Phil Reed, CEO of Steve Jackson Games, published the company’s annual Report to the Stakeholders today. In it, the company revealed that they had a second year of decline from 2014’s high of $8.5 million to $6 million. The main reasons cited for the income slowdown were delays on planned releases of Car Wars Sixth Edition and the Munchkin Collectible Card Game. With the delay on Car Wars, Mr. Reed writes it was due to “an insistence on making the game exactly the way we want it. We would rather not ship the game than ship a game that doesn’t meet our standards.” They are also seeking to get the Munchkin CCG ready to print by the end of the year.

The company looks to have a difficult year ahead for it, with the Ogre Kickstarter campaign from 2012 still not completed. “We are still sinking time into the project,” he writes, even though “we’re seeing real progress; several outstanding pieces of the project are finally coming to a close. Whew.”

Issues with the GURPS line have been problematic for the company as well. Two hardcover books for the GURPS line, Discworld and Mars Attacks, were released but performed poorly at retail. “Today’s cluttered market, combined with our insistence on getting it right, made both books expensive experiments that tell us one thing: Do not produce more GURPS hardcovers until we have guaranteed that the sales are there.” Also tying up resources at the company is the Dungeon Fantasy GURPS introductory box set. Reed writes, “what would have been a profitable project is rapidly turning into a loss.”

But it isn’t all doom and gloom: Munchkin continues to do well with reprints, Guest Artist Editions, and expanding into Walgreens. In the top twenty products sold by dollar volume, all but three were Munchkin related. The company released five new games which appear to have done well at retail, and Zombie Dice had to go back to reprint due to “unexpected demand during the fourth quarter” of 2016. “A game from 2010 that keeps outselling our forecast is good and bad, but we’ll take this situation over the opposite problem any day.”

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Phil Reed, CEO of Steve Jackson Games, has published the first public look at the status of the next Car Wars game. The card game, developed by Scott Haring, still features the solo fun of car building (this version uses vehicle component cards to quickly assemble a vehicle), but the emphasis in the new version will be “speed and destruction [rather] than on physics and math.” Actual play of a two-vehicle battle took about a half-hour. While the company is aiming for a $25 to $30 price point, Mr. Reed said that they’re looking at a slightly larger box to support four players, which might bump up the MSRP.

Playtesting continues, but you probably won’t see it in public at Gen Con, writes Mr. Reed. “Things aren’t quite at the point [where] we’re ready to open everything to a public playtest in the booth.”

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Of note this week, The Siblings Trouble calls back to the halcyon days of summer vacation adventures. This card-driven storytelling game is part Goonies, part Hardy Boys, and part Studio Ghilbi. You and family and friends have a grand adventure featuring trolls, the Rat King, and Big Secrets before rushing back home in time for dinner. This game looks insanely cute and fun and I have a feeling I’ll be backing it before it’s over.

I’ve already backed Cucu Dice, a set of a dozen (as of this moment) 16mm dice that are designed to work well with Fantasy Flight Games’ various Lovecraft-themed games. With one red face, two green, and three blue, these dice are designed to easily read successes in these types of games where a six-sided die is used for binary success/fail resolution. A full dozen dice is about $13 shipped to the US. (Honestly, I’ll be using them for my Shadowrun game.)

Calliope Games’ Titan Series is a subscription-based casual game series featuring well-established game designers such as Richard Garfield, Mike Selinker, Rob Daviau, James Ernest, and eight other prominent game designers. With a minimum of nine gateway games (plus three more as stretch goals), backers can subscribe to the entire series or pick and choose the games they want to pick up. Games will run from 2-8 players (various player counts on different games) and have a play time of 60 minutes or less. This campaign continues for another month and a half and is nearly funded as of this writing.

Playroom Entertainment’s Sitting Ducks Gallery Deluxe funded within a day of launch. The game is an update to the award-winning (Games 100, Golden Geek, and more) 2005 version. The theme echoes shooting duck galleries on a carnival midway, with players taking out their opponent’s ducks with humorous action cards and trying to be the last duck in the pond. It looks to be goofy fun.

It’s a Car Wars Kickstarter, but not the all new version of Car Wars Kickstarter I’ve been waiting for. If you already have Steve Jackson Games’ recent Car Wars Classic (or your set from the ‘80s), you’ll want to pick up Car Wars Arenas, collecting five different arenas from early in the product line now published for the first time at Classic scale. But what excites me about this campaign is they just announced an updated version of Car Wars: The Card Game to be released this summer. Pledging at the $65 Pro Duellist level will get you CW Arenas, CW Classic, and the card game. The updated 150-card game will retail for about $25.

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Steve Jackson Games‘ Phil Reed was happy to tease us at the GAMA Trade Show with news of an upcoming Hellboy Board Game planned for the fourth quarter. No other details or images, though. Grrr!

So what else did he reveal?

Muertoons Mix-Up, a card game for tweens based on the the Mexican Day of the Dead book and cartoon series, is scheduled for a summer release at $13. It’s a redesign of SJG’s earlier game, Spooks.

Ogre Operation 218, a two player card game based on Battle for Hill 218 published by Your Move Games, will follow in the fall at $15.

GURPS Mars Attacks, a full-color, hard-cover RPG supplement, should hit retail in October at $25.

And on the Car Wars front, SJG isn’t yet ready for the promised new edition of the base game. However, the company is planning a Kickstarter project later this month for Car Wars Arenas, a package of five map sheets and an arena rule book. With stretch goals, the map sheets could be double-sided.

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