Will be cheaper than Cloudspire. Won’t be cheap (obviously), and “all-in” is still up there in price, but there’s significantly less stuff to buy in this campaign than others. Victorum, Hoplo: Remastered, and two deluxe component upgrades. That’s it. Remastered in a single box is cheaper than the combined price of Lost Cities and Rise of Rome and also includes a lot of the Army of One/Beast and Master/Blade’s Edge/Legends of the Sand content.
It’s a single box with most of the content from The Lost Cities and Rise of Rome. Most of Origins has been folded into Victorum in one way or another. It’s not “all” of the content, as we’ve trimmed some fat, but it’s the best of it, and all units in Remastered can be used for variety in Victorum if you so choose.
[...] Long story, but overall we got to a point with Hoplo in general where we had to make a decision to either retire it or do something that really moved the needle. It looked like (and was!) a game made by some dudes in their spare time, especially when compared against the deluxe production of our more recent titles. It didn’t sell particularly well, and I think was perceived as old or of lesser quality than TMB, Cloudspire etc due to CTG not really being on the map upon initial release. So as stock dwindled, we had to make a decision.
First we decided to simply remaster the old content into one box with new art/UX so we could sell it cheaper and not have to manage the massive amount of SKUs. But then as we talked more we get like we needed something more to move the needle, so we thought about adding a new expansion of solo specific trials (credit to Ricky Royal on that, he was the one who initially pitched us the concept). Ultimately, what we wanted to do with it ended up being too large in scope (as tends to happen with most CTG titles...) and we decided to spin it out into its own big box.
We’ve long wanted to make a solo only big box game, both as a market test and as a way of streamlining the design process for ourselves. Including multiple modes/a separate campaign (Cloudspire)/encounter deck (TMB) for solo play is a ton of extra work. But also Hoplo’s legacy (again largely thanks to Ricky Royal) really was its solo play (even though I think Hoplo PVP and Co-op are *great.*
So we set out to make the ultimate Hoplo solo game. Hoplo’s original inspirations come largely from two not well known video games: Gladius and a PC game called Spirit Wars. All of us in the office had been heavily into Slay the Spire at the time as well, so you’ll find those inspirations in Victorum as well. But the main focus was adding meat, consequence, and variety to an already tremendously fun and easy to pick up and play combat system. I think fans of Hoplo are going to absolutely love it, and hopefully we prove that when you write a love letter to solo gamers, they will show up to support the game 🙂