Sunday Musings - Whatever Happened To The Cursed City

As always, the idea behind a Sunday Musings is that Adam takes a concept and times an hour and a half to write it in. This week, we get cursed.....

In April 2021, Warhammer Quest: Cursed City arrived with a bang that vanished as quickly as it arrived. A game so highly anticipated that on the day of it's release, people flocked to the preorder page causing the stock to sell out within moments, followed a few days later by a series of truly bizarre tweets that confirmed Cursed City was, and had always been a limited release. Problem was, the run up to release had never mentioned this, and the game itself made mention of expansions which trickled out slowly in a further insult to those who had expected a Blackstone Fortress level of roadmap. Cursed City was removed from existence for seventeen months before finally getting a rerelease that is still available to this day in most GW stores I've entered. The full tale is yet to be told, but over the years I've managed to piece together information that does not yet tell a complete account but shows the one true mistake that was made. But we will get to that later.

It's hard to think back to those strange days of the Covid Pandemic, but we must travel back to that time to see the faltering steps that led to Cursed Cities failure. Lockdowns were rife, Social Distancing was in effect and Games Workshops sales rapidly rose as people looked for things to do whilst trapped at home. Two global industries took a beating through that time, one being the Chinese Printing Industry that supplies the world with high-end and high-volume products ranging throughout all purchasable objects. If it's got a leaflet or book, chances are it was printed in China. We know GW was effected by this as throughout the pandemic, items went to the plain white boxes for being mailed out to customers, and these stayed for quite some time after the fact.

Secondly, Global Shipping ground to a halt, quarantine restrictions, a mass amount of staff absences and lockdowns shut down all movement, and costs spiked quickly. Empty shipping containers were stuck in ports, full ones were lost to the backlogs and new ones simply were not being made due to production being made in factories in China

We also know that GW was closing one warehouse down to relocate to a larger and more modern facility, and thus would be running down inventory as well as producing the bare minimum, a fact we can easily see due to how much ran out of stock during the pandemic. What we have here is a perfect storm of unmovable objects, with Age Of Sigmar: Dominion being prepped for release in the summer. GW made a pledge regarding AOS:D that unlike Indomitus, there would be more than enough stock for release day, a pledge they absolutely managed to keep. Dominion was always going to win a production popularity race being as it was, a flagship game starter box. Add to this cauldron of stewing difficulties was the shadow of Brexit, which added to the slowdown of imported materials whilst spiking the prices to ship items in from overseas. During this period, a vast amount of Kickstarter board games crashed into silence as items were sitting in shipping ports and the like and unable to be collected due to high charges. Many a smaller producer of games went under, and there are stories told by such creators as they realised that the choice of paying the charges would free up the items but would leave them in debt, or paying back the money raised for such games to the same effect. It was a heartbreaking time for the board game community.

However, the biggest failing isn't any of these part, but instead comes to transparency and attempting to change the history. If GW had spent some time explaining quickly what had happened, the goodwill may not have taken such a massive blow, but yet the now infamous series of tweets that denied Cursed City would ever be on long term sale like it's predecessors despite weeks upon weeks of saying just that left a gaping hole in that goodwill. GW has grown and matured into a genuinely global business now, and speaking to it's fans with the contempt it did is a mistake it cannot ever afford to make again.