UK miniatures publisher Spartan Games has gone out of business

Spartan Games, the British firm behind miniatures games including Halo: Fleet Battles, Firestorm Armada, Uncharted Seas and Dystopian Wars, has closed its doors.

Spartan was launched as an offshoot of consulting, printing and design company Rebel Publishing in 2008, and went on to release miniatures games spanning sci-fi, fantasy and alt-history to its adaptations of video game shooter Halo, including both the space dogfighting title Fleet Battles and the planetary surface-set Ground Command.

In a blog post on its website, Spartan said that it suffered a ‘significant’ loss for 2015/16 after investing heavily in new development and suffering management problems but had managed to drastically improve on its results during the latest 2016/17 financial year.

Despite an effort to raise extra funds through a Kickstarter for an expansion to Firestorm Galaxy, which picked up almost £50,000 before being cancelled last week, Spartan said that on-going “challenging trading conditions”, as well as the poor health of one of the company’s directors and amount of money owed to finance companies, had meant that it would be unable to continue as a business.

As a result, Rebel Publishing and Spartan Games have ceased trading, resulting in all members of staff being made redundant with state redundancy payments.

Spartan advised any players who are unlikely to receive their pre-orders or purchased games – such as those from Kickstarters – to request a refund from their card issuer as soon as they can.