Free SMOG:13th Hour rules from Smartmax
May 7, 2011 by beerogre
If you like your Victorian Sci-Fi you'll have been waiting for this for a while... SMOG:13th Hour...
It's the new game from Smartmax and they're giving it away as a free dowload or at a big discout if you want to buy the hard copy from their store.
If you want to download the PDF, just click the pic below...
Otherwise, here are a few of their great looking miniatures...
Enjoy!
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The sculpts (and paintjobs) look amazing.
Just the wrong scale and price tag for me 🙁
Some of them would have been great for Fear and Faith.
Love the look and concepts of the game
Oh, very nice. I’ve been following the smog model line for over a year now so it’s great to see the rules too.
I didn’t have time to browse the entire pdf but, man, they lost me at line of fire. Seems like one of those games you really need to read the rulebook word for word to grasp.
very nice models. and a rulebook for free? lets try this out ^^
Been looking at some f the Smog models for a long time, they’re fantastic. Now they have rules..? Oh dear, more stuff to buy then (not the rules obvisouly)..
I was so exited when I saw that because I didn’t know anything about this game but I love the theme, but then I went to their website and realized that one single miniature costs around 22 to 38 €!!!! o.O
Yes, it’s terrifyingly expensive… However, the quailty is unparallelled, in 54mm. I’ve never seen anything like it ! They hire the very best sculptors as well. The minis started out as collectibles and for the longest time they didn’t have any game.
I’m going to play it on wednesday at my local game store, I’ll see if it’s worth it… But it probably is, considering the universe !
BoW Romain
Please share your toughts after youve played it 🙂
I now have !
BoW Romain
Monkeyraff is right. Smart Max miniatures *are* expensive when you live in the US or in the UK.
Two reasons to that :
1) the exchange rate between € and US$ (or UK£) is terrible. 1$ = 0.70€. £1 = 1.10€.
As a customer, you pay the difference every time you buy something manufactured in the old Europe.
2) the French postal service (La Poste) is a unionized monopoly that has to feed 300 000 employees-for-life. Their pricing are the most expensive worldwide.
What do Smart Max do about that ?
Wheel, what *can* we do ? This : everyday, against all odds, we give our best in terms of quality & originality, hoping that in the end, the miniatures you’ll buy and the game you’ll play will be far much worth the extra buck (or quid).
SMax Ced
Sorry but even if you live in France 37 € for a miniature is way too expensive, even if the miniatures look great (and they are really awesome indeed), even more for a game who is just starting. If people are already giving up on famous GW wargames because of their expensive prices, I don’t think they’ll be atracted by miniatures that are even more expensive for a newborn game that nobody knows yet. Because it’ll probably be a challenge already for most people to pay 37 € on a single miniature and even more of a challenge to find someone willing to spend also that kind of money to play with you (and also you can’t play just with a single miniature, by the rulebook a game uses 3-6 minis, so it’s 37 x 3 at least).
Don’t get me wrong, this is just my opinion and I am really sad to see that. Because in fact the minatures looks gorgeous, the best I’ve seen so far. But I wish that a company would start a new wargame but with really good prices that would attract everybody like flies on a cake a give some concurrence to the “big” guys and also bring people back into wargaming instead of pulling them away.
I think it is better to sell cheaper and then selling more products (and at the end having more profit) then just selling a little but expensive and maybe having a profit but only for a short time or even sinking down…
Everything is expensive ! That’s too bad. Everything should be cheap and thus we could get everything we want ! Why did nobody thought about that before ?!
The average price of our minis actually is closer to 25€. So playing the game with 5 of them + the game costs less than 150€. How many miniature games can you possibly play with an investment less than 150€ ?
There are players that play five 30€ miniatures and others that play fifty 3€ miniatures. And there are players that will play both, not looking for any philosophical stone of miniature gaming but only for a fun time spent with friends.
SMax
It’s true that, in France, everything is expensive these days. Starting a miniature game in France is tough business, because most games-oriented small businesses cannot survive with the weight of the french economy, the postal fares, and the fact that the french-speaking market is a lot smaller than the anglo-saxon market.
I feel your pain ! Just look at what happened to fine games like Alkemy and Hell Dorado : they collapsed, and were bought by well established distributors. I wonder how the spanish do it… Infinity and Ron & Bones are both spanish games and they seem to be doing well.
BoW Romain
Warmachine for example, is more “famous” than your game and with the price of one single of your miniature you can buy enought to start playing. The result? In a short time warmachine went from unknown to warhammer rival, because people got attracted by the fact of paying around 30€ you get more than one figurine (the painting hobby also count in wargaming) and enought to start playing.
Well it’s just my opinion but I am sure that more people think the same way. But if you can’t stand or don’t care about the opinion of potential customers then you got it all wrong from the start and you’re not better than GW…
Oh a thumbs down?! Well that’s really pro…
I don’t want you to feel vexed or singled out… You aren’t being singled out, and I sincerely hope you won’t be offended by what I have to say. I happen to disagree with you, and I find your comment both misinformed and quite harsh on Smartmax. I don’t know about the opinion of the rest of the BoW Team, I honestly haven’t asked…
Everyone is entitled to his views, and, as a wise man said, in this market, you can’t just sit back and say “if the game is good and well priced, it’ll be successful”… So I’ll stand up for the awesome job SmartMax is doing, because I think they deserve it.
Can one criticize SmartMax about its high prices ? Sure, why not… It is, after all, expensive.
But one has to compare what’s comparable. To add something to my previous comment (which already explains a lot about why prices are high), you can’t possibly compare Warmachine and SMOG. or any other 28mm skirmish game for that matter.
Warmachine is a well known game that uses a well known scale for wargamers (28mm), well known codes and references, and a universe that’s easy to assimilate. They’re easily distributed in all of the anglo-saxon world, and that’s a hell of a lot bigger than the french market. Also, individually, their miniatures are about the same price as GW miniatures… The pricing is done differently, and you just don’t need as many miniatures to play, that’s all. And when they started out, the sculpts weren’t all that great, and they had a lot of molding problems with their metal warjacks.
SMOG is 54mm and unmatched quality… That means bigger molds, bigger expenses, and less sales. Compare, if you will, the prices of SMOG against the prices of Andrea’s 54mm range in white metal : they’re quite the same. And SMOG has better quality, IMHO. Considering that Andrea is a very well known company, well distributed and with an international and faithful customer base (sadly, SmartMax is none of those things yet), I’d say SmartMax is really doing a great job, bringing us miniatures of the very highest quality at the lowest possible price.
In spite of a rough economy, of french postal fares, of not being distributed everywhere yet, of the fact that virtually no one buys 54mm in our community, of the fact that the mere scale and quality of the characters intimidates a lot of hobbyists, and of the fact that they JUST published their game rules quite a long time after their first wave of minis, they’re still going strong… and they still have the same amazing quality.
They’re stirring something in the hobby, creating an original game with an original universe on an original scale… They do great stuff, they’re really pushing their products at every major event… Taking into account the market price and the costs of making such miniatures, their prices are far from being unreasonable. In the end, this simple fact remains : if it’s bigger and better, it costs more.
In short, they’re doing all the things people wish a miniature company would do, except losing money… AND their game rules are free ! How can I not at least wish them well ?
I don’t call what WMax Ced said “not caring” about the opinion of a “potential customer”… I call that admitting that you can’t please everyone. Maybe the game just isn’t for you… Maybe it isn’t for me either, I don’t know, I haven’t tried it yet.
BoW Romain
Looking at the prices of 54mm resin figures, SMOG minis are not far off the norm for that sort of size miniature.
The GW Inquisition figures are currently £18.50.
Resin figures seem to go for 20-30+ quid a pop from what I can see, with some minis around the £15 mark.
Well I never said that their miniatures do not look great nor the game sounds bad. At the contrary I said that the minis are really awesome and that the game and theme sounds really interesting.
I just said that for a new game the prices are way too expensive for this economy and the current market (there is lots of others games out there).
And the reply to my opinion: “Everything is expensive ! That’s too bad. Everything should be cheap and thus we could get everything we want ! Why did nobody thought about that before ?!”
Well I find this offensive and a lack of care for their customers…
That pricing may be too expensive for you, but it isn’t for some people. I bought some of their stuff.
It’s all a matter of opinion… If I’m not mistaken, you play/collect Games Workshop miniatures (I don’t), and you put up with their horrible prices and their absolute lack of customer care… If you feel offended by what SMaxCed has said, well, it’s your prerogative, but it strikes me as odd. I don’t think he intended to hurt you…
It may be so that the market or the hobby isn’t ready for this sort of game, that it’s too expensive and not appealing enough… Even though they try their best to make it great. Time will tell, just as time told us that Hell Dorado worked and did all right (albeit bought by another company with a healthier bank account and good anglo-saxon distribution) and Ex-Illis simply didn’t.
SMaxCed’s english may not be as good as ours… I don’t want to put words in his mouth, but he must be getting tired of people complaining about prices, all the time, at every turn, every event… Even in some articles I’ve read, their minis are qualified as “very pretty, but expensive, destined to remain on shelves”…
Yeah, it is expensive. However, I don’t think they can make it cheaper… That’s what SMaxCed was trying to say, even though it came out as perhaps a little snappy.
It’s a consistent trait of miniature gamers : To the best of my knowledge, we’re the only community where everyone complains about prices ALL the time… We groan when we’re not given free goodies (contrary to most sane business practices) and we still consistently pay huge sums of money for admittedly silly stuff (it’s all toy soldiers after all)…
I don’t think most smaller companies deserve that kind of grief, especialy the ones who try as hard as SMartMax to please their customers… And I really hope SmartMax succeeds (against all odds… I agree with you on that point) and continues to make such beautiful pieces.
BoW Romain
Hi, just wanted to give my POV.
I saw the minis a while ago, and at the time bought 2 of them (Zeels and tinkerbell). Yes, they are expensive, but since minis in 54mm are rare for those of us that mostly play, we tend to forget that fact.
After playing the game, i understood something: even if these minis are expensive, you don’t have to spend that much before being able to play. Honestly, before you have enough GW minis to play a game, how much did you spend? 100? 200 euros? For 100 euros you have a good enough force. Plus the game is fast and easy to understand, and can be played up to 4 people (yet, i’ll try 8 people soon)
As for the game in itself, you can use tokens in place of minis (8 of them are even in the box). Their minis are optional even if i think most of us will play with them^^
monkeyraff, you talk about the painting hobby. Honestly, i have a ton more pleasure painting 1 smog minis then a full unit of most other games. And i do not think i am the only one.
I’m in for that game! I do think that they listen to customers, and that they will last.
Finally, the game is out before people asked for it (“minis are cool to paint and shox, but what do we do with them” kind of comments), the game isn’t their life line. Ther minis seem to work sell, and are found on a lot of painter’s blog.
If i said something bad, please forgive me, english is my second language^^
I couldn’t agree more !
BoW Romain