2022 Review of the Year
2022 was another strange year, with Covid mainly in the rear-view mirror as far as restrictions but with the virus still hanging around and affecting show attendances. In general though we had a very productive year with a lot of ticks for our 2022 plans, so let's see what got done and where we missed our targets:
Peninsular Napoleonics - TICK!
With all of the pledges completed and sent out, and the ranges put out for general sale, this one is a big tick. The ranges have proved to be extremely popular as well, plus the new buildings look great and have been very well received. After the delays in getting the sculpts done and ready I'm still a little reluctant to run another 'not-KS' project but we'll have a think.
Cold War Commander II - TICK!
Another big tick here with the new Cold War rules released at Partizan in May and over 1000 copies sold now. The feedback so far has been very positive and there's a lot of new players that have joined the existing player base. The response to these rules surprised me a little as they've outsold the Blitzkrieg Commander set over a similar period, which I wasn't expecting at all, given that WWII is such a dominant gaming period.
New Releases - TICK!
2022 was our busiest year ever in terms of releases and all 324 of them can be found here: https://www.pendrakenforum.co.uk/index.php/topic,22184.0.html We've got equally ambitious plans for this year too so keep an eye out for those...!
Arab-Isaeli - TICK!
These and our Cold War ranges were the next big expansions for last year and have proved to be good sellers. With our new vehicle sculptor on board now we can really crack on with a lot of releases for the post-WWII era.
Sci-Fi Expansion! - MISS!
This project stalled purely due to finances sadly as putting the new roof on the building put a rather large £14k hole in our bank account. We've just about managed to get over that now so we'll be able to get moving on these this year. We'll have some previews for everyone soon as well...
More Fantasy - MISS!
We missed this one entirely, just down to all of the other releases needing to get done first really. We'll pick them up again this year and try to get something sorted for the summer.
TB Line - MISS!
Again with all of the other releases we were working on I just didn't get the necessary time to clean up the next batch of TB Line ranges. It's one of those annoying jobs that you know will take days to do so it's hard to work up the motivation at times!
Korean War Supplement - NEITHER!
This was shelved already so not really a hit or miss for our list. It's in progress now and we'll have more news soon.
New Army Builder Software - MISS!
Development on this has taken longer than planned but the software is just about there now. We'll be looking to run some testing very soon and then we can get it polished up ready for launch.
Dungeon World - MISS!
We got quite close in some regards with all of the master castings done ready for new production moulds. We've also had some new Dungeon modules designed digitally so we need to get those into resin moulds too. So this'll be a 2023 release now.
Red Vectors - MISS!
We got a few new Red Vectors products released but not enough for this to be considered anything other than a Miss. We had a slight issue in that some of the original files got corrupted somewhere so we're currently in the process of recovering those. Once that's done we should see a lot of new MDF stuff coming this year.
Moving on to other areas:
Pendraken Shop and Games Room! - TICK!
One of our biggest ever Ticks is that the shop was opened as planned and has been a great addition to our business in so many ways. Being able to host events and games in the Games Room as well is such a benefit going forward and opens up a lot of options for us. Shop sales have ticked over nicely but it'll take time to build those and get folks used to us being here.
Painting Competition 2022! - TICK!
The Painting Competition brought out the usual high quality entries and is one of the highlights of the year for me. I hope everyone enjoyed it and we'll be back with the 2023 edition next month.
Website Photos - TICK!
Even though this one is a Tick, I'm a little frustrated that we didn't get the last of the website photos done in 2022. I had a big batch ready to do over Christmas but then I managed to catch Covid and I lost about two weeks of work time. We did get from 396 missing photos down to 192 though, so that's progress. I'll be on with them very soon but I need to get caught up on some of the other stuff first.
Pendraken 30th Birthday! - TICK!
This was another highlight of the year as 60-70 gamers descended on Pendraken HQ to help us celebrate our 30th year. Everyone had a great time and there's a full report available here: https://www.pendrakenforum.co.uk/index.php/topic,21858.0.html It's tempting to do this every year...
So at the end of that we had 8 Ticks, 6 Misses and 1 Neither so overall pretty good with room for improvement I think! A lot of the ticks last year were quite considerable in size (Peninsular Naps, Shop, Games Room) so they took up a huge amount of time and resources and squeezed out some of the other plans a bit. This coming year we don't have as many of those major projects so we should find it a little easier to get through the plans. There'll be a lot more variety this coming year as well I think, with releases for Naps, 19th C, WWII, Cold War, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, scenery and more all on the cards.
We'll have more info on all of those plans coming in the next day or two, so keep an eye out for that!