STATUM ATLANTICUM MMXXV

Well fam we are back again for another year end (year beginning?) round up of what’s been happening and what’s planned for the coming months! Hint: holy hell it's a LOT!

2024 was a fantastic year for us and - knock on wood - hopefully the start of a long-lasting trend featuring more and better products, more types of products, more of our stuff in more stores all over the world, and just more plastic goodness altogether!

Wargames Atlantic in stock at LA Wargames

In 2024 we added another 26 hard plastic sets to the catalog and we have already put out 3 new ones this year so let’s see if we can break that record in 2025! Our current tally stands at 70 hard plastic sets since the launch of the Skeletons and Raumjager in mid 2019.

The start of 2024 also marked the end of our first five year plan as a company and we are now well into our second five year plan. As the first five years were focused on building a deep and wide hard plastics catalog, the next five are about not only increasing the tempo of that production but also adding in original game systems - the first of which will be launching this year!

Our 5 Year Plans are a LITTLE different!

THE DAMNED

Our successful crowdfunding campaign in 2023 has taken a bit more time than we had hoped to fulfill, but it was also 11 new sets worth to design, tool, and produce - talk about eating the elephant! Production has started on the 10s of thousands of frames needed for fulfillment.

Once sent out to backers, we will be bringing all 11 of The Damned sets out like regular Death Fields products over the rest of the year. We’re starting with a special Damned Army Box that will give you a great force to get onto the table.

This release will create our most complete Death Fields army in the range so we have a lot of work to do to bring the rest up to snuff! Part of that will be giving you a way to play with these models. More on that soon!

GRAND BATTLE SCALE

Perhaps the “biggest” news of 2024 was also the smallest: the launch of our first 10mm hard plastic ranges! Our first two sets: Samurai and Ashigaru are getting a follow up in a few weeks with a Samurai Army Command box. The next historical range is Azincourt with frames that include English Knights, Longbowmen, Genoese Crossbowmen, French Knights, and French Mounted Knights. These are in layout and tooling now so will be with us soon.

The next historical Grand Battle Scale range is coming fast on Azincourt's heels too!

CLASSIC FANTASY BATTLES

Combining two of 2025’s focuses (foci?) is the range and game for 10mm Classic Fantasy Battles! Our first set, Orc Infantry, is done tooling and the box is getting ready. Dwarven Infantry, Skeletons, and Elves will follow along soon with many other sets this year culminating in the launch of a massively small new game. You’ll be hearing a lot about that in the lead up to the release as Andy discusses gameplay, army building, and more.

Orc Infantry box art by Marco Capparoni

OTHER GRAND BATTLE SCALE GAMES

We have three other games in the works for the Grand Battle Scale ranges. One is in partnership with the fine folks at Helion and we’ll be announcing that in the near future. Another is the brainchild of Battlegames founder Henry Hyde. And the third one is well into play testing in the wilds of Cornwall!

ALL YOUR BASE BELONG TO US!

2024 has seen a flurry of hard plastic base releases in a variety of styles. Our first set of bases way back in 2022 were the somewhat revolutionary 25mm Round Dual-Use bases. For those of you who haven't heard of them, they are a base design that can accommodate a figure's integral puddle base on one side or take a puddle base-less figure's feet on the other. They all come with 3mm x 1mm magnet holes to help you secure your troops in transport too. 

We now have several new additions to this range including 25mm x 50mm pills, 20mm squares, 20mm x 40mm rectangles (which will come in handy for CFB!), and 40mm squares. 

We're also about to launch the second set of textured bases. 50mm rounds will be joining our 25mm rounds. These are great because you can glue your figure down, do a bit of drybrushing, and you are good to go! 

We've also just sent a starship decking base set to tooling. These will come in very handy with those upcoming Expanse crewmen! 

Let us know in the comments below what other size and type bases you'd like to see from us in hard plastic!

ATLANTIC DIGITAL

We continue to grow our digital catalog by leaps and bounds. At the time of writing we are up to just under 400 file sets on our store at MyMiniFactory! This year we added some new tiers including a Centurion tier that gives you 19 file sets a month spread across our 12 ranges and with extra sets for Medieval, Classic Fantasy, and Death Fields. At $18/month it’s quite a bargain!

We recently made the decision to take the digital products off our website and keep them exclusively at MMF. This keeps it simpler, allows us to focus on the hard plastic products on our site, and lets MMF focus on doing what they do best. 

We do still have a growing catalog of PDF rules on the site and will continue to add to those as well. 

We also have a growing, vibrant community at our Atlantic Digital Legion Facebook group. Come join the fun! 

STRANGE PLASTIC

There are many of you who aren’t into the whole 3D printing thing and this year we put in place a relationship to help fix that: Strange Plastic. This is a relatively new company set up by Joshua Qualtieri (the inventor of the Quar and former Pixar animator). SP houses almost all of our digital sets as fully printed (in very, very nice 3D print resin) parts. They also produce and ship from three locations: the USA, the UK, and from New Zealand. If you’ve seen one of the digital sets but lamented not having a 3D printer, this is how you can easily get ahold of the almost 400 sets we’ve made.

VOX POPULI AND “REGULAR” RELEASES

We still have a big list of sets on Vox Populi that we will be releasing. The first one - Dark Ages Army Builder - will be with us soon along with sets for the Warring States period of Chinese history. 2025 will see several more sets from the list appear as we release all of them over time.

We’ll also have several “random” releases to continue to flesh out our 13 ranges (14 if you count Might of Rome!) So prepare to be surprised. To paraphrase President Obama: “It’s what we DO!”

And 2025 will see the launch of models in a completely new scale from us. We're not talking about the 1/1200 Expanse ships (see below) and we're definitely not talking about "those nasty little 15s" or even the ridiculous 13.5mm figures! So stay tuned! 

OUTSOURCE MANUFACTURING, JOINT VENTURES, AND LICENSED PROPERTIES

2024 also saw lots of work for other companies (most of which we aren’t allowed to talk about!) 2025 will see quite a lot more of this including new sets for both the Iron-Core and Reptilian Overlords ranges. We are also bringing the Expanse to hard plastic (28mm Crew and 1/1000 Spaceships) in partnership with Green Ronin who publish the amazing RPG. We’re also helping bring Marcher by Golden Dragon Games to hard plastic for some dieselpunk action!

Coming up soon is the release of two new Classic Fantasy sets: Guards and Villagers. These frames were made to support Grey For Now Games' new Guards of Traitor’s Toll game. Keep an eye out for it!

Another one on the horizon are the Gladiators for the Blood on the Sands game (coming to Kickstarter February 11th). These will become the second set in our very occasional “Might of Rome” range and a follow up to the Citizens of Rome box we did in partnership with Footsore. The parts will all mix and match for a lovely Spartacus army too!

More than anything, 2024 was the year of the Quar! We partnered with Joshua Qualtieri of ZombieSmith (and Strange Plastic) to take his lovable and iconic Quar to hard plastic. Starting with the This Quar’s War: Clash of Rhyfles game we have followed up with three hard plastic sets and at writing have seven more in progress with even more to come after those! 2025 will see all these sets and more as the world of the Quar expands across dozens of hard plastic sets and more games.

We have also secured our first license for a popular television series that is fertile ground for a wargame. Contracts are signed and plans are made and work is starting. But that’s something for another day!

NEW BLOOD: ANDY HOBDAY!

Personally, one of my favorite parts of 2024 was getting to know Andy Hobday better as he worked with us on a part-time basis on several projects. As many of you know, Andy is a long-time wargames industry veteran (can you really call this little thing an “industry”?) who has worked for Games Workshop, Warlord Games, co-founded Footsore Games and Miniatures and also Hobday & Hicks among others. Andy is the co-author of the popular Test of Honour Samurai rules and also wrote Mortal Gods, Gangs of Rome, The Barons’ War, Coven, and others. As our new Creative Director and member of the senior management team, Andy will be working with myself and COO ("Operations Overlord" - we need a clever title for Andy!) Charlie Monaghan to steer the ever-expanding raft that is Wargames Atlantic. And he’ll be making some games too!

GLOBAL RELEASE DATES

We're excited to say we've achieved a milestone we have been striving to hit for some time: global release dates no matter where you are. As we increase our production capabilities and in general increase both the speed and the number of releases, we can now start shipping pre-orders everywhere all at once. This is how it works: a set will go on pre-order on a Friday, the following Friday it will start shipping out to anyone who placed their pre-order, and the Friday after that is the global release date where the sets are out in stores and available everywhere. Those who pre-order and our retailers and distributors will have already received the product on the official release date everywhere in the world. This makes us very happy.

"OTHER" PRODUCTS

Besides hard plastic sets and games we have a bunch of products in the "Other" category coming out this year. We've developed some interesting hobby tools specifically for hard plastic that we think will make your lives easier. We also have some amazing waterslide transfers in the works with original designs by the very talented Steve Beckett. And there are going to be a few other surprises coming in the "Other" category as well starting in March! 

A NOTE ABOUT THE CULTURE WARS

We find ourselves having to navigate all types of seemingly unnecessarily dangerous shoals when it comes to the ongoing culture wars with rocky outcrops on both the left and the right! From being accused of having Confederate sympathies because of our sci-fi “pew, pew” Rebel Yell set (and me a Yankee!) to the tempest in a teapot caused by one whiney guy upset over our dropping of the Twitter platform and moving to Bluesky (which is a growing and vibrant community and incredibly welcoming. In fact we’ve almost surpassed the number of followers we had after years on Twitter in just a few weeks at Bluesky!) There was even some nutter who claimed that we were secretly encoding Fascist messaging into a release date/price combination. Yes, there really was someone who imagined this in their fever dream mind!

Anyway, it seems we are the proverbial pickle in the middle! We’d rather not have to think about how every last thing we do is perceived depending on every political angle, and we will endeavor to worry less about that and hope the rest of the world starts to too! Not everything is a hidden message or agenda! If in doubt, just know we really don’t have time to fight culture wars when we’re spending all our brainpower, time, and effort on making wee little men (and women) for you all!

IN CONCLUSION

Ahem! For the three of you who have made it this far…I’d like to end with a heartfelt thank you for your enthusiasm and support for what we’re doing. After all, we couldn’t do it without you (yes, I would like to have a secret island lair and use my techno-crypto-billions to make whatever toy soldiers I want, but alas I have neither the island lair nor the billions).  So I hope we continue to make things you like to buy - some in great quantities! Let us know what else you want in the comments below!

Now it’s…

HAPPY WARGAMING!

Header image at top of page was taken from the painting: Rolling Waves at Dusk