September 7, 2015 Update from GMT Games

Hi guys!

Well, our “crazy busy” shipping schedule has hit a bit of a lull, as due to some production delays at printers and also in port here in California, we’re not going to have our planned September shipments (including the Twilight Struggle Kickstarter items) ready until very late in the month, and in the case of The US Civil War and The C&C Nappy expansion (and maybe the TS CE), probably a week or two into October. So we’re not real thrilled about that, but we are using the time here at the warehouse to get the rest of the summer games built and warehoused and to prepare for what’s shaping up to be a very busy late September and early October.

The good news is the sales of our summer games have been really outstanding, and feedback from you guys continues to be excellent on Churchill, Genesis, Wing Leader, Triumph & Tragedy, and Pax Romana 2nd Edition. I haven’t really heard a lot of feedback yet on No Retreat 4 (Italy), but that’s probably because you guys are all still playing those other summer releases. I expect it will do very well, too, as I know the No Retreat series has been very popular overall, and we don’t have that many good Italian campaign games in the hobby. You know, overall, I can’t think of a summer when we’ve produced this many games of such high production quality that were so popular and well-received. I’m really proud of all the design and art and production teams that made them happen, and thankful to all of you who supported the games on P500 to make it possible for us to produce them and get them to your game tables.

Turning for a moment to two new games that we think have a decent shot at making NEXT summer’s production queue….

We have a couple of really exciting (yes, I’m admittedly a bit biased about one of them! :-)) new P500 additions this time, including a completely new type of game for us, plus “the game I’ve always wanted to design.” We’re really looking forward to seeing the customer response to both of these games, as we think <fingers crossed> that they are both going to be very popular. So, please welcome (and order like crazy!) both our first 18xx game, Tom Lehmann’s 1846, and my new solitaire design, Mr. President to our P500 list. See the P500 section below and the P500 pages on our website for more details.

Although it is a bit of a “slow news time” for us right now, here are our latest updates on other info that we want to make sure you have:

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1. Many of you – at least those of you in the US – have now received the five replacement countersheets for the Great Battles of Alexander Deluxe Edition that we promised to reprint. Thankfully, the feedback from those of you who’ve posted online has been excellent. So hopefully this is “one down” on the (thankfully short) list of issues we need to fix. If you don’t have yours yet in the US, please contact our office folks to check status. If you’re outside the US, I’d expect that you’ll have them by the end of September. As always, you can chat or call our office ladies if you have any questions.

2. Updated components for Won by the Sword. I know we’re close, but don’t have any further updates from Andy or Tony yet this month. As soon as I do, I’ll let you guys know on social media and on CSW/BGG.

3. Empire of the Sun: We’ve replaced all the problem maps, so I think we’ve dealt with the issue. The only residual problem is that we had to cannibalize virtually all of the existing copies of the game to take care of all the requests for new maps. So we are temporarily out of stock on the game until we get the order of replacement maps (hopefully within the coming month).

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Just a quick update on mounted maps on the P500 list.  As always with the mounted maps, we need about 200 orders minimum in order to get them printed. The mounted map for Genesis has passed 200 orders now (thank you!) so Tony is starting to look at when he can schedule a new mounted map run. We’d love to print more than one map, so for any of you who would like a mounted map for either Conquest of Paradise or Unhappy King Charles, please place a P500 order and help us get one or both of these maps produced along with the Genesis map.

Here’s the current order status on all three Mounted Map options:

Conquest of Paradise Mounted Map: 138 Orders

Genesis Mounted Map: 224 Orders

Unhappy King Charles Mounted Map: 154 Orders

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Occasionally we have to drop some games from our P500 list, as the order #s and the trajectory of order pace make it clear that they’re just not going to make the cut. Recently, we took a top-to-bottom look at both our P500 list and the P500 Reprint list and decided to delete the following games:

Captain’s Sea. I really wanted this one to make it, but it seems that the demand for Mike Nagel’s terrific Flying Colors series of games just didn’t translate to a more detailed tactical battle game like Captain’s Sea. We wish Mike well with publishing this game in another venue and will let you guys know here where you can order the game whenever Mike is ready.

P500 Reprint List:

1914: Twilight in the East. I think Michael Resch is doing some work on a new edition of this that will be compatible with his other 1914 games. At the point he’s ready to show it to us, you’ll see that new product on the P500 list.

The Battle for Normandy: Not a lot of order demand for this right now. Dan’s really busy with real life military right now, too. Once that slows down for him, we’ll take another look at this one as a reprint.

The Napoleonic Wars: Hard to see this old favorite go off the list, but the orders just aren’t there. In a world where we had unlimited funds, we’d reprint it, but at least for now, it will have to wait.

Unhappy King Charles: Here’s another CDG that I really hate to see going off the reprint list, but again the orders just aren’t there. I’m hoping that at least we can get enough mounted map orders so that we can get those out to the guys who want them to enhance their UKC games.

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As you guys know, we have quite a few of Mark Miklos’ AmRev series games out of stock. Our attempts to get reprint numbers through P500 have been mostly unsuccessful, although we know this series has an avid following. It’s a real shame to have so many of its games out of stock, but we do have limited funds for reprints, and the reprint money tends to go where the orders are.

But we don’t like this situation, and have been looking for a solution. We think we may have one, thanks to Mark Miklos, who approached us at WBC this year with the idea of doing a multi-game reprint pack for the AmRev series. Tony is investigating details and pricing now, but we like Mark’s idea, as this approach would let us put as many as four of the AmRev games in one box to offer on P500 – something we THINK would be much more appealing than one-off reprints.

Hopefully we’ll have full details by next month’s update, but for now, we wanted you guys who’d like to see those AmRev games back in print to know that we’re working on it. If it works out well here, we may try the same approach with other series that have several long-out-of-print games.

More next time!

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We’re sending a new update for Digital Dominant Species in to Apple this week, so hopefully you guys will have new versions (including a nice new Tutorial from Kai Jensen) within 10-14 days or so.

We plan one more big update after this one, hopefully in about six-eight weeks. That one will add online multi-player functionality via Apple’s Game Center.

Playdek posted a Kickstarter update a couple weeks ago which includes more details on progress on the Digital version of Twilight Struggle. They’re very close to beta testing this with the Kickstarter backers now – we’re starting to get excited!

That’s all for now on the digital front.

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Our Twilight Struggle Collector’s Editions are stuck either at anchor or in the port at present. We expected them in 10-14 days ago, but unfortunately we seem to be stuck in another port delay.

Tony’s going to try to get a firm delivery date from the port/shipping people this week, and we’ll let you know as soon as we get that. But as I told you last month, we estimate it’s going to take us AT LEAST two weeks, once the games are in the warehouse, to get the shipments organized and ready to go out. So I’m telling the Kickstarter backers “late September or even early October” at this point.

For those of you who aren’t Kickstarter backers but who want to buy one of the excess copies once we’ve shipped the Kickstarter copies, there’s really no use for us to start that order-taking, as we won’t know how many copies we have available until we get them in the warehouse, count, and examine them.

Right now, the process looks to me like it’ll be something like this:

– Late September/early October: Ship all the Kickstarter copies

– Mid October: Open up orders for the excess games on our website on a first-come, first served, one-copy-per-customer basis. Charge for the orders.

-Early November: Ship the non-Kickstarter copies.

Or something like that. Our yearly sale – which by the way will be in the 2nd half of October this year – kind of messes everything up, because the office ladies will absolutely “KEEL GENE!” if I have them doing anything except the sale (it IS a LOT of work) during that time. So I’m thinking that taking orders and charging for the CE pre-sale and then shipping post-sale is probably how it’s going to have to work.

I’ll give you more specific details in the early October Customer Update.