News from GMT, mostly about tariffs

April 17, 2025 Leave a comment

(first, a pleasant image of three of my favourite people – Mark Herman, Charles Vasey and Harold Buchanan – having lunch together at Ziani, the very nice Italian restaurant in Chelsea where Charles and I have eaten)

You have probably already read this, but today GMT sent out an update concerning their reaction to the new tariff regime with respect to Chinese made products.

Here is the link:

https://mailchi.mp/2438d2843c59/april-17-update-from-gmt-tariffs-and-action-plan-new-p500s-updated-production-outlook-designer-updates-and-more

There is a lot in it, but it seems to me that GMT is doing some sensible things about the situation. Some highlights:

  • A sale on all their products for the next 60 days: 25% off. They badly need to build up their cash reserves as cash flow is the leading cause of death for small businesses… it certainly did for SPI.
  • Small tariff surcharges on products coming into the US now, more later. The ones being levied now are modest – no more than $2.10 per title – but were conceived of when the tariff was 10-20% not the ridiculous figure it is today (and which will be different next week, but anyway); still, there will be a surcharge.
  • They are figuring out a way to ship to non-US customers directly from China so as to dodge the tariffs (the US ones anyway). This will reduce the costs for these people by a LOT, and it might even become worthwhile for “game mules” to trek down to the US from Canada. Though if the border guard figures out that you are trying to flout tariffs when you claim that the eight copies of Cross Bronx Expressway in your luggage are for your personal use, you might just be “disappeared” (I know I should not joke about that but let’s laugh in the dark together for a moment).
  • Reducing warehouse holdings of games in the US as much as possible for now, in hopes that the situation will become more reasonable in time and import costs will come down.

There’s a lot more, especially about the impracticality of bringing quality board wargame production back to American shores, but that is what stuck out for me.

Elsewhere in the update, China’s War is marked as “at the printers” (in China) and the Distant Plain reprint is tentatively dated as Q4 – 2025 – though I would not count on that date, given all the other uncertainty swirling around.

Some of my wandering thoughts on the topic:

I acquire games in fits and starts, but I generally buy so few each year that tariffs won’t bite me much personally… I’m too busy making new games for companies to publish, but tariffs bite them much harder on their end of the equation and that’s what this is about.

It may yet happen that this nichey idiosyncratic hobby will survive. But the material industry that supported and distributed its intellectual products may not, and certainly will not in the manner it’s become accustomed to. People want big thick boxes, mounted maps, easy-punch counters in a million colours on thick cardboard, decks of cards with linen finish, plastic toys when they can get them… and they don’t want to pay very much for all that. Only one way to make that happen, and it’s stopping happening.

Take a look at the components of an SPI wargame from 50 years ago, it’s graphically modest but most of them were perfectly playable and challenging, and was printed in New York on offset presses without computers.
And its $12 price would be $71 today, applying inflation, so I think even with the tariffs added on nowadays we would still be getting a physically superior product (graphical coherence, playability and challenge still up for grabs though).
Anyway, of the sixty-odd BGG items where I’m credited with being the designer, over half (35) are available for cheap or free print-and-play, and always have been (or were made so once they were completely out-of-print, years ago even before the first tariff war with China).
Thanks to home computers and the PDF file, a print-and-play item with SPI-comparable graphics could be produced at home for printing costs (variable, limited only by your wallet, let’s say $5.00 for map and counter sheets from Kinko’s if you don’t do it yourself).

You also supply the production labour, which you could consider to be worth nothing or I note federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour (unchanged for the last 16 years, but consider it a priced opportunity cost).
And maybe the designer wants a couple of dollars as a reward for creating their intellectual property.
All up though, it’s a small fraction of the cost of the original product, and you do have pride of workmanship.

And I need hardly note that these titles are the ones on my BGG roster that have fewer than 50 owners each, so you’ve also joined an exclusive club.
People are also talking about crowdfunding as a way for publishers to not lose their shirt.
Only a few of my titles were ever made in China, or in large numbers (not sure about the magazine games or boxed games from Compass or LnL ).
Only one of those was ever subject to crowdfunding, a Kickstarter, and it cured me of ever wanting to be involved with one of those things from the publishing side other than as a horrified onlooker at the querolous, nasty, whiny, cheapskate, grasping demands of some of the backers.
In fairness, I have backed a number of KS games myself and always been happy, never been burned yet.
In the end though, I have never been in this to make money… I would have made far more money, hour for hour, if I’d spent all that time collecting aluminum cans.
So in the end I’m more like the chicken than the pig: both of us contribute to the breakfast, but the publisher’s stake in the enterprise is a bit more involving.

Filed under news, publishing Tagged with ,

China’s War: nearing the home stretch!

October 24, 2024 2 Comments

(quick look at some of the Event Cards)

In today’s update from GMT, it’s announced that solo development for China’s War is about done, other playtesting was completed some time ago, and we’ve signed off on map art, counter art, and Event Card graphics (see above). Final touches on the tutorial scenario have been made and now there will be final formatting of rules book, playbook, and player aids.

Pre-orders are now up to 1,725.

With luck, this game should be printed in early 2025.

All praise to the invaluable work of Jason Carr and Joe Dewhurst to bring this into the world! This game has had one of the longest gestation periods of any of my games, from design to formal publication.

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COIN Collectors #9: interview with Jason Carr

March 21, 2022 Leave a comment

The podcast “Dads on a Map” recently posted an episode with Jason Carr, who is the head of development at GMT. Here he talks about the GMT COIN system generally, and particularly the post Pendragon period when he came aboard.

Lots of news on new developments! He’s very enthused about the upcoming releases of Fall of Saigon (the late war expansion to Fire in the Lake) and especially People Power (which he cites as a good introductory game to the system) and Irregular Conflict series games like The Pure Land.

Nothing on China’s War though; I haven’t had a lot of feedback to react to, other than we’re going to have to do some work on the Event Card deck.

https://directory.libsyn.com/episode/index/id/22505021/tdest_id/1590551

00:00:53 – Introduction
00:01:54 – Background and Game Development at GMT
00:12:50 – What makes a COIN a COIN?
00:19:05 – Upcoming Releases: Fire in the Lake, Fall of Saigon; People Power.
00:23:48 – Selecting conflicts for COIN games
00:26:51 – Expansions for COIN games
00:29:20 – Best first COIN game
00:37:35 – New mechanisms for COIN games
00:40:57 – 2p COIN games
00:48:10 – The COIN experience and attracting new players
00:50:56 – App integration
01:01:15 – Best fictional COIN setting?
01:03:50 – Final thoughts and Outro

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GMT goes SPI

July 22, 2021 10 Comments

https://www.gmtgames.com/p-945-the-british-way-counterinsurgency-at-the-end-of-empire.aspx

Four-on-the-floor, that is… as in Quadrigame!

A while ago I had a talk with Stephen Rangazas, who has come up with an interesting way of distilling much of the 2-player COIN system experience down to a few cards and a small number of pieces… and he has put four examples of such in one box, called:

The British Way: Counterinsurgency at the End of Empire is the first of several COIN multipacks, containing four separate games exploring a series of thematically related insurgencies. Between 1945 and 1960, the British fought four major “emergencies,” as they referred to their counterinsurgency campaigns, each trying to manage their retreat from empire. The four games in this pack focus on exploring British counterinsurgent responses to a variety of different opponents, including communist insurgents in Malaya, militant nationalists in Kenya, and smaller and more clandestine terrorist organizations in Palestine and Cyprus. The games adjust the core COIN mechanics to provide a compelling new way of handling two-player conflicts, while also streamlining several mechanics to quicken gameplay. The British Way offers an approachable introduction to the COIN series for new players, while presenting experienced players with four mechanically distinct games to explore and compare.
 

Highlights:
  • Four full games in one box: Explore four different conflicts set during the twilight of the British Empire in the 1940s and 1950s. Each game uses a unique ruleset building on the same general mechanical structure, ensuring that they are easy to pick up while still offering a distinctive experience.
  • A new adaptation of the classic COIN system: Improved two-player sequence of play and a versatile Political Will track for determining victory. 
  • Unique mechanisms reflecting the British approach to each conflict: New Villages in Malaya, the ‘Pipeline’ in Kenya, Curfews in Cyprus, and Mass Detention in Palestine.
  • Small board footprint with quick-but-deep gameplay: Each game plays in under 90 minutes and takes place on a single 17×22” board.
  • An “End of Empire” Campaign: A campaign scenario allowing players to play the four games in a linked series with a cumulative scoring system, random ‘external’ events relating to British decolonization, and new mechanics to integrate each game into the campaign.

Prototype maps for Kenya and Malaya

Malaya
The British Emergency in Malaya (1948-1960) is viewed by some as the classic case of a successful counterinsurgency campaign, fought against an insurgency led by the Malayan Communist Party. The Malayan Emergency significantly influenced counterinsurgency theory and would become a model case, later appealed to by commanders in conflicts ranging from Vietnam to the present. The British Way: Malaya is the perfect introduction for players new to the COIN series, offering a shorter two-player game experience that will give players some familiarity with Government and Insurgent factions in other modern COIN volumes, such as Cuba Libre or A Distant Plain. For experienced players, it also serves as a good introduction to the new core mechanics in The British Way by offering Factions and Operations that will be familiar from previous COIN volumes but with several new systems, such as the Political Will track, streamlined Sequence of Play, and a shifting British Commander Capability.

Prototype event cards for Malaya


Kenya
The British Emergency in Kenya (1952-1960), fought against the Mau Mau insurgents, dramatically departed from the strategy modeled in many of the modern COIN volumes, with a heavy focus on coercion rather than winning ‘hearts and minds.’ In game terms, this means a shift away from building ‘Support’ towards new mechanics modeling various forms of repression used by the British in Kenya. However, their use of repression can have political consequences back in Britain, represented as a potential penalty to Political Will—as one British official noted, “If we sin, we must sin quietly.” The British player must balance this core tradeoff, while the Mau Mau player must mobilize the Kikuyu population and expand their revolt to survive the overwhelming British response. The British Way: Kenya depicts a dramatically asymmetrical conflict where an extremely poorly equipped insurgency must utilize clever (and in some cases brutal) tactics to try and ride out an overwhelmingly powerful, often unconstrained, and increasingly criticized counterinsurgency campaign.

Prototype event cards for Kenya

Cyprus and Palestine: New Counter-Terrorism Mechanics
The next two conflicts in the pack depart more significantly from core COIN concepts because Britain’s two opponents in Cyprus and Palestine operated as smaller clandestine terrorist cells rather than the larger insurgencies depicted in Malaya and Kenya. Instead, new “counter-terrorism” tactics are modeled, such as Curfews, Intelligence, Arms Caches, and a more detailed Sabotage and Terror system. These two games offer a fresh approach to a different kind of conflict and provide an even quicker play experience for two-player COIN duels.

Prototype maps for Palestine and Cyprus

The British Emergency in Cyprus (1955-1959) was conducted under the shadow of international opinion and increasing pressure from the international community to respect human rights. As the British player tries to balance locking down the population while managing international pressure, the EOKA player will launch sabotage attacks in towns across the island while building their organization in the mountains. The British Way: Cyprus is probably the simplest of the four games in the pack, although the new counter-terrorism mechanics it introduces are significantly different from anything that has appeared in previous COIN volumes.

Prototype event cards for Cyprus

Likewise, during the Palestine campaign (1945-1947), the British player will be faced with the Jewish resistance groups Irgun and Lehi launching sabotage and terrorist attacks across Mandatory Palestine, while risking criticism from the US and other international observers if their response is too heavy-handed. The British Way: Palestine further develops the new counter-terrorism mechanics introduced in Cyprus, while also including unique game systems to model the British use of the blunt tool of Mass Detention, the shifting cooperation of Haganah (the Jewish Agency’s armed wing), and high-profile terrorist attacks such as the King David Hotel bombing.

Prototype event cards for Palestine

A Note on “The British Way” of Counterinsurgency:
“that nauseating phrase I think I invented” – General Sir Gerald Templer on the term ‘Hearts and Minds’
The historical simulations included in The British Way are designed to depict the full array of strategies used by the British during these conflicts, ranging from the more benevolent provision of material benefits through pacification programs to the horrific measures used to gain control over the local population. Many myths have arisen about an ‘enlightened’ British approach to counterinsurgency that emphasized the use of minimum force and focused on winning the population’s “hearts and minds,” compared with the supposedly more violent approaches taken by the United States in Vietnam or by France in Algeria. However, new scholarship on these conflicts has confirmed the brutality of the methods commonly used by the British in their counterinsurgency campaigns. As summarized by the historian Hew Strachan, these conflicts were often decided by “the firm smack of government,” not the popular winning of hearts and minds. This multipack is intended to help synthesize and present these crucial developments in our understanding of British counterinsurgency, even if that means the simulations depicted are at times more thought-provoking than fun. The designer’s main goal is that players find these games informative about what happened during each conflict and why, and that the gameplay leaves them wanting to learn more. Each game will come with a detailed Background booklet describing the events depicted and listing additional sources, while the combined Playbook will include comparative essays discussing British counterinsurgency across the four games and how it is depicted in conflict simulations.

Game components
  • Two double-sided 17×22” mounted game boards
  • 4 Game Event Decks and 1 Campaign Event Deck
  • 54 Wooden Pieces
  • 8 Pawns
  • One full-color counter sheet
  • Eleven double-sided player aids
  • Two 6-sided dice
  • 4 Combined Rule/Background Booklets
  • 1 Combined Playbook/Campaign Guide
Number of players: 2
GAME DESIGN: Stephen Rangazas
DEVELOPER: Joe Dewhurst 

 

You better believe I signed up for this!

I believe I am customer #303, snicker….

A word about that “hearts and minds” aspect, though… I have been extremely busy lately and have not been able to finish work on a post I was making in response to “The Hearts-and-Minds Myth: How America Gets Counterinsurgency Wrong”, an article that appeared last week in Foreign Policy magazine by Jacqueline Hazelton, who teaches at the Naval War College. She also wrote Bullets Not Ballots: Success in Counterinsurgency Warfare which has been poked my way more than once recently. 

I don’t understand the binary, all-or-nothing thinking that goes into commentary on these things… it’s not a stark choice between “pyramid of skulls” or “armed social work”, it never is. If you never punish or pursue the insurgents, you will not win. But if you never do anything to address “why?”, the concerns of the insurgents or the populations they spring from (because no one ever does this for fun), you will not win either. 

But I am looking forward to these sporty little fellas. Happy to see a second game on Cyprus, too!

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Team play of COIN system games

September 12, 2020 4 Comments

O’er the hills and far away….

The estimable Brant Guillory of Armchair Dragoons and other manifestations has published a guide to the team play of GMT COIN system games that he and his group have put on at Origins!

Battle Lab ~ Team COIN Wargaming – A “How To” Primer

It’s brilliant, go check it out.

The hidden intelligence part is reflected in having teams of two players for each faction – one diplomatic and one military – but the diplomatic player cannot see the map and the military player cannot see the card, nor are they privy to the negotiations the diplomat has hammered out with the other players. This makes this method very good for games where there is a lot of argle-bargle, and Brant usually does this method with A Distant Plain (an even better wrinkle with this one is that the Warlords faction is played by two, but they take both roles, on alternate turns!).

Very clever, indeed.

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Scramble scramble

April 13, 2019 4 Comments

https://waypoint.vice.com/en_us/article/vb9gd9/a-cancelled-board-game-revealed-how-colonialism-inspires-and-haunts-games

So, this has been lighting up sections of the BGGverse for the last week… in case you have not heard, or are trawling through this blog years from the time it was posted:

  • GMT Games put up for P500 a game called Scramble for Africa in February. From the ad copy, it seems to have been in broad terms a “3X” game (Explore- Expand-  Exploit) as opposed to a “4X” game ( -Exterminate) where European powers enter the Dark Continent, found colonies, interfere with each other, etc.
  • After GMT posted the developer’s notes at the end of March with some more specifics, it emerged that this game was shall we say a bit light on historical accuracy and completeness – the native population was more or less the background on top of which the players drew their designs.
  • An increasing amount of adverse commentary on Twitter, Facebook, Boardgamegeek, and other spots led GMT to pull this off the P500 list, with a very measured and reasonable explanation and apology from the publisher.

People are still yelling about it, but more in defence of or offence against their own straw men. Some decried it as bowing to the mob, erasure of unpopular opinions, censorship, my god this is the beginning of the end what’s next erasing the Nazis soon they will come to pry all my wargames from my overheated flabby hands… never mind, you can imagine all this yourself (and if you can’t, there is a thread on BGG that is over 1,000 posts long now, counting the unusually large fraction of ones deleted for personal attacks and abuse).

Others had more measured and thoughtful responses. The link above is a much better explanation of the event and what it means than I can write; go have a look. It also gives due credit to the thoughtful games GMT can and does produce. Colonial Twilight, Navajo Wars and Comancheria all get praise for handling complex issues well, as do Freedom: the Underground Railroad and This Guilty Land, two games by other publishers.

Again, I did not have a chance to learn very much about the game, but it seems it was too cavalier and light a treatment of the topic to be appealing to the strong-history crowd, and not satisfying enough for the theme/history-be-damned, strong-play crowd. So, a sound business decision, and one that is GMT’s and only GMT’s to make.

We should not shy away from historical controversy, for that is the most direct way history teaches us it’s still there and still valuable. But it has to be done in a productive way, that advances the state of play. Obviously, this game did not do that.

Probably more than a few people have commented that if the game were rethemed and placed on a distant planet as “Scramble for Afraxic”, they might have  had a goer on their hands… sometimes that works. GMT has a few of these 4X in space games in their stable, and they sell very well… I suppose they are good games too, but I don’t play much science fiction stuff anymore. But the point is that there is sufficient distance from what is going on, even more so than the usual abstraction of playing a game about something, to not bother people.

 

 

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ADP in Genesee

January 24, 2019 Leave a comment

adp@genessee

Students in the thick of it. (photo: Brian Mayer)

Today I got notice via GMT of a two-day, 20-student play session of A Distant Plain organized by Brian Mayer, a Gaming and Library Technology Specialist with the School Library System of the Genesee Valley Educational Partnership. (I’m not exactly sure what this partnership is; they seem to be providers of special education, adult education and support/technical services to a large number of school districts in New York State.)

Great to see these students so engaged, and learning about a war that hopefully will not be waiting for them after graduation.

GMT very kindly provided the games at an educator’s discount. Class act, GMT!

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Newest COIN system P500: People Power

February 20, 2018 4 Comments

Just announced for P500, is a new COIN system game from GMT: People Power: Insurgency in the Philippines, 1983-86. Designed by Ken Tee, a gamer I know from CSW  – this appears to be his first design.

I’ve just had a glance over the description but here are some of the interesting points I noticed:

  • 3 factions:
    • Government, symbolized by the personal rule of Ferdinand Marcos, his wife Imelda, and his political cronies and military forces. Seeks Support and Patronage.
    • Insurgents, split into two blocs – the communist New People’s Army (or NPA) and the Moro National Liberation Front (or MNLF but more commonly referred to as Moros). The NPA sought a national uprising from both the urban and rural populace, while the Moros wanted a separate nation founded on Islamic autonomy. Seeks Control of spaces and some form of “Resistance” index.
    • Reformers, think Corazon Aquino. A non-violent faction that was historically the winner of the conflict as the Philippine political landscape changed. Seeks to build Bases and Opposition.
  • Seems to be an effort to create a high-speed, low-drag entry into the COIN system: small map (17 x 22″) with only two terrain types (city and country) and likely a small number of spaces; low number of pieces (79 wooden bits), and a small deck of event cards (likely around 40 or 50).
  • Some new features:
    • A hand of Key Personality cards kept by each player, that represents the effectiveness of various generals and power brokers.
    • Propaganda Rounds replaced by a two-turn Election Cycle procedure (each Election Cycle is made up of 10 cards and represents 6 to 9 months of activity).
    • A faction can combine any Operation with any Special Activity.
    • A card-driven solitaire play system; no more flowcharts.

Here’s the link to the description page and pre-order link:

https://www.gmtgames.com/p-689-people-power-insurgency-in-the-philippines-1983-1986.aspx

220 orders already – I’m jumping on this one too!

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Review of Colonial Twilight at Katie’s Game Corner

December 20, 2017 1 Comment

Ohhh, exciting!

The very clever Katie Aidley (nka Saffron Ann) has reviewed Colonial Twilight on her blog Katie’s Game Corner… she likes it, a lot.

https://katiesgamecorner.com/2017/12/20/a-few-first-impressions-colonial-twilight-the-french-algerian-war-1954-62-from-gmt-games

Excellent! Thank you Saffron!

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Space-Biff! reviews Colonial Twilight

October 25, 2017 1 Comment

CT banner1

Image from GMT Games pre-order page, using French anti-war poster.

Daniel Thurot, aka Space-Biff!, reviews Colonial Twilight on his blog. (He also posted it on my birthday, which was yesterday, but I didn’t find out until today – but what a nice gift!)

https://spacebiff.com/2017/10/24/colonial-twilight/

He says, among many other things:

At its best, Colonial Twilight captures the high-level decision space of guerrillas and counterinsurgents alike, peeling back the layers to reveal the processes by which a war of independence is fought on both sides, and aptly illustrating the complexity that can arise when that war’s belligerents define “victory” by very different standards. Its take on war is brutal, bitter, and liable to leave both sides taking and retaking the same inches of ground many times over.

Ah yes. That’s good to hear….

He also wrote a very kind review of A Distant Plain, some time ago:

Space-Biff! reviews A Distant Plain

Many thanks!

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