Category Archives: The Inside View

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

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Hi everyone!

We got a bunch of feedback and questions in response to the “Anatomy of a Game Design: The Gallic Wars” article that encouraged us to give you guys more insight into how we accept new game designs. Some of the questions came from existing or  aspiring designers or friends of guys with a pet design project, some from customers  just looking for a deeper understanding of our processes. I hope this article will be beneficial to all of you.

More than an Idea:

Before I get into the details, I should say clearly that “We do not accept game IDEAS.” There are many creative people in the gaming world, and frankly, ideas are a-dime-a-dozen. So we generally won’t even look at a “design proposal” that doesn’t include a functioning prototype, at least not from a new designer. If you want us to accept your game, take the time to build a prototype, then test and refine it. It doesn’t have to be perfect when you bring it to us, but it does have to be an actual functioning game, with rules and pieces.

The Gatekeepers:

So, once you have a prototype, to whom do you submit a game if you want GMT to evaluate it?

Andy Lewis, VP of Acquisitions & Development

Andy Lewis, VP of Acquisitions & Development

Andy Lewis and I do virtually all of the new game evaluation and approval here at GMT. Andy lives in Delaware and gives up most of his vacation time to attend several large East Coast Conventions each year, including WBC, where he is on the board. I live in California, and run a couple of GMT Weekends at the Warehouse here at our HQ each year (April and October). I also attend the Consimworld Expo in Tempe, AZ, and occasionally conventions in LA or SF. So between us, we have at least half a dozen  opportunities per year to talk to designers and evaluate new games at a multi-day convention. For new designers, it usually takes one of us playing a physical copy of the game – often at one of those conventions – before we are willing to accept a game to add to our P500 list. There are rare cases when this isn’t true, and that’s usually because either Tony or Mark (who play a LOT of games and whose opinions Andy and I totally trust) have seen the game and know the designer and recommend we accept the game (This happened recently, actually, when Mark saw the Gallipoli 1915 game at a convention, was impressed, and came back and made the case to us to accept the game. Hey, if Mark likes it, I’m in!)

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Happy 18th Birthday, Luke!

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Those of you who have been to a GMT Weekend at the Warehouse know that the Billingsley kids have been involved with GMT for most of their lives. Samantha, our oldest, was born six months after I created the first version of Silver Bayonet in 1990. Rachel came along two years later, and Luke in 1996. All of them worked at GMT during summers and sometimes on weekends from very early ages, and all have done virtually every job in the warehouse and many of the jobs  in the front office. Many of you have received packing slips signed by one of the Billingsley kids dating back to the late 1990s. They all grew up with GMT as the “family business” and are about as “Inside GMT” as you can get. Even now, they stay plugged into what’s going on with GMT (they watched the TS Kickstarter campaign with great interest this summer) and continue to offer good suggestions and feedback on how we’re running the business.  Most of all, though, they all PLAY our games!

They’ve played a bunch of our games over the years, starting with a road trip with the girls about 15 years ago to meet Reiner Knizia in a San Francisco hotel and play games all day when Andy and I were first looking at some of his games. And they are fiercely competitive (must be from their mom’s side of the family! 🙂 ) Samantha owns family bragging rights as the only sibling to have, partnered with dad, won Mike Lam’s ACES Down in Flames tournament. The other two have made valiant attempts, but so far 2nd place is the best finish for Rachel and Luke. Besides Down in Flames, the girls mostly like our more Euro titles – we STILL take Ivanhoe with us on every family vacation. Rachel plays a mean game of Labyrinth, though, and reminded me just last week that she beat me the last time we played. Luke, though, likes both Euros and (thank you, Lord!) WARGAMES! He and I have played a lot of games of Combat Commander over the years, and he’s had a friendly grudge match going with John Leggat over various Combat Commander battlefields for years now (John, you have been a tremendous positive influence on Luke over the years. Thank you!). He also likes Labyrinth and the COIN series games, and this year discovered he liked to play Chess, so we’ve had some fun over the chessboard, as well.

My "little playtester" got big!

My “little playtester” got big!

This summer, in between a lot of travelling, Luke has been helping me get Mr. President ready to hand off to the test teams. I always knew he was a good gamer, but this summer he has really impressed me with his attention to detail. He has an editor’s eye and reminds me of Volko in terms of organization and detail skills (that’s about the highest praise I can give), so he has been very valuable to me with his work on Mr President this summer.

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Falling Sky: Anatomy of a P500 Addition

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On  a day when we added three new games to our P500 list, I wanted to post something here on our blog to advertise the additions. But the more I thought about it, adding a “We just added three new games to the P500 list!” post here, after we’ve already posted information on all three games across all of our social media and in today’s Customer E-Mail Update, seemed a little redundant and not really in keeping with our “InsideGMT” theme for this blog. So I thought I’d try something a little different – a post about our process, and how one of these three games came to the P500 list.  So here goes. I hope you guys find this interesting.

By way of background, all of our designers and design teams know that I routinely add games to our P500 list near the end of each month, to coincide with the release of our Customer E-Mail Update. So as games get close to “ready” for the P500 list, there’s a lot of preparatory conversation back and forth with those designers and teams about whether their game is going to be ready for the list this month. For the games that are going to be ready, the designer or team sends me text for the P500 writeup and an exact component list. I then send the component list to Tony Curtis, who figures out the retail and P500 price points for those components, and the text  to Rodger MacGowan or my daughter Rachel Billingsley, who use it to make cool banners for each of the new P500 games. Meanwhile, I create the P500 page itself on our website. This all usually happens about a week before we launch the new P500s near month-end, but there have been times when a writeup came in at the 11th hour and we decided to go with it, when Rodger and Tony did REALLY quick turns to help get the game ready for launch. (It’s always nice to work with professionals – guys who stay cool when things get hectic.)

GALLICWARsetup

So let’s talk about how we came to add  Falling Sky to the list today. Usually, I know about games in development for months, sometimes years, before they go on our P500 list. But Volko REALLY surprised me with this one. About a month ago, as I was on a long drive home from Stanford Medical Center (fun with shoulders and back!), Volko called and told me, rather casually, that he had a new game in the COIN series, and that it was almost ready for P500!! What?!?! That was stunning but awesome news to me, as Volko and I had just a couple months back laid out an overall strategic plan for the next couple years of COIN P500 additions, and I thought I had a good handle on what was coming. But an ANCIENTS COIN series game!?! Oh, MAN!!!!  (Given that about half of our customer base loves ancient games, the “sales guy” part of me was drooling at  the potential appeal of COIN doing Ancients.) Wow! It was a bonus that Volko said it was a co-design with his son Andrew, a young man I think very highly of, and one of the savviest COIN series players I’ve met. I think this father-son design team approach is just really cool. And I love seeing younger designers cutting their teeth in the hobby, especially with games that say “GMT” on the box.

So, after discussing all the details and weighing pros and cons (ok, there weren’t that many cons!), we decided to move Falling Sky to the front of the COIN series line and move back a couple other games that we thought we’d be adding later this summer (At least one of those you’ll probably still see on the list later this year.)  The rest of the process went smoothly, and the rest of our team was as excited as I was to see this evolution in the COIN series.

Why do I want this game on our P500 list? OK, beyond the “doh! Volko!” aspect, I think this period is PERFECT for COIN! Also, I think that this is going to open up some potential COIN co-designers’ minds to other non-modern possibilities for the COIN series and that we may see some applications of this system to periods and situations that Volko and I never envisioned when we first discussed the possibility of this series several years ago.

If you’d like to read more information about Falling Sky  or place a P500 order, please visit our Falling Sky P500 page. Thanks!

Enjoy the games!

Gene

 

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Welcome to the InsideGMT blog!

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Hello Everyone!

Welcome to our new InsideGMT blog! The purpose of this blog is to get you guys more current information on the projects our designers are working on, and to give you more peeks “behind the curtain” at the people and products that make up GMT Games.

So, several times a week, you’ll see a mix of posts from me about various happenings InsideGMT, Guest blogs from our designers on various projects, interviews with GMT team members, and general news. We’ll also utilize this blog’s “Upcoming Events” feature to keep you guys informed about which shows and game conventions our team members will be attending. And we’re going to do our best to give you more frequent updates on progress with our P500 designs from designer and developer updates as well.

I want to invite you guys to get involved with this blog. Feel free to leave comments about things  you’d like to see in future blog posts as well as your general feedback to what we post. If there’s a feature you’d like to see us add to the blog, feel free to suggest it. And if some of you would like to send me Guest blogs to post with your perspective on GMT or one of our games or any aspect of our operations, feel free, and I’ll work them into the general posting plan.

I hope that you find this InsideGMT blog will enhance your enjoyment of GMT Games and draw you closer to the “Circle of Friends” who create and produce them. I look forward to reading your feedback. Until next time….

Enjoy the games!

Gene