A Knight in Shining Armor

Originally posted an unabridged version of this as a backer-only KS update for the Crusaders project a few days ago. Heads up... this is one of those good news/bad news sorts of things

It has been 3 years since Crusaders: Thy Will Be Done delivered to backers, and I've really enjoyed seeing positive reviews, session reports, and pictures on Instagram and Twitter of people enjoying the game!

For those of you who play games online, Crusaders has recently gone into Alpha testing on BoardGameArena.com, with a very nice implementation!

As I'm sure I've said before, I designed an expansion to the game, called Divine Influence. I may also have said that that expansion got printed over 2 years ago, and has been sitting at the manufacturer this whole time!

The Bad News

How can that be? Wouldn't TMG want to sell the product that's already been printed? Well, that brings me to the "bad news" portion of this post. I'm sad to report that the rumors you may have heard are true: TMG will not be publishing games for the foreseeable future. This has led to a number of disappointments for me, not the least of which is that Divine Influence was never released. For a while now I have been trying to find a way to make the existing copies of Divine Influence available myself, to no avail.

The Good News

But hark! I bring good news as well! I'm happy to announce that, like the eponymous (see post title) knight in shining armor, RENEGADE GAME STUDIOS has licensed the Crusaders line, as announced at their Renegade Con virtual event today (Friday, March 4th)!

If you tuned in to twitch.tv/playrenegade this afternoon, you saw a cavalcade of products announced in their G.I. Joe, Power Rangers, My Little Pony, and other lines (deckbuilding games, role playing games, and board games), you saw an unboxing of My Father's Work (a very ambitious and awesome sounding legacy-style game by T.C. Petty III), and you saw Crusaders retail, Crusaders Deluxe, and Crusaders: Divine Influence mentioned.

Renegade has the existing stock of Divine Influence (with TMG branding) available for pre-order now, and if-and-when that sells through, they'll print a Renegade version (which is the same thing, but with a Renegade logo instead of a TMG one).

They also teased more Crusaders content, which was referring to Crimson and Amber Knight (5 and 6p expansions - see below).

What's In The Box

A few years ago, the fine folks at boooored.com made a fantastic summary of what's in the Divine Influence expansion, so check that out to see what's in the Divine Influence box. I'll add that there will be only one version of the expansion, and it's compatible with both the retail and the Deluxified base game. That was TMG's plan all along, and it kept the price of the expansion way down.

If 3's Company, and 4's a Crowd, What Are 5 and 6?
[Eleven!]

And just to tease one more little thing: For those of you who enjoy Crusaders, but generally have 5 or 6 players at game night, I have also designed a 5/6p expansion, which Renegade will print a little bit later. I'm not sure when that will release, let's give them a chance to get the base game out first!

That's actually 2 separate expansion boxes, one (Crimson Knight) adds a red player color, the other (Amber Knight) adds a yellow player color. The boxes are nearly identical, so you can get one or the other to add a 5th player, or both to play with 6. Each box comes with 2 new Knight Orders as well (4 total if you get both), and they are also compatible with Divine Influence - they have all the additional stuff you'd need to play with the expansion. That's how it was set up before anyway, and the art is done, but Renegade may decide to combine them into one box or something.

Oh, and on BGA you can play with both Divine Influence and Crimson/Amber Knight if you'd like! So try them out online, then buy them to play at home with your friends!

I'm So Excited, and I Just Can't Hide It

I can't begin to tell you how happy I am, and how much of a relief it is, to see Divine Influence finally moving forward into circulation. I'm having a blast playing the Alpha implementation on BGA, and I get excited whenever I see people post about playing it on there, or signing up to be an Alpha tester just so they can play it. Now, if only I got royalties for games played online! 

Actually, my position is that the best advertising you can get for a game is people playing it, so an online implementation is only going to increase sales of the physical copies when they release later this year. So it's super-good timing that the BGA implementation will go live around the same time the game becomes available for purchase!