Or I copy it here:
By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Thursday, September 29, 2005 - 05:38 pm: Edit
This is the huge press release I just sent to wholesalers.
Memo: 29 Sept 2005
From: Amarillo Design Bureau, Inc.
To: Wholesalers, retailers, and gamers
Re: Federation Commander launch date.
Drum roll, please!
We here at Amarillo Design Bureau, Inc., are incredibly excited to be able to tell you about our new space combat game system, which will ship on 7 Nov 2005. You’ve heard rumors and seen vague listings in our production schedule for months, and now it’s time for some hard facts.
Federation Commander is the new "fast play" starship combat game from Amarillo Design Bureau, Inc., the people who brought you the intense (and complex) game Star Fleet Battles, the best-selling starship combat game of all time. Federation Commander is designed for the new markets of the 21st Century, where players expect and demand high production values, rules they can learn in an hour, and games that can be played multiple times in a single evening.
Here is the hard data for your computer.
Federation Commander: Klingon Border
Boxed Game, SKU #4001, MSRP $59.95, Release 7 Nov 05
Allow me to take a moment and apologize that you didn’t have all of this information two months ago. You should have, and if we had been able to send it out, we would have. During the final phases of design we made a terrifying decision to produce Federation Commander to "Eurogame" standards instead of to "1980s wargame standards".
Now let’s talk about the game itself. The box has brilliant cover art by Mark Evans, the artist who did the dramatic cover for Klingons D20. The playing pieces are full color one-inch squares with full-color high-resolution computer images of the starships. The ship diagrams (listing what a ship has, and how much of it has been wrecked by enemy weapons) are in full color and laminated for hundreds of repeat uses. The full-color map board is laminated on both sides of 80-point board, with "open space" on one side and terrain (asteroids or planets) on the other. Players can fight their savage battles in deep space or near their home planets.
Federation Commander invites comparisons to Star Fleet Battles, even if these are not entirely fair. Federation Commander has been called "SFB Lite" and it fulfills the function of that title, but it is far more than a "stripped down’ version of the classic game. It is a new design, built from the ground up for fast play. We didn’t take SFB and made it simpler; we built a new game engine that IS faster to learn, master, and play. For those who want the hard numbers for comparison:
SFB Basic Set has 224 pages of rules (with over two thousand more pages in later products), 32 decision points per turn, two die rolls for every point of damage, takes four hours to fight a one-on-one duel, and uses a tax form to allocate the energy produced by your engines.
Federation Commander has 48 pages of rules (with only a few more pages in all future products), 8 decision points per turn, one die roll for ten points of damage, takes one hour or less to play a one-on-one duel, and handles energy with an on-the-fly system using tokens (or even a paperclip sliding on a numbered scale).
We are aware that Star Fleet Battles started in 1979 as a 48-page book that grew, over 25 years, to over 2,000 pages of rules and over 3,000 starships. We don’t need to reinvent Star Fleet Battles, and have designed Federation Commander to START and REMAIN a fast-paced game with all of the excitement and little of the engineering, accounting, and rules lawyering. Future elements will add scenarios and ships, not complicated new concepts and systems. Future elements will add new empires and a modest number of rules for the weapons of those new empires.
Federation Commander will sell to:
Everyone who ever played Star Fleet Battles and liked it.
Everyone who ever played Star Fleet Battles and thought it was too complicated.
Everyone who plays Full Thrust, Silent Death, Battle Fleet Gothic, A Call to Arms, and Babylon 5 Wars.
Everyone who is a fan of any Star Trek series.
Everyone who plays RPGs and wants a fast space combat system.
Major selling points of the system include:
Colorful Eurogame-quality components
Thousands of pre-sold Star Fleet Battles players.
Full miniatures support.
Hex-based and free-form movement systems.
Two game scales to keep the largest battles under four hours.
A major element of our marketing campaign (which has sent advertising to all of the major magazines and other venues) is our Federation Commander Rollout Weekend on 25-27 November. Hundreds of fanatically loyal Star Fleet Universe fans have committed to running demonstration events in their local stores all weekend. Wholesalers already have our full-color flyer to send to every game store.
Federation Commander is a complete game system, designed to maximize player value. By providing the elements that the players want in digestible bites, we will also maximize store profits. Here is what we have planned.
Federation Commander: Klingon Border is the first boxed set. It includes 16 full-color 5x8 inch starship displays and 40 full-color starship playing pieces.
Also available will be three $39.95 "squadron boxes" of Starline 2400 miniatures which exactly match the ships in Federation Commander: Klingon Border. This will be a major up-sell item for retailers ... and remember that those other space games are basically vehicles to sell miniatures.
The mounted double-sided space map will also be available early next year as a separate item, which Federation Commander players will want so they can host larger battles, and which will also sell to any other miniatures and space combat players.
This will be followed in February by three "booster packs" for $9.95. Each booster will provide additional copies of the full-color laminated starship cards from the game so that players who want to play larger battles can use multiple ships of the same class. Each booster will include a command cruiser not included in the original game.
This will be followed in April by Federation Border: Klingon Attack, an expansion with 16 additional ships (none of them in the original FC:KB game) and two additional map sections. Simultaneously, we will release three "boosters" with additional copies of the ships in the Federation Border: Klingon Attack (each booster including one new ship not in the expansion).
This will be followed in June by Federation Commander: Romulan Border and its three boosters and three squadron boxes, followed two months later by the Federation Border: Romulan Attack and its three boosters.
Obviously, we will add exciting new expansions (that do not clog up the game system) for years to come, and our multiple lines of RPGs are an exciting opportunity for cross-marketing.
Additional information about Federation Commander can be found at
www.starfleetgames.com/fc if you want to check out some sample components, and please feel free to call Ken Burnside, our Marketing Director, at 806-351-1950 if you have any questions.
And with the audacity to add this:
By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Thursday, September 29, 2005 - 05:39 pm: Edit
Retail price $59.95. Given the components, no other company would sell it for less than $99.95.