Up Front – no new version from MMP!

Up Front Status

Recently, we were able to agree with Wizards of the Coast/Hasbro on extending a number of the licenses that we hold from them. Unfortunately, with the status of Up Front in the air, that license was not continued. WotC/Hasbro could not estimate when, if ever, they would be able to work through the legal issues surrounding ownership of that game that have prevented us from producing anything for the last five years. We regret that we will not be involved in the future of Up Front. We are very grateful to Andy Maly and Ken Smith for all the hard work that they put into Up Front for us. It was a pleasure working with them, although the results did not pan out. We are big fans of Up Front, and we hope it is able to thrive somewhere else.

That’s a statement recently posted by Brian Youse over at CSW and really bad news, because as we all know Up Front is one of the best card wargames ever designed and a very innovative  and thrilling game. The so called Up Front 2000 project (the plan to publish a new updated and completely overhauled version of the classic game) has been on hold for several years so that nobody really believed it would ever happen, but there’s always this 1% of hope that it will happen anyway – and that hope is now completely dead. Given the situation Brian describes above it seems to be fact now that no reprint/reproduced version will come out and  I would suggested that everybody who owns a copy of the classic UF game should by all means keep it and everybody not having it on the shelf should get a copy as soon as it appears on their radar.