February 9, 2015 Update from GMT Games

By the Staff of GMT 

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Several of you have asked why we haven’t put a lot of new games on the P500 list over the past few months. The answer is that Tony and I think the list is large enough as is, so we are trying to add new games to the list in equal (or close) measure to the new P500 titleswe ship, thereby keeping the list roughly the same size. Over the past few months, we’ve shipped mostly reprints (including the coming batch), so I haven’t wanted to increase the size of the new game list. This month, though, we are adding two new games (including a completely new edition of our first game) and a new expansion module, which essentially keep the list size static considering the two new games we shipped in December and the games we are removing from P500 this time. Speaking of which…

P500 Deletions:

We are deleting the following games from the Reprint section of the P500 list, based either on designer request or lack of orders:

Infidel Reprint

Successors Reprint

The Spanish Civil War Reprint

We’re also deleting Rising Glory from the list. It’s unusual, but does happen sometimes that we delete a game that’s over 500. In this case, the Nappy 20 series is a core game line for our friends at VPG, and the length of our queue to get the quad versions of these games into production and published (in the case of Rising Glory) and reprinted and back on sale (in the case of Fading Glory) was causing some difficulties for the series. Unfortunately, we just never had really strong P500 numbers for these games, so it was tough for us to give them higher priority.

So I asked Alan at VPG if it wouldn’t be easier for us to just give them these games back and let VPG run with them (VPG has upgraded the Nappy 20 system to v4.0 rules and really improved their graphics for these games). That way, VPG doesn’t have to wait for us to keep the Nappy 20 series in production. Alan agreed that would probably be the best thing. So, that’s the news, guys. Victory Point Games has the Nappy 20 series back now. My understanding is that they will be adding theRising Glory games into their publishing queue soon. If you are interested in getting the Rising Glory games, check out the next VPG newsletter for more information on their plans.

If you had an order for any of these now-deleted P500 games, those orders were automatically deleted when we deleted the games from our P500 list.

One Game with a Deadline:

The order #s to date for WBC: The Boardgame(157 so far) have us wondering whether you guys really have any interest in this game. Rather than delete it outright, though, we talked with Bryan Collars, the designer, and we’ve all agreed to give the game one last window of opportunity on P500. So if the game doesn’t have at least 400 orders by April 1, we’re going to delete it.

We still think this is a really good game, but we don’t want to keep a game on the list if it doesn’t garner a lot of interest. So if you want to see us print WBC: The Boardgame, please get your order in before April 1. Thanks!

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1714: The Case of the Catalans

We do still have some copies of this cool game in our warehouse! We invite you to check out the info and player comments on our 1714: The Case of the Catalans game page, and if you like what you see, get your order in soonest, as I think we are one of just a few that have any existing English-language stock on this game, and I don’t think there’s a restock coming anytime soon.

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Digital Games Update

We’re currently doing in-house testing on three digital products based on latest builds from our development partners:

• Twilight Struggle 
• Dominant Species
• Space Empires 

I can’t give you guys a lot of details on functionality at this point (NDAs), but based on what we’ve seen so far, I think these games will release in the order above. i.e. Twilight Struggle is the furthest along, and Space Empires is a very early build with most of the game functionality built in but only programmer placeholder art in the game at this point. Dominant Species is somewhere in between the two, but I have to say that it does have a functional AI that is already quite a lot better than what we had in the original version of the game, and it’s only going to get better before release as Chad and Kai and soon other testers pound on it.

There’s no info about the TS game here that Gary or Randy haven’t already disclosed (see below) so I can tell you that I’ve been having a lot of fun (er, I mean REALLY WORKING HARD :-)) lately testing Twilight Struggle with my son Luke, who is studying abroad this semester. So he’s on a different continent running Twilight Struggle on his MacBook and I’m swapping back and forth between my PC and my iPad (the game is platform agnostic, so you can pick up your latest game from any of your devices, as long as you own the game on that device) and we’re refighting the cold war from almost 6,000 miles apart. We play both synchronous and asynchronous games (the latter really helps when you’re in radically different time zones), sometimes both in the same game, and they are SMOOTH. The more I play, the more impressed I am with what Playdek is creating. MAN, I’m going to love being able to play this with friends all over the world when it’s ready – but for now being able to hang out with my son over online games of TS is just really cool.

Over the coming weeks and months, to keep you guys up to date with the digital game  progress and also to respect our NDA requirements, I’m going to be inviting our development partners to post updates themselves through our InsideGMT blog, so they can give you guys whatever details they are comfortable releasing. We’ve already done this a couple times with Playdek.  If you haven’t seen their updates, here are two recent updates from Playdek, the first from Randy in InsideGMT and on Kickstarter, and the second from Gary in response to a bunch of questions from Kickstarter backers. Here are the links:

Twilight Struggle Digital Version Update

Answers from Gary Weis on Kickstarter (just scroll down the page to the Comments section and read the last one I posted with Gary’s answers – interesting stuff.)

Sometime soon, I’ll have an InsideGMT article from our friends at GameTheory to update you onDominant Species development. Hopefully we’ll be able to get you guys at least monthly updates after that.

That’s all for now on the digital front.

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This Month in InsideGMT!

We’ve updated our spring event calendar on our InsideGMT blog this month, so please take a look (right side on the main blog page, about 2/3 down the page) if you want to find out which conventions and events we’ll be attending over the coming months. For you designers and developers, if there are events that you’ll be attending that aren’t listed on our calendar, or if you’re attending one of our listed events and want to get your name and events added, just drop me a note and I’ll take care of it. We’ve also recently added a “Designers BlogRoll” link that points you to several blogs that our designers update on a regular basis.

Here’s a look at our most recentInsideGMT articles:

Space Empires: Replicators – Resource Cards

Rendering Caesar’s COIN (Part II of II)

Silver Bayonet Archival Material, Part I

Twilight Struggle Digital Version Update

Silver Bayonet: The 25th Anniversary Edition

Next War Taiwan Scenario: Invasion

Next War Korea Scenario: Regime Change
As always,  I  invite you guys to head over towww.insidegmt.com, check out the articles, leave us your comments, and tell us what else you’d like to see us do to make our InsideGMT blog even better!

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