No-Mans-Land
But this brings us back to the bigger question of does GW really even want to have their games break into the broader boardgame universe. On the one hand, Games Workshop is the undisputed king of tabletop wargames and therefore plastic miniatures. GW’s miniature quality and design are unmatched, and no other major IP in the industry has anything close in 2021.
But this comes with baggage. Take a modern boardgame like Frosthaven, or a more miniatures intensive one like say Twilight Imperium. These games are playable right out of the box. The minis are usually color coded, and require little to no assembly. Some higher-end editions come pre-painted.
On the other hand, GW wants and requires you to step into the deeper GW hobby community. Even with push-fit minis, you still need hobby supplies, and then painting. Some more recent smaller GW games are shipping with color-coded minis, but that is still the exception rather than the rule. This is by design, as you are welcomed into the universe of GW games via the hobby aspects and we all know that once you start wandering down the Warhammer rabbithole – it is very, very, very deep indeed. Things like Warhammer Underworlds, lead to Warcry, and before you know it, you have 3 Age of Sigmar armies begging for you to assemble and paint them. And all those nice new minis in Cursed City will of course have enticing rules for Age of Sigmar. This of course is by design.
We went back and looked for GW boardgames that stand up on their own and are played and collected independently of the broader GW universe. They are few and far between. Things like Heroquest (now reclaimed by Hasbro), and Space Hulk are examples.
This again leads me to think that GW may view these boardgames with a different eye than other companies do. They may not view these games as standalone products designed to bring in a giant audience who will duke it out on BGG. Instead, they could be defensive hedges designed to keep those existing GW fans busy if they get the boardgame itch, while staying all warm and cozy within the Warhammer universes. They may also be designed to pull in those Nottingham-curious who have been tip-toeing past the GW stores looking for an excuse to jump in.
We have to wait and see, but I do look forward to the day when GW decides to push the ‘Games’ in Games Workshop with a boardgame that really breaks into the entire industry.
~Also I’m sure that whatever is up, Cursed City will sell out in 5 minutes and get tossed around by resellers on ebay in hours!
