With Nexus, the producers of Wings of War, now no longer operating, and with the English language distributor of WoW,
Fantasy Flight previously announcing that they would no longer support it (in favour of their Star Wars based
X-Wing, which uses similar mechanisms.), things were not looking good for the 'Wings' community.
But at last some good news, posted by the games designer Andrea Angiolino on the Yahoo Group, and confirmed by the likes of
Tabletop Gaming News.
The press release...
Camaiore, Italy – September 1, 2011 - Ares Games, a Tuscany-based games publisher recently established, announces an agreement with Andrea Angiolino and Pier Giorgio Paglia, the authors of the best selling game that recreates aerial combat during the WWI and WWII, formerly published with the name "Wings of War".
Ares Games will publish the game under a new brand, "Wings of Glory". Wings of Glory will be published with a new rulebook, while maintaining compatibility with the previous Wings of War products already in the market.
"We are happy to be partnering with Andrea and Pier Giorgio to bring this wonderful game system to market." said Christoph Cianci, CEO of Ares Games, "Thousands of fans worldwide will be pleased to know that their planes and maneuver cards from Wings of War will be compatible with the new Wings of Glory."
Initially, Ares Games will focus on developing new miniatures for the game, but also plans to release new starter sets.
"This game has a very strong and loyal fan base around the world, which gave and will surely continue to give a great help to the success of our game with their support and creativity. They have high expectations of it, in spite of several attempts to imitate it with other settings and chrome," stated Andrea Angiolino, co-creator of the game. "We chose to partner with Ares Games because we believe they understand our game, and that they will take care of the wishes of its fans, as well as be respectful of its creators."
The first Wings of Glory products to be released will be four airplanes for the WWII game series: the American P40, the Russian Yak-1, the Japanese Ki-61 and the Italian Re-2001 Falco. Ares Games will publish a Starter Set with these four models, containing the introductory rules and all other elements needed to start play. The complete schedule of the next releases will be announced soon.
With this announcement, Ares Games now publishes two important games from Italian creators that have achieved international recognition. In July, Ares Games aquired the rights from Sophisticated Games to publish the award-winning board game "War of the Ring", based on the J.R.R.Tolkien' s trilogy, "The Lord of the RingsTM", and created by Roberto Di Meglio, Francesco Nepitello and Marco Maggi. A new edition of the game, in English, will be available this Fall, with other language editions forecasted for Spring 2012.¶