Lego Star Wars: Battle of Endor

So my main gift for my recent birthday from my wife and daughter was a Lego Star Wars: Battle of Endor set. This is an older set that can still be purchased online but does not show up in stores even Lego Stores much. They might phase it out completely after christmas which is a shame since it is a fun set if expensive as all Lego Star Wars is now.


Here is the set assembled. Multiple smaller objects so this post is picture heavy.


First we have the Rebels and their Ewok Friends. You get a Leia, Han, Chewie, R2-D2, 2 Rebel troopers, and 3 ewoks. Since I stick to mainly OT sets I have several of the main characters in different outfits.


Here is the Ewok catapult. It works much better than flick fire missiles and I can get the lego stone to go several feet. Not fast enough to hurt anyone but pretty good.


You also get a little glider which mounts onto a flying stand attached to the Ewok. It also has a rock dropping mechanism in the back.


The set also comes with 3 imperial guys. They are pretty outnumbered in this battle which is ofcourse the exact opposite of the true situation. While I have a few Snow Troopers from recent Hoth sets and battlepacks my normal stromtrooper ranks are pretty empty.

Here is the AT-ST from the set. It has a swivel mount for the top and the weapons have tilt adjustments. Cockpit opens to seat 1 minifigure.


You might remember my Easter message which showed my mini scale AT-ST which has articulating legs. Well my daughter tried to do that to these legs but luckily I stopped here before she broke anything since the legs are pretty rigid except where they attach to the chasis.

The little knob on the back allows you to swing the legs back and forth but it comes no where near walking but it will stand on its own pretty well.


The largest part of the kit is the bunker. I already had a bunker which I had picked up on bricklink mainly for spare parts in the Star Wars color scheme of grays. The front door of the bunker opens.


The two black knobs control the doors.



Here is the inside with the power generators.

The outer walls fold out. I am thinking of using my spare parts to expand the bunker some. I am not sure if I would extend it or make it wider.


The bunker has a play feature where parts fly out as it explodes.

What fun is having a OT Star Wars Lego set without staging some classic moments.

I believe he is doing something a little rash.



And here is the second " I Love You" "I know" Scene.

I like this set for my collection and play with my daughter. I will get the new Ewok set to go with it later this year and might look to get some brown and green bricks to set up the hill this bunker entrance is built into.

Games Workshop Financials: Whats in the numbers? Price Rise and Embargo

We already had a quick note about the Games Workshop annual report but I am interested in digging a little deeper to see if we can get a better understanding of some of the issues with GW recently. This post will be slightly more technical and math related since I like Math (hence the Math Hulk series).

The first thing we need to understand about GW is that they divide their company into essentially 3 parts: Sales group which covers both retail, online, and trade sales; Production and Supply which designs and makes the products; and a Support Group which Logistics, Admin, Corporate which is really all overhead. The first thing we note is that production and supply sold 57 M pounds of stuff to the sales division which converted it to like 115 M in revenue when the 8 M of other stuff is removed Black Library and Forge World. So a quick look would make you think that GW retail doubles the price of what they get to sell but this is not going to be the case. GW has both retail and trade sales so those have to be accounted for seperately.

GW used to publish the break down of those two channels but stopped I would guess since the numbers did not look the way they wanted to. Globally last time they showed them (2008 report) it was 60% retail and 40% trade so it would appear that more than half of people get their kits from GW directly but you have to remember that these numbers are based on revenue not volume. A sale at a full GW store nets them MSRP while a sale at a RT store nets them probably 60% MSRP on average (trade discount varies and might be as high as 50%). So with those numbers you actually get GW sells 47 percent of the kits and the independent 53%. In someplace like the US where the split is probably closer to 50:50 in revenue now then the volume split is 38%:62%. So given that the US only has like 100 GW stores and over 500 RT we can see GW stores do move a lot of volume for their limited number but are not the primary channel for the customers in the US or worldwide.

So lets see if we can figure out what production is charging retail for the kits. Assuming the Sales pays the same price to production regardless of the final sale channel we can get that sales pays about 40% of MSRP to production with 30M associated with sales to independents and 27M for sales through their stores to generate the 115M in sales with the 60:40 retail:trade division. So GW stores pay 40% MSRP for kits and charge 100% and are often not profitable while independents are often paying 60% and selling at 80% while trying to be profitable which can be hard. Interesting to not that even at selling the products at 40% of MSRP to sales the product group brings in 57M and lists its operating expenses as only 9M. So if that is an indication of the incremental cost of production (cost for next unit as long as below full capacity) the production cost for the kit is like 6% of MSRP on average. So that means that at a GW store 94% of what you are playing is going to pay for them selling it to you, corporate overhead, and profit. even if we include the 4 million for design and development the cost is still about 10% of MSRP. Now some of the corporate overhead is because of the production but remember that design and production has like 250 employees and sales has 1250 so organizing them and their work environments represents most of the overhead costs. Remeber this 10% cost the next time GW talks about how things are getting more expensive to make so they raised the price another 10%. It really translates into things are getting more expensive to sell not to make since that is where all their costs are.

The next point to look at is the embargo. Now we can clearly see why they decided to do the southern hemisphere embargo. Profit down under went from 600K on 10.6M sales to -400K on 10.4M in sales. So profit went down 1M but sales only dropped by 200K. How does that happen? First thing to remember is these numbers are in pounds. The cost of the business in Australia is in their dollars which moved up about 10% on average over the year. So if you look at their costs in pounds they went up by 10% but their sales actually went down 10% since they generated the same number of pounds even thought their dollars were worth more.

Now this loss of sales could have been offset partially if they paid for their kits in pounds from corporate since the kits would have also gone down in cost by like 10% but I think that corporate has them pay in dollars and then does the conversion on their side which means they made that extra money from that 10% of currency. But remember that is a long going issue and GW uses about a .4 AU dollar to UK pound on its product which is now at 66% of the true exchange rate. Assuming UK and Au both pay 40% of their MSRP to production, production is get 67% more for each kit sold to Australia . Using a 66% GW retail vs 34% RT for Au taken back when it was part of the pacific group, we get about a 5M product cost level which if it was reduce by the 40% that they are overpaying to corporate to be a fair price with their new currency value they would have made a 1.5M profit last year. GW still made that profit but it is getting credited to Production and Supply not AU Sales division even though they lost 10% of their sales. Now we will see if the embargo will work with a significant boost to GW AU sales or if it will just take a bite out of UK trade and AU will be flat still eventhough they saw another price increase.

Blood Bowl: 2nd Edition Plastics

The Blood Bowl games during the second edition era came with plastic models to use for the teams. In Blood Bowl you got 16 humans and 16 orcs, Dungeonbowl had 16 dwarves and 16 elves, while krunch gave you some of all 4 to make up the two teams. We can see how they scaled the models. Orcs are the same size as humans and the elves are really thin. These dimensions did not translate to the metal lines.

The question of how to tell the positions apart was with ringed bases. These 4 all have basic gray lineman bases but in the picture below you can see on of the ringed bases on the Skaven blitzer, Red=Blitzers, White=Thrower, Green=Blocker, and Yellow=Catcher.

GW Annual Report Out

I am a keen follow of GW financial information and they released their report for last year today. I am really just interested to see how all the things they do that I think are negative to the wargaming hobby and my enjoyment of their products affects them.

Results: Sales Down 123.1M from 126.5M and profit pretty much flat. Remember GW has an annual price rise of like 5% averaged over the whole product line so if they actually had a lose of volume of about 7% again. Not so good. They do not mention the lack of volume growth much. They also claim that everyone had a positive reaction to finecast and got a 97% Quality Control value. This would have to be the level of kits they deemed shippable at production and not the return to store level. I still see plenty of bloggers post about their problems with finecast.

More discussion to come later.

Big Week

This is a big week for us. Our second child is going to coming at the end of the week so I will be pretty busy with that next week. I have a few posts from the current series scheduled but expect to be off the web for a while as we get back into the groove of having a baby in the house (no more Lego Stars Wars kits on the floor).

Lego Star Wars A-Wings

If you are like me you grew up watching the Star Wars movies and they put a hold in you that never really lets go. I then played the classic X-wing series of games on the PC which were great fun with a multitude of ships in the star wars universe both on the Rebel and Imperial sides. My favorite ship was always the A-Wing. Fast and Agile, it could outfly any other ship. So when I started getting Lego Star Wars stuff the first thing I wanted was an A-Wing.



My fleet now has two A-wings. Red and Green so Christmas as we used to say about our chilis in New Mexico.



Models look fairly close to the studio model for Lego versions. Only issues would be that the stabilizer wings are a little thick and not angled.

The Green A-wing is from the Home One Mon Calamari Cruiser set. It has the cursed flick fire missiles mounted where the laser cannons are and a removable engine.

One thing I do not like about this ship is that it has a death star trench on the computer screen. No A-Wings at the Battle of Yavin and at the Battle of Endor they did not attack down the trench.

Here we see the red awing which was sold with a little maintenance/ladder sled. It has a removable container for supplies in the back. I think the cannons are not as nice as the green a-wing but it does have a star destroyer bridge in the targeting computer.

Pilots are the same except for the visor colors.

Lego has an older A-wing design but I think these are closer to studio model.

Halo ODST

I finally picked up a copy of Halo ODST a month or two ago and I finished it a couple of days ago. It is a fine game for me at the 20 dollar price point. I have already played through all of Reach and expected a slightly different game since I was not a Spartan but the game play was pretty similar. The game does have you switch from one member of a team to another as you play through the story in a nonlinear way but it is usually just you verses a ton of enemies just like in other Halo games. I would have like a little more of the action to be with other grunts even if it is scripted stuff on the side or more rifleman covering you. They throw in some vehicle stuff like all the Halo games. A good part of the game happens at night but you have a HUD system which must be come type of radar which picks up edges for you and show you visible enemies.

I have noticed that what I look for in a game has changed in recent years now that I have much less free time with 1 daughter turning 5 and a boy on the way next week. I used to like some of the tense and tactical shooters like Brothers in Arms and Rainbow Six but now I need a little more mindless fare so that I do not get stressed playing in those few hours I get every couple of weeks. I know that an update of the original Halo is coming and I will see how much they want for it before I get it. If they are expecting 60 dollars they will not get it from me. I have not spent that much on a game in years. I am so behind the times that I am just now trying Gears 2 only a few months before the sequel and might get CoD MW 2 sometime later this year.

Blood Bowl: Ogre Team Box

Another birthday present this year was a Games Workshop Blood Bowl Ogre team. This box has 4 ogre blockers and 1 ogre thrower but it should be noted the team rules just does not have any positions for the ogres. A full team roster is 6 ogres and 10 snotlings so this set does not really get you a playable team which is unfortunate. I have like 6 snotlings from second edition but these are not easy to come by to get another 4 so I am looking at other options.

Here are the box contents. Enough parts for 5 ogres and a goblin. Many duplicate parts so I will keep the close ups limited to the unique parts.

I got 5 different heads in my box.

There appears to be 3 different torso designs so I got doubles of the 2 of them on the right.


Four different leg positions.


Four different arm sets. Including one holding a ball.

Here are the extras. One arm holding a goblin with the ball about to be thrown, a goblin with the ball who I generally think is Grotty from the star player pair Brick Far'th & Grotty, plus spikey shoulder pads for all the ogres.



Here is a thrower assembled from an early blister purchase.

Last Trip to Borders

We made a last trip to our nice local Borders before they move into liquidation later this week or next. It was one of the last stores they opened I believe and was a large concept store with sections for all types of media and various digital areas. We might check out the clearance sales but until they get to at least 30% off you can generally do better online anyway. We liked our Borders and would go every couple of weeks to look at books and buy a book or two (with a coupon and our membership). I actually like to buy Lego stuff there until they stopped the coupons from working on them. We are sad to see them go as it was always a good place for our family to spend a little quiet time.

As a last purchase I got the Penny Arcade "Be Good, Little Puppy." which is a compilation of cartoons that I could get online for free but my wife really does not like me taking the electronic devices into the room where I get my quiet reading time if you get my meaning. It has a Witchalok character class for D&D 4e in it up to third level powers but I have to say it does not look very balanced. Apparently someone messed up the page numbering since anytime the text refers to page it is off by 2 from the correct one.

Another Local Hobby Store Disappearing

The Ann Arbor area is losing another hobby store with the announcement that Riders Hobbies is closing down in the next few weeks. We lost Labyrinth Comics and Games last year, a GW store and Planeswalker Magic Bag the year before. Each one for its own reason but still quite a toll.

I have been and on an off shopper at Riders. For a while I would shop there often since they had an accessible location with parking but I had some problems with the attitude of one of the RC/Train hobby staff in helping me find a special order from GW that the store had called to tell me had arrived. He solution was to come back another time when the gaming people where in but as it is like a 15 miles from my house I did not really like this option.

I moved most of my purchasing over to Ryan at the Labyrinth since I got along well with the crew their but even after their closure I did not go back to buy much at Riders since my hobby money was not going for current GW products anymore and more OOP stuff and Lego Star Wars stuff to play with my daughter. I would still go in to look around. I went in a few weeks ago and even mentioned to my wife that the stock level looked pretty low. They used to have a GW aisle where the boxes where filed likes books but now less stock was filling up 2 aisles with the boxes set to up to show the front with spaces between them.

I used to go to another Rider's location for RPG and Magic stuff when I was a teenager but it closed many years ago. I am sorry to see another hobby store go leaving only one nearby to me but in an annoying location downtown for people who live on the outskirts of Ann Arbor. Add in the loss of Borders where I have been buying most of my gaming and black library books to liquidation officially announced today, just not a good day for nerd related shopping.

Epic Eldar Warhost Box

Here is the contents of the current Games Workshop Epic Armageddon Eldar Warhost. You get 2 copies of the same sprue which they have to cut in half to get it into the small box.

First half frame shows 10 Rangers, 6 jetbikes, 2 Auturchs, 5 Wraithguards, 5 swooping hawks, 5 striking scorpions, 5 dark reapers, and 1 farseer.

Second Half frame: 2 Warlocks, 5 warp spiders, 35 guardians, and 5 howling banshees.

Assuming 5 models per base (which is not a requirement), you get 2 farseer stands (1 farseer and 2 warlocks), 14 guardian stands, 4 Ranger stands, 2 stands of 5 different aspect warriors, 6 stands of 2 jet bikes each and 2 stands of wraithguard. How you build up the force from these will depend on the list you are using since some use different units as warhosts and troupes.

Close up showing Wraithguards, Auturch, Ranger, and Jetbike.


Here we have Farseer, Dark Reaper, Ranger, Scorpians, and Swooping Hawks.


Close up of the howling banshee section of the sprue.

Warlocks, Warp Spiders, and Guardians.

You will not that this box does not come with any avengers or dragons. I am thinking about using my guardians from the Eldar legion as guardians and the guardians in this box as the avengers and dragons based on paint job to tell the difference. Currently GW makes those minis in metal and want 20 dollars for a total of 8 stands compared to the 30 stands here for 20 in plastic. These newer sprue are also missing many other things found on the Epic 40K versions like heavy weapons, vypers, harlies.

Disaster

I had a model disaster today. I was moving some of my gaming stuff stored in my garage to get better access to some of it. I left it a little to poorly balanced and both my blood bowl and epic storage containers fell over on their sides from a few feet of height. It add insult to injury they fell into my wife's car path and she did not see them until she hit the blood bowl one with here car. Luckily she was not going fast and did not crush the container. I had to rush off to work so I did not get a chance other than reposition the containers and put the individual boxes back in the tub.

I will have to inspect the contents tonight. Hopefully nothing worse than some disorganized models or models with limbs popped off.

Blood Bowl: Amazon Team

As part of my birthday present this year, I filled in some holes in my blood bowl teams. Here we have a Games Workshop Amazon Team.


The box contents includes 2 catchers, 2 blitzers, 1 thrower, and 7 linewomen.

Close up on the thrower. Only one model even though the team can have 2 but this is pretty standard in the blood bowl line.


Two copies of the same catcher model.

Two different blitzers.

Four different linewomen models for the seven in the box. Do you see the problem?

This is the problem. One of the linewomen models has the same pose and very similar appearence to one of the blitzer models. This makes these player types very hard to tell apart on the pitch. I have seen people paint their uniforms different colors to make them appear different.

Epic Eldar Legion

Here we have some classic eldar box set for the Space Marine game and Epic Battles. This is a pretty old box of Epic stuff dating back to the late 80's so over 20 years old now.


Here we have some painting schemes like Eldritch Raiders, Sunblitz Brotherhood, Black Suns, and Void Watchers. The box came with 20 tanks and 200 warriors. None of these names seem to match up with any Eldar fluff still used as far as I have heard.


As you can see this models are all exactly the same as was the style in this first release of Epic scale models. Different units types were generally determined by base color. These guys would be guardians in the current game.


Here is the Epic Eldar Falcon Grav Tank. I might actually use these as wave serpents if I was building an eldar force since they look like the current epic models at little.