 Hi folks, I've been invited down to Manny today to have a chat with some of the staff about things that they've been working on recently and some things coming up in the near future. And first of all we're going to chat to Dan about the board games that Manny have been producing. So Dan, what do I tell us about? Yeah, so board games is getting more and more important for Manny. We've always been into miniature wargaming, it's where we started, it's still the big bulk of what we do now, what we're very passionate about, but we love board games and we love theme and we love universes and yeah, dripping with story, all this kind of stuff and it's really important to us. And it's also because this is a great entry point for younger gamers. I think most of us grew up probably playing board games probably before we got into miniature wargaming. Yeah definitely. So this is a great start for people and you think how people get into picking a monopoly piece well once we put proper miniatures in the game like this it brings it to life. That's it, 100%. So we've got a few things here with us today as well. So what do we want to start with first? Yeah we've got a few things and the goal of all of them is kind of the same, they're all very kind of characterful, it's friendly, it's welcoming, it's just great fun. And we do a few things which are based on our own worlds and we do others which are based in fan favorite themes and universes as well to kind of bring that in. So we could start with kind of a couple of our own really. So one of the big things at the moment is bar room brawl. You've seen this, it's our kind of our advent calendar that we you know in a lunatic way launched in the middle of August and that's been very, very popular. We've had a few out into the wild, we had some retailers that wanted some but most of them have sold out and it's gone very, very quick and the idea was to what if we put a miniature game in an advent calendar. It's a brilliant idea. And we did and it's all about, it's a kind of a tavern like you might have at the beginning of an RPG game and you've got characters kind of making their way, I won't say who because there's some surprises behind some of the doors but they're making their way, they're getting food and drink, bringing it back to the table, barging each other, watch out for the bouncer and go and get your stuff from the dwarven barman and all this kind of thing. So it's very thematic, it's silly, it's fun and then in the run-up through December you build and paint the things over the course of the month and then by Christmas day you've had your turkey, you sit down, you play a great fun miniatures game with your friends. Nice little Christmas tipple and player brawl. Yeah and its reaction's been great and we'd love to do more of that kind of stuff in future, those one-shot fun silly thematic just brilliant stuff. So this has already gone on for pre-order originally, did you see if the initial wave has gone, is there a second wave coming? Yeah it's gone on the web store so now there'll be a few friendly local gaming stores who've got in on the action but otherwise this was a trial run and it's gone very well so everything in this one is hand-cast resin and it was just going okay let's see if there's an appetite for it and yeah it's gone really well. So we know people like that so we can look at it again and do something totally different next time. Get ready for next Christmas. Yep. Next up what have we got? So the next one will be dungeon saga origins. Yes. So this is one that's very near to our hearts, dungeon saga the original version was hugely popular and we've done reprint after reprint after reprint but it was showing its age and it was time to take it back to basics, inject some new life into it and bring that dungeon delving adventure to also to a slightly younger audience. So the core mechanics have been reworked, they've been polished, the miniatures in there are more detailed and better than what we've had before and the storytelling as well so the Kickstarter backers you'll be getting an enormous box version which has got extra campaigns and stories and characters and yeah all this fantastic stuff and then there'll be a more basic retail version which is your starting point which we're hoping to be up on retail shelves is probably one of the most affordable high quality dungeon crawlers that you can get your hands on and just give people just that great entry point to you know go battling through panathor with friends and family and have crazy adventures down in the underworld. I remember when I played it it's the perfect mix of kind of nothing too complicated to get younger players involved as well but still with some depth and some character and a good storyline behind it that keeps it interesting for for seasoned gamers as well. Yeah absolutely and in the future you can always add complexity in it's very hard to take it out so this is a reset point and we go back we do the stuff we do best and we do it really really well but the complexity comes from making tough decisions not from remembering tough rules and that's that was very much the goal and it's just it's nice it's smooth it's fun and you can play it with you know teens and young adults and yeah and have those family experiences. Great point so time and wise you were talking about the Kickstarter backers when is it looking roughly? This was a super ambitious new target for us we did the campaign in March yes and we said we're gonna try and get it under your Christmas tree yes and everyone went you're nuts but we're on track. Fantastic. We're on track we're on schedule and it looks like we are going to pull it off. Amazing. So yes we've got all our fingers crossed but so far you know not but not very long to go but it's all looking good. Look forward to seeing that and people's hands are very soon then. Absolutely yes. Okay that's not that's not the end we've got more. There is yeah well those are those are two games set in our own worlds yeah set in Panathor you know great fun and adventures and then we do lots of other things as well so we started off years and years ago we did you know Mars attacks and that kind of led on to bigger things and then we had the walking dead and then one thing leads to another then it was Hellboy yeah you know we've got this reputation and we can take an intellectual property and we can do it justice and then we get trusted by more and more people and that's going to allow us to do some even bigger stuff on the radar for the future which who knows Ronnie may or may not talk about at some point but yeah we've got big plans we've got lots of dreams and ambitions and stuff we would love to do and we'll make as many of them real as we can yeah some of which are already coming out so a great one is Worms. Worms yeah so Worms is what I first joined the company I hope we were doing Worms and that made my day I play this with a kid it's yeah I play this as a kid yeah with my best mate up in the spare room on the on the PlayStation and we would go on rainy day go and play Worms and it was great fun it's just it's fun it's silly and to bring that to tabletop is brilliant and trying to capture that craziness taking that vertical action laying it down make it make it horizontal but then you're modeling when you're modeling things like you know grenades bouncing not quite where you wanted them to go stuff yeah stuff's blowing up you know the landscape being destroyed worms are plopping into the water it's it's all there yeah it happens it's go it's fast it's furious it's silly and again it's all about just good fun and that's a that's a great one for ages 10 and up so so that's just recently been a Kickstarter yeah absolutely yeah and the company's finished now it has yeah yeah and time and why is how will what's the ambition for that so that one is for the the back end of next summer yeah but yeah the files have gone off everything's in final approvals with team 17 yeah checking the last teeny tiny details make sure it's just you know polished just right but they had lots of say obviously in the development so there's not there's not very much kind of tweaking to do yeah we just got to get it 100 right goes to the factory and then we begin the the fun bit of making it real brilliant so that's worms middle of next year we're talking now yeah absolutely next oh after after worms um well actually it's probably we're not kind of looking too much further forward than that yeah other stuff we've got going on so big kind of successful ip's voice is hellboy has been with us for a few years now and that ball game that's a hellboy dungeon crawler set in yeah might be known as comic universe dripping with theme all of the dungeon tiles are done in comic art yeah all of the sculpts are you know they've kind of been through and yeah make sure they're absolutely on point for just the look and the feel and yeah they're beautiful yeah yeah so it's just yeah dripping with theme and you go through and you carry out investigations there's a deck and you don't know what's going to be in it so you work through the surprises and twists and it's got that sense of kind of mystery and investigation and adventure yeah and then we've had a whole whole series of expansions for hellboy as well yeah and it's you know it's still it's still very popular i remember playing the kind of the prototype versions of hellboy with uh with james ewitt who was one of the creators of the game absolutely and uh and playing through he's kind of the first time he really had a a demo set shall we say and we played through that um and then to see it like when it when it finally arrived because i backed the kickstart as well when it finally arrived to see all that stuff and unboxing it and looking to see what's inside it's a beautiful product hellboy great ip um and yeah as you see loads of bits of expansions and stuff especially for folks who didn't maybe back the original Kickstarter but also new stuff for Kickstarter backers as well yes yeah yeah absolutely okay so that's hellboy it doesn't stop there there's more to come no we've got this rather big tower next to me here so umbrella academy so this one has just gone up for pre-order yeah so of course we make sure stuff gets to backers first of course most important yeah but then we let everyone else have a crack as well so we have shipped out to backers we've seen some pictures on facebook of people going oh it's here it's in the post it's on the doorstep as we now put this up for pre-order for everybody else so this is November the 20th i believe wow so we're doing taking pre-orders for that already for the retail edition and if we've got a few left over of kind of collectors editions yeah from the from the print run because inevitably you have to do however many thousands of course and if we don't do exactly that number we're not we're not going to get rid of them we're going to make sure they get into a yeah someone's hand who's going to play it and love it and of course yeah so we may have a few collectors editions kind of rattling about but at this point it's mainly about the retail edition yeah and we save generally now we tend to save retail editions for the retailers for your friendly local gaming shop yeah they want that pickup shelf appeal of course yeah you want people to support those stores and get out there and play those games as well absolutely and this is a great game for one to five players yep 13 plus you're working together to save the world of course you are and you've got characters with with different abilities and the catching this one they don't always get on you know which is very much in line with the comics and in line with the tv series for those who've seen it yeah so yeah good fun nice and affordable very self-contained yeah this one isn't as miniatures heavy this is more there's more kind of you know card based acts but of course you're all heroes you've got your miniatures and they're all thematic and characterful yeah again i've played through this one as well and it's one of those games that if you're a fan of the umbra academy um you'll really feel the theme coming through and if you're if you're not aware of the umbrella academy at all there's still a great game in there as well load a hand management making sure that you kind of you know what you're doing with the with the cards that you've got in your hand planning ahead working together as a team as you see it's cards that are stopping you not always getting on as well kind of those family feuds that always crop up in this i think there's three series on netflix as well yeah of course we want to really just immerse into the world and what it's all about so that's quite a lot then so we've just talked about the bar room brawl advent calendar we've been talking about dungeon saga origins we talked about worms umbrella academy hell boy is that it it's not quite it there's a little bit more of course there's more of course there's um so walking dead yes we are working with we're working with skybound again yeah which is exciting it is exciting so we had a whole series of walking dead to get a product and yeah we had a couple of offshoot games and things within that it was very very popular yeah and you know as licenses often do you know good usually all the good things come to an end of course but we've gone back for more and we're starting off with a kind of a card and dice game yeah um we've said we've done dice games before we did the dice game for hell boy yeah which is a really nice self-contained fun quick filler game that is you know it's all based on pushy luck mechanics and we realize we've got so we've got a system there that works really well and a little bit like you see other kind of filler games have spun off into different universes with a slight twist each time yeah it's going to be a bit of reasoning and yeah yeah because also you might not like hell boy but you might love the walking dead yeah and you go oh okay well that's a nice cheap pickup affordable yeah from the counter at my local game shop and you take it yeah or you take it traveling or it's yeah the intro to games evening yeah um all because you haven't got very much time you want to squeeze a game in it is brilliant for all those things but again pushy luck mechanics there's a little bit of a twist each time different cards work different ways um so basically that's experimenting with a couple of non miniature games in a small accessible format yeah so that's what the walking dead and also invincible also invincible which is getting bigger and bigger on uh because especially because the amazon prime series yeah it was something i've not wasn't that aware of until i saw the amazon prime series and i've gone back to try and understand more about it and didn't realize just how big and how popular it was yeah it's funny how these things can fly under the radar yeah and that takes a lot of the kind of the superhero conventions and turns them on its head and that's not very much what it's it's getting at so it's a it's a bit of a twist you're expecting superman it's not superman it's very different but you know we've got all this kind of flavor and the arts especially the great thing for the card and dice games is the comic art just kind of pops on just all the kind of the cards in the artwork yeah definitely really nice and these games are the kind of the perfect kind of thing like you say that the game between games you know like oh you're at a game store you've played your big game you've got a bit of time left at the end of the night kind of thing you want to play something else i've been to conventions where you're waiting in queues for the place to open these are perfect just to kind of like you know when you see people sitting in queues playing card games that kind of thing sitting having a beer on a night time or a cup of tea or coffee of course yeah or it's an evening after work and you get you get you get home you've been at computer all day and yeah maybe you don't want to turn another screen on you go let's play a game i haven't got three hours what have we got oh we've got we've got this yeah that we could play that in half an hour 25 minutes and you can still get that that social interaction tabletop experience in a nice bite size little format hundred percent i think it just it shows now the breadth of kind of the the stable of mantik's um board game sort of um offerings now as well is that you might be well known for miniatures and kind of been doing that for quite a long time but the quality of those board games just kind of keeps coming now and there's some big licenses in there there's some good like sort of your own ip stuff in there but i think that there's generally something for everybody whether you're a new gamer just getting started whether you've got a young family and you're wanting to get them playing kind of rolling dice and getting off the screens for a bit yep or if you're a bit more experienced and you want to kind of uh you know you want to take something a bit more meaty to your games there your games night so when we started we've got some which is sort of 14 plus then we've got something with 13 plus yeah we've got some which are 10 plus and then we're going to go but we're going to kind of broaden that out even more in the future we've got some but we can't talk about just yet we'll be we're showing a little bit of the open day well we've got some got some ideas for future and so yeah things things that we're working on to just welcome yeah even more people into getting around the table playing great games having that that social experience because that's the magic of it that's where it kind of it comes to life it's the it's the reactions you get from each other when things happen on the table when plans work or don't work of course and just bring bring that magic to a bigger bigger group of people that's why we play games you all want to have fun together don't we absolutely so Dan thank you very much for your time there thank you thanks for showing us what what manic have been up to and a little bit of a glimpse into the future as well of what's coming down the line and no doubt when we've got more to talk about we'll be back again and let you know sure we will thanks very much thank you