About Thane's Games

Thane Morgan is the owner of Thane's Games; in real life he was an energetic materials chemist working for a small research company in Albuquerque, NM. The game business is operated out of his home, guarded by the three-and-a-half Hounds of Chaos, Mystic, Merlin, Sadie and Rodent. Thane has a very understanding wife, Silvia, who has not yet complained about him using about a quarter of the house for gaming activities.

Thane's Games was originally established in 1997 to move Armies of Arcana into the marketplace. It has since branched out to several other game systems, including GSC2, Xenocide, Xenocide: Firefight, Battleshift, and the board game Empires of Arcana. Several more boardgames are under development as well. Thane's Games now has a small 15mm miniature line of four armies plus miscellaneous monsters, focusing on some of the races people often want to play but are not typically available.

The goal of all of this is to put out great games, the kind of games that players want to come back to over and over again. I am a total gaming geek, and like all other gaming geeks I have felt the aggrevation of buying games that didn't really seem like they had been tested, or games that mostly existed to drive players into buying more stuff that they didn't really want but had to have to remain competitive. A basic philosophy of TG is that if the game is good, players will naturally want to spend more money on it. This has been proven over and over again with Armies of Arcana, as players have rapidly expanded their armies to monstrous size because the game is fun, and plays very well with monstrously large armies. I know many players with over 20,000+ point armies, and who have actually played games where they used all of them. In a normal afternoon. To me, this seems a much more desirable selling point than "we will change the rules every couple of years and half your army will become useless - go buy replacements", a business model not unheard of in miniature gaming.

In the years since Thane's Games and Armies of Arcana have been on the market, much of the goal of reducing the predatory tactics of some other game companies has been achieved. Companies are now offering their rulebooks without the $70 initial investment in boxed sets, many are making errata readily accessible without additional purchases, and many are publishing the troop creation systems to allow any figures to be used. A wise man with a measure of perspective might say that these trends were inevitable results of a growing consumer hostility towards the practices of big game companies. I am not such a man - I claim all credit!

I owe a huge debt of gratitude to the many friends who have helped playtest these games, encouraged their publication and let me steal their ideas. Jen Engle deserves a special thanks for all of the artwork she has done for Armies of Arcana and Empires of Arcana.

© 2007
Thane's Games