Mail Call: GMT Fall Sale Booty

  

  

I’ve been accused of being a GMT Games fan-boy sometimes (mostly among my circle of gaming buddies). It’s true, in part; the largest segment of my collection by publisher are GMT games, but I tend to talk up Legion Wargames and Worthington Publishing at least as much in this space. The reason is simple; the quality of their games aside, I’ve always received exemplary service from all these folks. Like errata, order problems will always be with us. Whenever a problem has arisen with these companies, it has been cleared up quickly and professionally.

But there’s another reason I have a lot of time for GMT. The company has a sense of responsibility to its customers and its employees baked into it. In early 2020, during the COVID lockdowns and mass lay-offs in other sectors, GMT managed to keep ALL of their staff on the payroll, first through a shutdown of the warehouse during a shelter-in-place order in April, then implementing social distancing by splitting the workforce into morning and afternoon shifts. With the reopening, customers (me included) did what they could to help by believing in the company and continuing to order and pre-order games.

GMT couldn’t support their annual sale in 2020, but the following year they had a special Thank You Sale for their P500 supporters. Anyone who had pre-ordered P500 games in the previous year and a half could buy an in-stock game at 50% off for every P500 order received in the previous eighteen months or so. Since then. the annual sale has continued that tradition, but it’s been expanded to anyone being able to by at least one game at half price.

All this is preface to what I wanted to talk about here. With the Fall Sale* now behind us, I want to show off my fresh acquisitions. I’m one of the obsessives who sits I front of their computer, cart already loaded, waiting for the sale to open and the discount code to be accepted. This year, half an hour after the stated time (5:00am Pacific Standard; 9:30pm local time), the code was working, and there was much rejoicing among a couple of discussions I was following on Facebook (in the previous year’s sale, it took a little over an hour to place my order). There had been mention in an email from GMT that some titles were down to their last hundred or so copies. Among these, not surprisingly were I, Napoleon (GMT Games, 2024) a surprise hit released earlier this year, and The Plum Island Horror (GMT Games, 2023).

Oh, happy day!

As pictured, I managed to get both of these, and a couple of other games as well, which I’ll talk about in brief. But firstly, I’d like to mention the one that got away. I’d originally ordered the recent fourth reprinting (and 25^th Anniversary edition) of the Mark Herman’s classic CDG, For the People (GMT Games, 2024) another recent release. I was contacted by the GMT office folks a couple of days after my order had gone in to let me know the game had sold out just before the sale, and what would I like to do, swap it out for another game or take a refund? Being a difficult customer, I asked if I could get Banish All Their Fears (GMT, 2024) and some counter trays with my unused slot, and could they charge the difference to my credit card?

I was late Saturday, local time, when I sent my answer, so I knew not to expect a response until Monday night. I was surprised when not only did I get a confirmation late afternoon on Monday – yes, they could do it and the extra charge went through without a hitch – but I received a shipping notice from UPS early next morning confirming the label had been struck and I could expect delivery a week from Friday. As it turned out, the package arrived on Monday afternoon, just six days after it left Hanford, CA.

I couldn’t be sore about For the People selling out before the sale, and in a way, it solved a problem for me. When I was thinking about what I wanted to order, I’d settled on a couple of titles, but was debating the merits of Banish All Their Fears over Norman Conquests: Conflicts of the Normans and their Successors 1053-1265 (GMT Games, 2024), the fifth in the Men of Iron series. After some toing-and-froing, I reckoned on being more likely to be able to get a copy of Banish All Their Fears on the secondary market (i.e. from aa FLGS), so Norman Conquests it was. As it happened, I got both. I’m fairly confident another print run of For the People will be announced within the next twelve months, and it’s not like I’m short of games to keep me busy I the meantime.

And so, to the games. All four games I ordered (as well as For the People) were games I had previously ordered on P500 but had to cancel, mostly due to their being the only games being released that I had ordered. Someone asked me in the comments how I afford to buy the games I buy with the onerous cost of shipping to Australia. I’ll put a post together about this in more depth, GMT is a special case in that they have available on their website a breakdown of shipping charges for all their potential customers, not for just the lower forty-eight.

If you’re a gamer in Australia (I imagine it’s the same in New Zealand and elsewhere), and you want to buy games form publishers that don’t have distribution outside of North America or maybe Europe, then shipping costs are the price of doing business. Sometimes these are just too outrageous to consider. This isn’t the case, though, with a lot of companies (even some of the smaller ones).

As I mentioned, GMT have a shipping schedule, which is based on weight. Currently, shipping to Australia (Pacific Rim UPS) is US$53.00 (about A$78.00 at time of writing) for up to 12 lbs. GMT also helpfully list the shipping weight for each product. When Banish All Their Fears preorders were being charged, there wasn’t another game I had preordered being released in that bracket, and I couldn’t justify spending $53.00 on shipping a single game (more than the preorder price of the game itself), so cancelled my order. The next round of P500 releases will include the first expansion for Commands and Colors: Medieval (GMT Games, 2019) and Mike Bertucelli’s Wolfpack: The North Atlantic ConvoyStruggles October 1941-March 1943 (GMT Games, 2024). These are both 5lbs, and I’ve ordered a second copy of The Crusades expansion (GMT Games, 2024), for a total shipping weight of 15 lbs. At $70.00 shipping – a little over $23.00 per item; not ideal, but in total it will still be a better price than I’d pay in another six to twelve months from an Australian store, assuming stock eventually made it to these shores, and I was able to actually get a copy. US$23.00 per game is a price I’m willing to pay for that certainty.

Here ends the lecture, so let’s get back to the games. I’d been on the fence about I, Napoleon, and was almost grateful about it being my only P500 order that month that it gave me the excuse to cancel my order. But then I started seeing people talking about it, particularly Meandering Mike on his YouTube channel. That piqued my interest. I knew there were only a few hundred or so copies left in stock, so I wouldn’t have been too heartbroken if I hadn’t got a copy in the sale, but nabbed one I did. It’s a solo game, but several reviewers have said it can play well I think I’m looking forward to trying this one out. I know it’s not strictly a wargame (I don’t think it fits into the category of role-playing game, as some have tried to argue, either), but I think it is wargame-adjacent enough to warrant some coverage here.

I also vacillated over The Plum Island Horror. The game had two selling points for me, though; it’s a multi-player game that is also playable solitaire. Over the last three GMT sales, I’ve bought one game that accommodates multiple players, so I could take it along for the Wednesday night gaming group. This has yet to happen, but I think Plum Island might have enough appeal to sell everyone at the table. Again, not a wargame per se, but its pedigree is there in In Magnificent Style: Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg (Victory Point Games, 2012) and Crowbar! The Rangers at Pointe Du Hoc (Flying Pig Games, 2019).

Norman Conquests was perhaps the hardest to cancel when it was printed. I like the Men of Iron series, and this looked like a worthy addition, with some interesting battles, including all three of Harold’s battles for his English kingdom, and it’s an easy game to play two-handed. This will in all likelihood be game out of this batch that I get to the table first.

 Finally, Banish All Their Fears: Bayonet & Musket Battles, Volume 1. I’m an Eighteenth-Century guy at heart, so this was of particular interest. And it’s intended to be the first part of a series, the chronological successor to the Musket and Pike series. There has been a lot of complaints about the game in the usual places, but for all the complaints about the rules and the low-balled ratings on BGG, Banish All Their Fears is still showing around a 7 ratings average, and there are as many positive – if measured – comments on the game as there are nasty ones. I don’t mind a challenge, and the subject is close to my heart, so I’m looking forward to this one.

The keen observer will notice there was a fifth game in the appended picture. I ordered Virgin Queen: Wars of Religion, 1559-1598 (GMT Games, 2012) at the request of our Wednesday night host, B. Last year, the group played our first game of Here I Stand: Wars of the Reformation, 1517-1555 (GMT Games, 2006). It played out over five weeks, a complete turn each week, until the Protestants reached their victory conditions. We all had training wheels on, we all make blunders, learned from our mistakes, and had a ball with it.  At the time we agreed it should be a regular fixture on our gaming calendar, but with a group of five, Virgin Queen will probably be a better fit.

So that's all there is to show for now. I'll try to get some unboxing snaps as I work through this lot, and a play report or two. Until then, be well and go play something.

 

* This used to be a Summer Sale, but It’s been brought forward this year, I suspect because several other publishers have their cellar-door sales in the month or two before Christmas as well, so this will make for less hard decisions on the part of customers.