Category Archives: The Inside View

Posted on

Buyer’s Guide to GMT’s 2024 Fall Sale

by

Every year when we roll out our Yearly Sale, we get lots of requests from customers asking for a variety of information about the games that they can buy in the sale. Which games have the lowest stock levels, which games of a certain series are available, which hot games are available, which games have the highest retail values (usually for the folks who are looking to resell some or all of their sale purchases), etc. So this year, as we approach the GMT Sale that starts on Tuesday, September 3, Rachel and I have created this Buyer’s Guide to try to give you some of that information to help out with your buying choices. We encourage you to use this information and the links below to build your sale carts on the GMT website between now and Tuesday when the sale begins. I hope you find this Buyer’s Guide useful.

Posted on

Farewell, My Friend. R.I.P Richard H. Berg

by

“Bear with me;
My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar,
And I must pause till it come back to me.” – Mark Antony, from Shakespeare’s The Life and Death of Julius Caesar, Act III, Scene 2

This pic of Richard was taken in 1989, about a year before I met him. It’s a great one to show how he smiled with his eyes.
Posted on

Welcome to Frank Chadwick’s ETO Series Team!

by

Sometimes you just get lucky. Or maybe you’re just in the right place at the right time. Such was the case this past month when I attended John Kranz’s most excellent ConsimWorld Expo with my son Luke. On our first day at the Expo, I ran into Alan Emrich and Frank Chadwick. As most of you know, both of them are legends in this industry. To my surprise, they mentioned that due to Alan’s sale of VPG and a subsequent change of focus at that company that returned the series rights to Frank, they were looking for a new publisher for Frank’s ETO series.

A great Soviet counteroffensive in late autumn ’41
Posted on

GMT Website Update

by

[avatar user=”gmtgames@aol.com” size=”thumbnail” align=”left” /]

Hi everyone!

In this article, I want to give you guys a quick update on the website transition, let you know what we’ll be testing during the coming days and weeks, and let you know what you can do right now to help us with that, if you’re so inclined.

Phase 1 of System Transition

First off, as of today, we have now completed Phase 1 of our system transition and have a new website online. Same url as always: www.gmtgames.com.

Phase 1 involved moving all existing customer information and game information to a new server and into an upgraded website operating system. The move should be transparent to you (but we’d still like you to check your information, just to be sure); you should be able to login to the site with your same user name and password, your billing and shipping info on file should all be there, and your existing P500 orders and auto-ordering information should all be just as you left them on our old site. If any of that isn’t the case when you check your information on the new site, please let us know right away.

For the remainder of this week and through the weekend, we will be stress-testing the new server environment with real-world customer traffic loads, making sure all the graphic elements of the new site are rendering correctly and quickly, and filling in a few blanks on the site (like resizing some images and updating formatting on something like 350 game pages!) that we couldn’t do until we were in a live operating environment.

While we do all this, the site order processing is LIVE, so you should be able to place orders, add and delete P500 orders, modify your auto-orders, and basically edit any of your personal information. I’d encourage you to go into your account and just take a look through everything to make sure it’s all good. This is also a good chance to update your P500 orders on file with a few new orders anyway,  especially given the recent additions of two new P500 games that Mark Herman is involved with: Peloponnesian War (an enhanced version of his classic VG design) and Versailles 1919 (his co-design with Geoff Engelstein).

New features in Phase 1.

You’re going to see a cleaner, faster, more mobile-friendly site overall. But we’ve tried to keep a lot of the functionality – especially around our P500 operations – familiar. We want you guys to be able to use our site easily, gathering the information and enjoyment you want in the process. So the additions to our site’s functionality (compared to our old site) have been mostly based on customer requests, to hopefully make it easier for you all to find key information. Here are a few examples:

Front Page Carousels for Most Recent Releases and Newest P500 Additions

We have heard from many customers who don’t have time to keep up with GMT on a regular basis who wanted to be able to go to our site and just find out what’s new. So now, in addition to the “Recent Additions” and “News” feeds at the bottom of the front page, you also have two new Carousels above them that show you what we’ve released lately (with quick links to those game pages) and which games are our newest additions to the P500 list. We hope you guys like this added front-page functionality.

Search

Oh, my goodness. As SO many of you have pointed out over the years, the Search function on our old site was badly broken. We think you will like this new functionality much better. And “Sorry!” for all those years of Search Angst on the old site.

New section on the P500 page called “At the Printer.”

Due to the popularity of our P500 program as well as the broad range of games that our customers enjoy, we’ve in the past generally had a very large number of games in the “Made the Cut” section of the P500 page that stayed there until we were ready to charge, with no way to let customers know (well, unless you read the monthly customer update) that a game was nearing completion – until it was charged and went into the “Charging” section. But with the new P500 page on the new website, when we send games off to the printer, we’ll move them into the “At the Printer” section, so you all have a sense of which games are nearing completion and getting close to charging. We added this to our “To Do” list based on customer suggestions about a year ago (and started testing it in our customer updates then). So thanks for the suggestion. We hope you guys agree that this is a useful status differentiation and definitely helps to track a game’s progress toward production.

Multi-Image Carousels on the Game Pages

These are a work in progress for us right now, as we have a TON of game pages to update. But what we’re adding, over time, are multiple images of each game’s internal components – maps, counters, cards, etc – in high-res photography (with a massive thank you to the uber-skilled Scott Mansfield, who took the lion’s share of the new photos). We only have a handful of pages updated right now, but for examples, take a look at the image carousels on the Talon, Twilight Struggle, and Silver Bayonet pages.

Mobile-friendliness

One of the driving goals of this site rework has been to make the site much more mobile-friendly. I hope that you will find that we’ve accomplished that, and that you will have a much better mobile experience with the new site.

Posted on

GMT Games: State of the Union (Summer 2016)

by

As I mentioned in last month’s Customer Update, GMT is now growing at a pace that is significantly faster than ever before in our history. Although I don’t pretend to understand precisely the mix of factors behind our exploding growth, what I believe is that we are benefitting from a sort of “perfect storm”:

  • Popular games and game series’ that are standing the test of time and continuing to sell well as they age
  • A growing corps of creative and skilled designers and design teams who continue to hone their craft and bring us innovative new games
  • An increasing awareness of our games across the broader game market due to a core group of very popular strategy games as well as the increased customer reach fostered by our expansion into digital products

Of course, these synergies are leveraged by the power of the internet, and more specifically, an increasingly varied and eclectic customer base full of people who enjoy our games and are willing and able as never before to spread the good word about them online through the powerful  tools of social media, blogs, YouTube videos, and mass-gamer sites like BoardgameGeek.

GMT LogoIn this series of GMT Games State of the Union articles, I’m going to take a look at our games, our design teams, our strategies to increase our ability to embrace and foster growth, and finally the challenges that growth is bringing and how we intend to meet and overcome them. For this Part 1, then, let’s talk about our games.

The games are the product that we ultimately trade for your gaming dollars. Their quality is paramount. The designers of these games (we’ll look at them in detail in our next installment) and their teams are our capacity to continue to create future products. Because of this, they are possibly the most important cog in the GMT machine (although all of our team members are very important) because without them, we would lose the capacity to provide quality designs to our customers. And that’s really what it’s all about; putting consistently high-quality game designs on our customers’ game tables at a pace that we can handle and that meets but does not exceed our customers’ demand.

Now let’s look at the sales of our games in a bit more detail, as we examine where GMT Games stands today.

Posted on

A GMT Weekend at the Warehouse with Örjan Ariander (April 2015)

by

The GMT Weekend at the Warehouse offers gamers an opportunity to play their favorite games amongst the shelves of thousands of GMT games.  For me, the best part is the opportunity to meet designers and other notables that created and love the games.  Now that I am designing Liberty or Death it gives me the rare opportunity to meet face to face with those working with me.  COIN Series Developer Mike Bertucelli and I enjoyed playing head to head, trading smack talk like we have known each other for years, all the while working the kinks out of the game.   Gene Billingsley is the master facilitator, and in fifteen minutes with him I complete 6 things on my to-do list.  This year was a rare treat with Mark Simonitch and Tony Curtis in attendance.  Mark and I talked about the Republic of Texas and he gave me advice (and a deadline) on working with the artists engaged in Liberty or Death’s production: Terry Leeds and Charlie Kibler.  Tony helped me nail down piece types and colors – the final production version is going to be fantastic! But, I must say the highlight was spending time with the Bot Master – Örjan Ariander visiting from Stockholm, Sweden!

Oerjan1

Some of the GMT/COIN Brain Trust – Series Developer Mike Bertucelli, GMT President Gene Billingsley, Bot-Master Örjan Ariander and Liberty or Death Designer Harold Buchanan

Posted on

Inside Our Digital Game Strategy (Part I)

by

We’re rolling out our new Leaping Lemmings for iPad app this week, with thanks to the good people at GameTheory, who programmed the app. Thanks to all of you who have helped us by downloading the app and giving us your feedback already. To everyone else, please DO support us by downloading the app – it’s a whopping $2.99 – and let us know what you think of our latest digital product.

LL Collage

While we’re thinking about the fledgling digital side of GMT, I want to give you guys an update on where we are and what we’re planning as we begin to really get rolling with our digital games. As befits a blog called “InsideGMT,”  I want give you all a look deeper inside our digital effort, basically “how Gene thinks about this stuff.” As you might imagine, that includes good, bad, even ugly, but I’m not going to hold back because I want you guys to understand the challenges we face as well as the opportunities that are before us.

Early Efforts – In Search of Good Partners

First off, I think it’s important, in business as well as in life, to understand what you do well and where you could use some help. At GMT, what we do well, due to  some outstanding teams of designers, developers, testers, artists, and support staff, is designing and producing  boardgames that our customers enjoy playing. That’s our core competency and, over 24 years, has become our identity in the game marketplace. Every person we bring onboard to work with us – from those early days of “just Jewel and me,” to bringing on Rodger and later Mark, Tony, and Andy, and all of the designers and their teams – every one of them brings their considerable skills to the GMT family for the purpose of helping us continue to create games that bring enjoyment to our customers.

Posted on

What Do You Want to Know About Falling Sky?

by

NoRetreatItaly-TabVolko and Andrew Ruhnke, the designers of Falling Sky our newest COIN Series game to hit the P500 list, are preparing an article for you guys that gives you a look inside the design. Gallic Wars COIN AvailForces (Rome)In what is a first for InsideGMT, they’ve asked me to involve you guys in the process of article creation.

Volko and Andrew want to tailor their article to give you the information you’re most interested in. To facilitate that, we are requesting that you guys give us your questions, input, and comments in advance.

So here’s your chance to help shape the Falling Sky article. Please leave us a comment with your questions, suggestions, and curiosities about the game.

Thanks much for helping Volko and Andrew craft a Falling Sky article that will give you the information that most interests you!

GALLICWARsetup

Posted on

What Does it Take to Have Your Game Accepted by GMT? (Part II)

by

As I noted last time, I asked Andy Lewis for his input after he got home from WBC, and he sent me enough good information that I wanted to just devote a whole section to Andy’s view and process. Part I of this series can be found here. – Gene

——————

Andy Lewis, VP of Acquisitions & Development

Andy Lewis, VP of Acquisitions & Development

Sorry for being away during the first part. I do want to give you guys some information about how I look at design submissions, because. as Gene noted in Part I,  my process is a little different than his.

Regarding where I can best evaluate your submissions: Yes, I would like to see your game at a convention, but my useful time at them is limited. You see, WBC is my main vacation for the year – yes it is a working vacation – so you need to arrange something for Monday or Tuesday otherwise I’ll look if I have free time. Just please be aware the zombie stare doesn’t mean I’m uninterested; I’m just exhausted from gaming all week. Prezcon in February is another option, but I run the booth there 10-6 so again zombie stares will come with the review. The best opportunity is at GMT East in March in White Plains. I am the host and run the “store” there, but have more free time and less zombie stares.

Posted on

Mass Shipping Day at GMT HQ

by

 

Deb and Letitia

Deb and Letitia

At last, today is the day we ship 2,100+ copies of Fire in the Lake and 1,200+ copies of Won by the Sword to our P500 customers. Oh, and mounted maps for four different games, as well! So I thought I’d give you guys a brief glimpse at the mix of organization and chaos that is our warehouse on “mass ship day.”

Elizabeth and Savannah

Elizabeth and Savannah

Everything starts with the office ladies, who have prepared and organized orders and shipping labels in advance of the big day. Without the hard work of these ladies, ship day would be a disaster.