How Firelock Games Won a Niche Within a Niche

Jason Hsieh (00:42)
Welcome back to another episode of Toy Business Unboxed. Today, we are excited to have Mike from Firelock Games on the show. If you love miniature world gaming, especially richly detailed historical setting, Mike’s work will definitely resonate with you. Firelock Games make wave with Blood & PLunder a pirate-themed skirmish games. And now they’re also bringing additional games and they’re also launching more product into the miniature gaming space. Thank you so much for being on our show today, Mike.

Mike Tuñez (01:10)
Happy to be here, Jason. Thank you for having me.

Jason Hsieh (01:12)
Yeah, so first of all, could you first share with our audience, like, what make you even start, working into this kind of a niche within the niche?

Mike Tuñez (01:19)
Yeah, sure. So, so really the story is pretty straightforward. so kind of discovered these sorts of games when I was in middle school as a kid and, I got into a game called BattleTech with my brother, which is like little robots fighting each other. People know the MechWarrior video games. It’s the same universe. so that was kind of the catalyst. ⁓ I also got into another game called Hero Quest, which is a similar vein.

And then that was pretty much the only games I played. I played that quite a bit with my brother and some friends for many years. then when I first got married and I didn’t have a lot of money, I found more stuff like that, like playing at home and things. So I started getting into different games. We started getting into some historical like World War II stuff different science fiction and fantasy things like some Lord of the Rings games and whatnot.

that kind of broadened my horizon. I started just playing more and more games as I discovered them. there was a game in particular called Legends of the High Seas that was, I have always had an affinity for pirates and history and anything that’s kind of nautical and adventure-y. So I had never considered playing with like big giant ships.

full of pirates and things that just didn’t seem like a practical thing to me until I came across the game and it just realized it’s really not a big leap to do so. got into that the game kind of went defunct the whole company and did it was shut down. And so there was no other game like it. So I decided to try my hand at essentially making a replacement and it started off as kind of a hobby project. And then I met my current business partner.

Alex Aguila. He’s been successful in business in the past. He’s the co-founder of Alienware Computers. He had a great, great experience with He had always wanted to do a game company. He, I had a game that he liked and was excited about. And we just kind of joined forces and then started this company, essentially.

Jason Hsieh (03:06)
I see, I see. I think you have some of the… Would you mind sharing some of the game on camera?

Mike Tuñez (03:12)
So, always the big attractive thing right is the ships if I can get

Jason Hsieh (03:16)
yeah, that’s definitely a lot of detail that your team put in.

Mike Tuñez (03:19)
So this ship is about from here to here. It’s, is about a 15 inch ship more or less. Right. And you could see it doesn’t have any of the cannons or anything in it right now, but that’s the ship. That’s the models that you can play with. And as a Blood and Plunder, like I said, is our main game. And here’s some, figurines. For example, this is a one just freshly made today.

So the ships and the figures, they all come unpainted. So it’s a hobby game, as you know, if anybody knows about miniature wargaming. Now ours mostly, we do have some unassembled stuff, but most of our miniatures come mostly assembled. So it’s just a matter of painting them.

But yes, and you got, and here’s another guy that I just had laying there, so why not? okay. Buccaneer with a musket there. So you can kind of see it.

Jason Hsieh (04:01)
Those are 3D printed.

Mike Tuñez (04:03)
3D printed is the primary manufacturing mode that we use right now. We also do some injection molding with HIPS. We use the spin cast metal pewter for the figures that are now 3D printed resin. But that is not anything we’re doing anymore.

Jason Hsieh (04:16)
I see, see, I see. I’m kind of new to the miniature game space. I do other type of board game, but not a miniature game in particular. Like if people want to get into that kind of hobby, like what do they need to purchase initially to even play the game?

Mike Tuñez (04:31)
Yeah, so it depends wildly on the kind of game you want to get into. So for example, Blood and Plunder, if you want to get into Blood and Plunder, the best thing you can do is to buy a starter set. And all these games typically have starter sets. So for Blood and Plunder, we have here, for example, I have

this big, big, big box and flip it around here. So in this box, you get a, you get this, it’s kind of in the picture, you can’t see it. get the rule book, which gives you everything you need to play some history, background, some information. This is all HIPS in this kit. So this comes with a bunch of model kits. So you see, you get this paper, C-mat, you get the two ships.

Jason Hsieh (04:46)
I see.

Mike Tuñez (05:05)
You got all your cards, your dice, your token, you get two crews for the ships. The game mat is reversible. The other side is land, because you can play on land or on sea. It’s the same rules. And now that’s a big kit with a lot of, stuff to build. It’s a model. This is a model kit. So you’re building models, you’re assembling them, you’re painting them, putting it together. If that’s not so much your speed, but you’re into the same thing, there are other games. And we do one like this, a much more manageable.

Oh, that’s smaller. Yeah, so this is just ship combat and it’s just smaller ships. This is the old edition that I have here. But it comes with a similar thing. You get the blue mat for the ocean. You get some terrain, little pieces that go down. It comes with six ships. You get the dice, the rulers, the memory tapes, the cards, the rule books, et cetera. but the cool thing about this one is that the ships are

They’re just, you just pop the pieces together and the hole is brown and the sails are white. So it’s ready to go right out of the box. You can open that box and be playing in five minutes. So it varies. It varies quite a bit. And then, you know, we have an in-between, which is, so this is Port Royal. Port Royal is the same exact figures as Blood and Plunder, but it’s plays on a smaller scale. so this one, only need about six figures to play. So you get more than enough figures to start.

You do have to build and paint the figures, but when you only have to do six per side and you can play with as little as four if you wanted to, it’s really easy. And this comes with a bunch of three dimensional scenery and stuff like that to go with the mat and everything else. So this kind of gets you for if you want something more in the middle. This is called a skirmish war game is kind of what we call these. So skirmish just means it’s a smaller scale of fighting. Yeah. And so that’s kind of an in-between place where you can get in.

do a little bit of the hobby stuff, it’s not like, but with Blood and Plunder you need 13 models, it’s like the minimum that you’ll need to build plus your ship. this one you could do half that and 13 models of Blood and Plunder is like a bare minimum. You really want to play with more. Typically you want to at least 25, right? So 25 is really a better place to get a feel for the game. Whereas this game, six figures, you’re playing the full game.

Jason Hsieh (07:01)
Which one is the best seller currently?

Mike Tuñez (07:03)
Blood and Plunder is by far a bestseller right now. Oak and Iron and Port sell pretty well. But Blood and Plunder eclipses both them, definitely. Now the good thing is Blood and Plunder does have a lot of crossover with Port Royal since it uses the exact same figures. So you can use the same figures to play both games. They’re semi-compatible.

Jason Hsieh (07:22)
I see. How long is usually the gameplay for game like that?

Mike Tuñez (07:25)
So it varies. Our longest game is Oak and Iron. Oak and Iron games tend to take about two hours usually. Port Royal is very fast. It typically less than an hour, usually around 30 minutes, depends. If you’re learning, it’s always a little slower. But once you know the rules pretty well, it takes about 30 minutes. and Plunder is kind of right in the middle. Blood and Plunder games typically go a little more than an hour, hour, hour and a half. And a lot of times it depends on… So these games are all scalable.

You can that small Blood and Plunder game with 13 figures aside, more or less is going to be done in 20, 30 minutes. Right. But you could, you could scale that up and you can, do big convention games, right, that’ll last four hours and there’s a, and there’s six or 700 figures on the table, you know, and a bigger space. Yeah. So it’s kind of, it’s very customizable experience. So if you don’t have a ton of space.

Jason Hsieh (08:07)
Oh, wow, that was a lot.

Mike Tuñez (08:14)
Blood and Plunder is kind of unique in respect to a lot of games in that it can play small well, but it also plays really big well. Most games kind of specialize in one thing, but Blood and Plunder is a little more flexible than most. You could play giant tables, or you could play really small tables like at home on a three-foot board. So it just depends on what you want to do and how much time you have.

Jason Hsieh (08:35)
I see. And all of them have similar scenes where I guess the base or the world.

Mike Tuñez (08:41)
Exactly, it’s all based on 17th 18th century colonial history of the Americas.

Jason Hsieh (08:47)
Oh,

I see. I see. I see. And I the years, as you grow this business, what has been like some of the biggest lessons that you have learned?

Mike Tuñez (08:56)
the biggest lesson I’ve learned is exactly how niche of an industry it is, right? When you have a lot of friends and stuff who play, it kind of feels bigger than it really is. But when you get out realize that you’re fighting for a very small market share, right? And I totally understand because I am part of the problem myself, but it’s a market share with a lot of ADD, if you will.

So the next shiny thing comes around and everybody gravitates toward that for a minute. And then they go back to another thing or the next thing. So you do have to be constantly innovating and trying to come up with new things and exciting things to keep people interested so that they don’t get distracted and shift over to the next exciting thing. Because this is just a small space and anything that comes in is potentially a big deal.

Jason Hsieh (09:37)
I see, I see, I see. So how often are you launching new product on the product line?

Mike Tuñez (09:42)
Yeah, so we’re trying to, we’re in some one way or another, we’re launching new product probably two or three times a year at least. We’re trying to make that every quarter. We’ve experimented with a few different things. We’ve tried to do smaller, more consistent releases. We’ve also tried, the thing we’ve had the most success with is

is a model that we’re now kind of implementing, which is where we’re doing big crowdfunding projects. One big crowdfunding project a year, supplemented by two or three smaller ones. And smaller, not so much in but just as far as like our actual development, how much is already done? How much do we need to get done? How much time do we have to put into it essentially is kind of how we scale it, not so much in the quantity or quality of the thing.

Jason Hsieh (10:24)
I see, I see, I see. And what are some of the new games that you’re currently working on that you’re planning to launch right now?

Mike Tuñez (10:29)
Yeah, so right now, the two things, so we’ve got a game called Blood and Bayonets. So one of the things we do is we publish kind of like fan projects, sort of. They’re the easiest way to describe it. So people who play Blood and Plunder, for example, they really like the rules a lot of times. And they want to use the rules to play other sort of settings. So one of the more recent ones we did is called Blood and Bayonets. So it gets Blood and Plunder and kind of transposes it to the Napoleonic Wars.

So you can play, the rules are not exactly the same, but they’re the same kind of baseline. They just add some stuff to make up for the differences in that conflict. So that we kickstarted earlier this year and is about to go to print. We’re just waiting on one final edit and then it’s going off to the printers and it should be out in the fall sometime. And then we also have another, we have a role playing game called War Stories and that’s a World War II.

RPG where you play the role of an allied US soldier or British soldier or Australian now with the New expansion that we put out for the Pacific for that and there’s some different options there and it’s a That’s gonna be out right around the same time as Blood and bayonets just because the way things ended up but It’s a pretty different market for those two things

Jason Hsieh (11:36)
I see for the type of product that you’re selling, what kind of marketing has been working well for you so far?

Mike Tuñez (11:42)
So the two things that have worked the best for us is YouTube sponsorship. where we basically Youtube influencers and have them basically mention our products or talk about them and do some advertising in that regard. And then also social media, Facebook and are still the two that do the most for us.

Jason Hsieh (12:01)
I see. Are you also running ads on ongoing basis for those?

Mike Tuñez (12:04)
Yeah,

pretty consistently. Yeah. that’s what seems to give us the best result.

Jason Hsieh (12:08)
I see for the brand. got it. And also, are you also going to quite a bit of conferences as well?

Mike Tuñez (12:15)
yeah, yeah. So we do, we do, we go to, we go to quite a few conventions every year and we have a presence set. A lot of the big shows. The two big ones that we do are Gen Con and Adepticon. Gen Con is coming up now in August. Adepticon is in the end of March. So those are our two big shows. We do a few smaller ones as well, as well as some local, some very small local ones for just a couple hundred people, but

That’s kind of like our local community of people we know. that’s just kind of fun.

Jason Hsieh (12:39)
I see, I see, I see. And do you also run any kind of like tournament, like in-person tournament for the game?

Mike Tuñez (12:45)
Yeah, part of Wargames in general is that it’s very community driven. So when you have a game, by nature, you’re going to have a community that comes with it, especially because these are games you will play against each other. And that, of course, draws a competitive aspect. So we do have a very active tournament scene. So a lot of these tournaments happen in local game stores all over the world, and we do support them.

So if you’re running a tournament, some people email us. And we have a program also called Quartermasters where it’s like, they’re kind of just fans of the game, but they sort of want to represent the company to a degree and help us grow the games because they want to see more people playing the games, right? So we have like this mutually beneficial relationship where we give them free product in exchange for them spending time to run demos and get people excited about the game.

They’re kind of like ambassadors.

Jason Hsieh (13:31)
Yeah,

yeah, yeah, okay. That’s a very good analogy, yeah.

Mike Tuñez (13:35)
Yeah, and it’s not our idea. It’s a very common thing in Wargaming world because it’s kind of necessary, right? Like if you go to a game store and no one’s playing the game you want to play, you can’t build that community yourself and get people excited to do so. You know you’re probably gonna lose interest in the game and that’s not good for the game or for you. but those guys they do the majority of the work.

vast majority of the work for running tournaments and things that we do have, but we support them again with prizes and things. That’s part of what we give them things for. So we give them free products so they can use it to incentivize people to play, have giveaways, do tournaments, things like that. They could use it for some of their own collections as well, just to you know, keep them excited and motivated to do things. yeah, lots of tournaments. That’s a big thing for us.

Jason Hsieh (14:18)
I see. And what does a general rule look like? Because I haven’t played one of your games yet. So if you just explain on a high level gameplay usually works.

Mike Tuñez (14:28)
Yeah, so the very high level of it is we’re going to set up a table. going to or choose a scenario out of one of the books. And that’s going to tell us what the mission is, right? So what we’re each trying to do, It could be like symmetrical or asymmetrical, so we can have same or different objectives. It varies, right? So then once we have that set up,

we are going to build, we have a certain number of points and each little group of characters is worth a certain number of points. Their leaders are worth points, the ships are worth points, et cetera, and all that. So let’s say an average point cost for Blood and Plunder is around 200. So we’re each going to build around 200 and that’s going to give us a balance game, right? So we’re both playing the same number of points. So we know that it’s going to be a fair game. get our stuff.

we roll to see who’s the attacker, who’s the defender, then that determines how we set up our armies. And once our armies are set up, then once you get into a game, in the case of Blood and Plunder, you’re going to use a deck of playing cards and you’re going to draw cards and those are going to give you options of how you’re going to activate your units. the cards, whoever has a higher suited card is going to go first with one of their units.

And then that card also tells you how many things the unit can do. So a fast card that lets you win initiative gives you less actions. A slow card with lower initiative gives you more actions. So that’s one of the tactical choices you have to make in the game. And then from there, the choices of what you can do is things like you can move and then everything moves four inches and you can move as many times as you have actions. Or you can use that to shoot.

You can use it to reload your guns, can use it to rally to try to get your guys back in fighting shape because as they get attacked or push themselves, they can gain what’s called fatigue, which will hinder them from taking actions later as you build it up. And then from there, so let’s say I want to attack your guys. If we’re going to shoot, we measure the range and farther away is little harder to hit and you roll 10-sided dice and it’s based on the skill that’s on the character’s stat line.

So let’s say a character has a skill of six and he’s at the super close range of the red in front of each other. That means I need a six to hit. So however many guys I have in my unit, I’m going to roll that many dice and every six is a hit. And then the target is going to have a save and that’s how well they can avoid taking fire. So they’re going to roll and have a chance to block those hits. And they have a target number for that as well. And then anything that doesn’t get blocked.

gets killed and then they do like a morale test to see if they gain fatigue based on how many guys they got killed. And that’s kind of how an action resolves. You just keep going back and forth and you’re out trying to out maneuver each other. There’s typically little objective markers on the board that you’re trying to control and they’re going to give you points. Eliminating the enemy is going to give you points and then it gets to a certain point where one side is losing pretty significantly. You’ll do what’s called a strike test to roll and see if your guys are going to surrender or run away or something like that.

Jason Hsieh (17:12)
Hmm

Mike Tuñez (17:13)
And

that’s kind of a general overview of how it plays.

if the side that doesn’t run away will be the winner. Otherwise, it typically is a certain number of turns, right? So typically we play six turns at the end of the turn six. Whoever has the best score is going to win. And that’s based on how many of those objectives you’re controlling, how many of the enemy you killed, etc.

Jason Hsieh (17:28)
Oh based on a school point system.

I see. Okay, okay, okay,

Mike Tuñez (17:38)
The

scenario is different. It’s not always the same scoring. Sometimes there’s different ways to win. It just depends.

Jason Hsieh (17:42)
Yeah, I see. But you also add more variety to the game because each time you play, it’s kind of a different scenario and different setup. Yeah.

Mike Tuñez (17:50)
And with the scenery and everything, how you can change it around, every game is always games are never the same.

Jason Hsieh (17:55)
I see. Okay. Thank you so much for sharing that. And I think you also spend a lot of time on like making sure the figures and miniature is also tying to the scene. So that’s definitely very different and difficult for games. I think that’s a lot more, you know, components involved as well, if I understand it correctly. How important it is for you when you’re designing the game, like when you come to historical accuracy of the characters and

like the scene in general?

Mike Tuñez (18:22)
Yeah, so for us it’s pretty important. It varies on the company. Some companies do like, you know, miniatures, so historical actually is not terribly important. But for us it’s pretty important. It was kind of a big thing for us. We enjoy that aspect of it to the point that we have, we work with a historian named Benerson Little and he’s, use it. He has a consultant that we use. you know, but we don’t take it too seriously either. We do realize it’s a game.

We’re not trying to create a simulation of real life. We’re trying to make it realistic, but not a simulation, if that makes We take a lot of creative liberties. For example, game, there’s over 100 factions that you can play as in the game, but they all kind of fall under these umbrellas of the nations. So English, Spanish, French, Dutch, Native American, etc.

There’s nothing in history to really tell me that a Spanish sailor is maybe a little bit tougher than an English sailor. There are certain things about discipline or training or experience or whatever, but we take some of information and we try to get the best picture that we can of how they would look different and we use that to stat them and make them different. And applying that history really makes it…

interesting because it gives a lot of flavor to the game. So even though you’ll have, a guy with a musket and a guy with a musket ultimately, but with all the little historical details that we can add, we can add a lot of flavor that makes these two guys, even though they’re both, you know, they look the same. It’s it’s a Europe, 17th century European guy with a musket, right? but these two guys are able to play really differently because of the way they fought historically,

the tactics they use or whatever and we’ll apply things like that into the design process, which makes the games just more fun. And that’s the main reason we care about the historic accuracy because we do think it makes it more fun.

Jason Hsieh (20:00)
Yeah, that’s true. That’s And I think that’s also a very big component about customization because a lot of the product that you have, people actually need to spend kind of building the components and the pieces before they can start playing. So, yeah. And based on your experiences, what kind of a typical customer do you usually attract for the games like yours?

Mike Tuñez (20:23)
Yeah, so mostly, it’s mostly men. we do have, compared to other games, we do have like a larger percentage of women interested in playing. Women just seem to like pirates for some reason. But war games in general is typically male dominant and it’s typically age range about 30 to 70. So it’s kind of middle age to older. Not a ton of young guys. some, but it’s mostly in that range.

I would say the average is probably 40 to 50 really if you want to average it out.

Jason Hsieh (20:46)
Okay. ⁓

okay, okay, okay. I see, I see, I see. So that’s kind of the main audience they are trying to go after as well. And I think you also released another game that actually is rule only without miniature as a Blood and Crowns right? Can you also talk about that one and the reason why you decided to release that one?

Mike Tuñez (21:11)
I mentioned Blood and Bayonets. So Blood and Bayonets is the same thing. We don’t produce miniatures for that game. We only produce a rule set. So we have Blood and Bayonets, which is the Napoleonic. We have Blood and Crowns, which is medieval. It’s the Hundred Years War. And then

Blood and Steel, which is Victorian that’s kind of just like a little bit, that’s the most varied one. And then there’s Blood and Valor, which is World War I. World War I skirmishes. So all of those games, we do not produce figures for. And again, they’re all based off of, that’s the one I said, it’s kind like a fan project where fans, people who like the game kind of reinvent

the rule systems that we’ve come up with to play in different settings. And that’s the idea. Now, because of the nature of the miniatures industry and all these historical settings, there’s a whole bunch of options to get figures from different these are mainly geared toward people with existing miniature collections, but maybe they’re bored of the rules they have or they don’t like them that much, but they haven’t found one that really represents it the way they like it. So this gives you another option and alternative.

And it’s good for us. It’s an easy way for us to diversify our player base a little bit and kind of drag because through those games, we’ve actually brought a lot of people into Blood and Plunder because it’s an area that they’re more interested in, but they like the rules and they kind of then kind of get dragged into the pirate side of things if you will. So for us, it works really well. The players all really like it, especially because a lot of times they get a lot of input in the communities that are built around these

Jason Hsieh (22:29)
I see.

Mike Tuñez (22:37)
are a little more flexible. they’re parts of other existing communities for a specific genre or something. part of the reason, is really just to diversify. And it’s almost like a mix of marketing and just game design. And it’s games we want to play, right? So we like our rules. So we like playing all these different things. So it’s things that we can enjoy as well.

Jason Hsieh (22:56)
I see. see. Got it. Thank you so much for sharing. And as we’re kind of wrapping up today’s interview, if you had to share one piece of advice with someone that’s getting started, within the toys and game industry, what would that be?

Mike Tuñez (23:09)
I you’re out there to try to make a healthy profit, avoid joke that we should have started this as a nonprofit because we almost kind run it as one. We kind of depend on the goodwill of our customer base to, again, spread the good word and do things and kind of build support and interest.

which is interesting. I’ve worked in the nonprofit industry in the past. So I’ve, there’s a lot of parallels. It’s actually very interesting. But, but I think in toys and games in general, it’s, it’s kind of find something that you can relate with. think if you could relate with your products and you had something that you find interesting and unique or, just draws you in having that connection with your products, instead of just being like a cog in a machine that’s just designed to

produce just gives you a tremendous edge and really makes you work a lot easier at the end of the day.

Jason Hsieh (23:57)
Yeah, I see. Thank you so much for sharing that. Yeah, it’s definitely a interesting sub niche, like I mentioned in the beginning of the show. It makes it kind of difficult to scale the business as well because the demand, I think, is a little bit lower, but definitely very interesting and very passionate audience that you’re building as well around the community that you’re building alongside with the wonderful game that you’re providing also. So for our listeners that are interested to learn more about your companies and your games.

Where can people find you online?

Mike Tuñez (24:25)
Yeah. So the best place is firelockgames.com. So firelock, it’s like behind me right there. That’s a weird font, but firelockgames.com. Obviously we’re on socials, we’re on Facebook, we’re on Instagram, we’re on Discord. So we’ve everywhere there. If you’ve got a local game shop in your area, we sell direct to local game stores. We sell through Golden Distribution. We sell through other distribution sources.

In the overseas, we sell through Wayland Games, or actually War Cradle, BNC, a bunch of different ones. So there’s lots of, we always love for people to support their local stores and try to buy our stuff from there if you can. We love direct sales as well, so come visit us on our website, especially if you don’t have a local store in your area. And that’s the best place to find us.

Jason Hsieh (25:11)
Got it. Thank you so much for sharing that. And thank you so much for your time today on our podcast and sharing your journey and a little bit more about your company as well.

Mike Tuñez (25:19)
Yes, thank you for having me. had a, I enjoyed the conversation. Thank you.

Jason Hsieh (25:21)
And for our audience, thank you so much for tuning in for this episode of Toy Business Unboxed podcast. We hope you have enjoyed today’s conversation and find it insightful and inspiring. If you like what you have heard, be sure to subscribe to our podcast on your favorite platform so you never miss an episode. We really appreciate your support and would love it if you can leave us a review and share the podcast with your friend and colleague. For more resources, tips and the latest update within the toys end game industry.

visit our website at toy-launch.com. Join the conversation and connect with us on social media using #toybusinessunboxed. We’d love to hear your feedback and suggestions for future episode. Until next time, keep innovating, keep creating, keep bringing joy to toys. This is Jason Shea signing off on the Toy Business Unboxed podcast. We’ll see you in the next episode. Thank you so much, everyone.