Was talking to my local FLGS here in British Columbia, Canada about Battletech minis. They stopped carrying minis, but are looking at stocking them again given the resurgence Battletech has experienced. That's great because there is (literally) not a store in BC that carries miniatures and its hard to introduce new players when they can't even buy the product. You can't get the Intro Boxes, maps, or miniatures which is something of an indictment of Catalyst and Iron Wind (on the flip side it reflects growing popularity of the product) so at this point there are no NEW players here even though there are individuals that are certainly interested.
But moving onto the specific IWM part: according to the local owner, they are waiting for Catalyst to start "stocking"/selling miniatures. I of course pointed out that IWM not Catalyst sells miniatures and he responded that the two major North American distributors they use (of which some company called Universal is one) do not stock IWM miniatures because apparently there's some problem with IWM selling them.
So what's going on? Is it the distributors problem, is it Catalyst, IWM? Because frankly, I'm getting really annoyed with the unavailability of product here - if we can't buy the goods the game will die all over again.
