Hey everyone!

I’m Golden Xan and this is my first post here.

I was introduced to Cthulhu Wars a few months ago by Denis Dyack, from Apocalypse Studios, where they had videos of him painting the miniatures from the game and talking about its assymetry. Some time later, Denis invited me to a match with them and, since then, I have been amazed by its awesomeness.

However, I live in Brazil and the only way I found of playing the game was through Tabletop Simulator. But this is not ideal, because Petersen Games deserves recognition for having designed it. And even though I am perfectly fine playing it via TTS, I am more than willing to buy the game in its physical form with all its amazing expansions, present and future.

The problem is that there is no feasible way to do this.
Not because the game is not available in my language (Brazilian Portuguese)… I even prefer games in their original, English, form. Many games are available in English only around here. No, it is not possible to acquire the game because it only ships individually! Brazil has terribly complicated importation laws and even more absurd importation fees. Any product above $50 in price is passive of taxation, and the taxation can potentially be more expensive than the product itself—taxation takes into account the shipping costs plus the product costs.

Moreover, the game has to be purchased in a foreign currency. Conversion rates can be complicated as it is, but on importations they take the most expensive conversion fees possible.
Summing up all complications, a $50 game can end up costing effectively the equivalent to $125 at the end of everything. The more expensive the game is, the more costly it becomes. A $500 game could potentially end up costing $2,000 for the individual, if not more. Importing physical products is prohibitive to interested buyers.
As if that were not enough, there are box size restrictions that would make it impossible to import certain expansions (maybe even the core game) due to their proportions, negating the whole idea.

All this because there is no in-country company that commercializes the product. And I’m certain that this is true to many other countries other than mine, each for their own reasons.

Cthulhu Wars may be bulkier than other games due to the miniatures, that is surely true, but we have other games with miniatures around here and they have their own place. There are conventions where people play boardgames specifically, there are many leagues, tournaments and competitions, and we have even have places called “Luderias“, bars where people go to play from a varied assortment of tabletop and card games together in groups—most of which are only available in English.

I do not have a thorough understanding of the logistics and economics involved in preparing a game to be shipped and commercialized in another country.
Which is why I’m coming here and presenting the idea. Petersen Games must have thought about making their games available to as many people as possible worldwide, so you must have some thoughts.

The foremost impediment I could think of was language. Some cultures typically do not accept products that are not sold in their language. This is not the case for Brazil, but there is always value in making the game available in multiple languages. As a professional Game Localizer, I can tell that translating Cthulhu Wars would not be particularly challenging when compared to any other game, except for the utmost accuracy that is necessary when translating rules and the functioning of systems. I’m not advertising myself here, I’m just saying that translating it is a one-time cost for a tabletop game, differently from a software, which gets updated frequently. But you must know this already.

The rest, however, is beyond my current understanding. So I ask, in hope of insights and as a suggestion:
What’s holding you back from selling Cthulhu Wars, and your other game lines, in other countries?

My next suggestion would be to make the game available in another form, but I will leave this for another day, another post, as this one is long already. 🙂