“The biggest problem with Trench Crusade is people buy it faster than we can make it and ship it out”, says Jamie Parsons, chief operating officer at Factory Fortress Inc. Wargamer’s Mollie Russell interviewed Parsons at the huge SPIEL Essen convention, where he was one of the team representing the smash hit skirmish wargame of religious fanatics and grotesquely altered history – here’s what he had to say about the studio’s meteoric growth.
“From the very beginning, even the first Kickstarter – not the big one that blew up, the one before – it’s a project where we only had good problems”, Parsons says. Initially joining the team as a Kickstarter project manager, he now handles “all the boring business stuff at Trench Crusade” so the artists can get on with profaning against god and man, making a kick-ass wargame while they do it.
To get a sense for how far Trench Crusade has outstripped the team’s expectations, consider the recently released two player box set, Carcass Front. It’s a wargaming campaign so scintillating I gave it my first ever 10/10 review, yet Parsons says he was circumspect when deciding how many copies to order.
“For any company that is under two years old in the tabletop industry, if you sell 15,000 of anything, that’s great”, Parsons says. “So I ordered that many. I was like, if we do this in a year, we’ll have made back our investment. We’ll be paying our people”. The stock sold out in two and a half months.
“We thought we made the correct call”, Parsons muses, “we thought we were even being too enthusiastic”. The team’s only benchmark was the second Kickstarter in 2024, which raked in a staggering $3 million, but Parsons – a veteran of 30 campaigns – was all too aware this was not a reliable indicator. “Some Kickstarter companies see demand, overhire, overequip themselves”, he says. “Then when that demand drops, if you mass hire, you must mass fire”.
“Now we’re starting to actually get sales numbers, so we can see the actual demand – we’ve been flying blind up till now”. The studio has releases planned for most months until March (with a December break), with production lined up with Polish manufacturer Archon Studios. Parsons has a lot of praise for Archon. “We could not pull this off without them. And I say that because some people have been blaming Archon for [our lack of stock] – it is not their problem, it’s not their fault, it’s just suffering from success”.
In fact, Parsons thinks that Archon has been transformational for the industry, simply by making high quality plastic mould production, and high-volume plastic production, feasible in Europe. “Carcass Front took us three months to produce, print plus plastic, and that was 15,000 units of a big product”, Parsons says, “If we had to do that in 3D printing, we’d be having this interview next year”.
While Factory Fortress Inc is investing heavily into plastic miniature production, Trench Crusade welcomes conversions and fans playing with other models. “If you don’t like them, if you don’t think they’re good enough, we haven’t made a good enough product”, Parsons says. He’s aware “there are other people in certain parts of the world where import [costs mean it’s] just not possible to have plastic – I don’t want to cut them off”. He promises “I’m not going to break into your house and check” – we hope that’s a joke.
The big Kickstarter that catapulted Trench Crusade into the limelight came at the end of 2024, and since completing fulfilment for that Parsons “spent a year getting us out of Kickstarter, transitioning into a serious company, because the two are very different”. “One of my objectives was to grow cleverly, so we’ve been investing in production, especially miniatures”, he adds, but “we’re very lean in terms of management and actual operations, we need to grow that as well”.
But what shape will Factory Fortress and Trench Crusade take? “What makes wargaming so special is it’s not just one thing: it’s not the miniatures, it’s not the painting, it’s not the game, it’s not meeting people, it’s not traveling to go to events or just collecting, it’s all of that”, Parsons enthuses. Within 10 years, Parsons “would like us to start providing the full shebang, the whole scope”, so that “no matter where you are, we’ve got something for you, and we just want you to enjoy it”.
A noble endeavour. Mollie delved deep into Trench Crusade during her time at Essen – check out her interview with lead developer Tuomas Pirinen, the results of the epic Crimson Chalice painting competition, and her experiences as a first time miniature wargamer playing the skirmish game. If you’ve got a warband you’d like to share, drop some pictures into the Wargamer Discord community!
Source: Wargamer
