In August 2022, the Hasbro studio Avalon Hill announced HeroScape: Age of Annihilation, a new standalone game from a design team led by Craig Van Ness that would be fully integrable with previous HeroScape titles.
At the start of October 2022, Hasbro launched a crowdfunding campaign for HeroScape: Age of Annihilation on its own Hasbro Pule site, and the $250 price tag for the “Vanguard Edition” (i.e., the only edition) caught a lot of people by surprise given the retail price of earlier HeroScape sets.
When the crowdfunding campaign ended on November 15, 2022, more than 4,300 people had backed the project — committing more than US$1.08 million dollars — but that number was just over half of the 8,000 backers that Hasbro required to meet its funding goal.
Many publishers regroup and relaunch when their crowdfunding projects don’t succeed, reworking their financial targets or adjusting the game itself to make it a more attractive package for backers, but Hasbro has instead announced that it will move on to other projects for the time being:
Our unfortunate answer is… nothing. As we said during the campaign if this project doesn’t meet its goal, we won’t be able to produce Age of Annihilation. That has not changed. HeroScape as a project will be shelved, and there are no current plans to attempt a resurrection at this time. The Avalon Hill team will refocus our efforts on the exciting games we currently have coming soon, such as the next HeroQuest Game System expansion, Mage of the Mirror, or the upcoming Yawning Portal D&D strategy board game.
We’ve all been saved from annihilation! Hurrah?
