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Hi everyone! 

I hope that all of you and your families continue to be safe and well during these difficult times. We are all doing well, here, although the virus numbers continue to spike in our county here in Central California. As you may know, we are running multiple shifts with smaller numbers of workers in each, while working spread out in masks and gloves to provide as safe an environment as we can. We are doing everything in our power to take care of our employees while also getting orders out to you as quickly and accurately as possible. Thankfully, all of our employees are well.

As you might expect, we ran into numerous obstacles after we re-opened for business in this type of environment on May 25. Over the past month, we've endured record high heat (105-108 degrees several days), shipping software that worked when we shut down but didn't when we reopened (vendors did updates while we were down and didn't inform us - fun!), a system printer that breathed its last and expired on us just after we began shipping international orders, and more! All told, it's been an "interesting" month—all while we're trying to get used to using our warehouse and running our operations in a new way that's safe during these times of COVID-19. I'm incredibly proud of our office and warehouse workers and our IT and management folks who have been models of "Improvise. Adapt. Overcome." as we've faced and overcome these challenges together. They are a talented, patient, resilient group of people with whom I am proud to work.

I want to again thank those of you who have taken the time to send gifts, meals, treats, cards, and notes to our office and warehouse staff during this time. Every time they get a gift or a note, it lifts their spirits. We all appreciate your kindness and thoughtfulness in helping us get through a trying time. And I appreciate you helping us take care of our employees.

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Doing a Bit to Care for our Customers, Too: The Return of the Tough Economy Special

We know that this virus, in addition to the threat it poses to our collective health, has had a negative economic impact on many of our customers, as well. As with so many social or economic problems, it's not within our power to provide big fixes—to restore lost jobs, retirement funds, or lost earning power. But we've decided, as we did numerous times in the wake of the 2008 financial meltdown, that we can show support for those of you who have lost jobs by giving you a free game or two. I know it's not much in the greater scheme of things, but we want you to know that we are thinking of you and that your welfare—including the ability to destress and decompress from the pressures of the world by playing games—is important to us. Here are the details:

Eligibility: If you have lost your job due to shutdown-related layoffs or closings since March 15, 2020, you are eligible to get one (non-US customers) or two (US customers) free games from us, from games that are in stock now. We'd love to give an extra game to international customers as well, but the spiking shipping rates overseas limit our ability to do so.

Process. If you'd like to take advantage of this offer, please drop an email to Tony Curtis, our LLC Manager, at a_curtis@sbcglobal.net. Please include proof or explanation of your job loss and your choice of which in-stock game(s) you'd like us to send. Tony will work with our office folks to take care of getting your game(s) shipped out to you.

One Game Exemption. We're sorry, but we're exempting the new game Imperial Struggle from this offer. We printed twice as many as usual, but based on current demand it looks like they'll be sold out within a couple months.

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Where we Stand on P500 Charging/Shipping. Please see the P500 Charging and Shipping Section later in this update for full details. Briefly, though, we are about 2/3 finished with shipping Batch 1. We anticipate that we'll be finished by mid-week next week. Then the office and warehouse folks will turn to shipping distributor and store orders for Batch 1 while others prepare the P500 ship lists for Batch 2. We will charge for Batch 2 on Monday, June 29. We should be ready to start shipping the Batch 2 games by July 10.

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IMPORTANT!!!! Consolidated Orders. I've mentioned before that we were working on getting our system to automatically consolidate P500 orders. This has been an ongoing problem because P500 orders are made well in advance of a game shipping, and there's no way to know when a particular game will ship many months (or even years, sometimes) in advance. So to date, we always charged P500 games separately, then our office workers would consolidate orders by hand. This was inefficient both for our workers (who had to collate multi-game shipments by hand) and our customers, as charging individually often would cost more in shipping than if we had been able to charge together.

Well, Mitch and our programmers have been working on this problem, and we are now ready to go live with our Consolidated Orders functionality. So beginning with our next (June 29th) charge, which will be for the four Batch 2 items (see Charging and Shipping section for details), we will make one charge for all four items and consolidate them into one order and one shipment.

Our system will determine whether to charge and ship them separately or to consolidate the shipment based on whether the CONSOLIDATE ORDERS box (it's at the bottom of your ACCOUNT INFO page on our website) is checked. If you'd like to always consolidate P500 orders, please make sure that box is checked before we charge on the 29th. 



We think that almost everyone will want to consolidate orders to save money, BUT some of our international customers may not want to consolidate. For example, if you live in a country with a VAT or Tax limit and single game orders allow you to stay under the limit while multi-game orders do not, you might want to uncheck the Consolidate Orders box so that your orders are shipped separately. We're leaving this decision in your control. When we charge on June 29th (and hereafter for every P500 charge) our charge code will look at the Consolidate Orders box and then consolidate or not based on your choice before it makes the charge to your credit card.

We hope you find this new functionality helpful and efficient. Thanks for your patience with us while we figured out how to make this a reality on our site.

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We're Updating Our Shipping Matrix with New Rates and Zones. Mitch is in the midst of updating our shipping rates and zones in our website software. Currently, the only areas that have changed are domestic US shipments. Therein we've added a Western Zone and changed which of the states go in a few affected zones. We've also increased US Postal Service shipping rates. The larger across-the-board change that you'll see over the coming month or so is a significantly higher rate for non-US USPS shipping. We've been getting killed on postal shipping costs (especially overseas) for several years now and have decided we just have to raise those rates to be more in line with what we're actually being charged (although we'll still be subsidizing shipping, just not to such a huge degree as previously on USPS shipments). As Mitch gets those into our system, he will update our Shipping Table with exact amounts so you can see the differences. The new domestic US rates are in there now.

On the "better news" side of this, Tony and I have been working with UPS to get better rates and service for our non-US deliveries. We still have to raise our UPS shipping rates to keep pace with overall industry increases, but because we're negotiating overall better rates with UPS, the price change to our customers using UPS delivery will be generally very small. So the net impact you'll see overall, once we've completed this process, will be UPS rates that are very similar to postal rates at lower poundage in the US and much more competitive, often significantly better than postal rates for 7 lbs and over US shipments and most shipments overseas. We do not anticipate any significant changes to our Euro-Friendly charges and are hopeful that we can begin to add other "region-friendly" services over the coming year. We wanted you to know about these changes, current and upcoming, so you can continue to evaluate the best delivery methods to get our games to your door, especially for you P500 customers. 

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Status of The Russian Campaign, Deluxe 5th Edition - from John Kranz.  "The final pass on proofing all components is complete. Final changes are being implemented now for all components and the rules booklet is being laid out as the last last step to get this game to the printer. Apologies for the constant delays but we are now just one step away (rules booklet layout) to getting this game to the printers."   - John

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Office/Warehouse Hours. Just a reminder that our new warehouse shifts run from 9 p.m. to 5 a.m. and 4 a.m. to noon Monday to Friday (with an hour in which both shifts will be there for cleaning and coordination). We send the morning shift home at noon because we don't want our warehouse workers exposed to the heat of a Central California summer in a hot warehouse while wearing masks and gloves. 

New Expanded Office and Chat Line Hours (9 p.m. to 4 p.m. Pacific time, M-F). The good news—especially for our overseas customers—is that with two shifts running (night and early morning), plus a skeleton office staff in air-conditioned offices in the early afternoon, you have greater access to our office folks via phone or online chat than ever before. Bandwidth can be an issue with only half of our workers on a given shift, but we now have chat lines manned from 9 p.m. (2100) Pacific time until 4 p.m. (1600) Pacific time Monday-Friday. So the Chat lines are open a total of 19 hours per day! We hope you enjoy this expanded access to our customer support staff.

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The Players' Aid Loves The Last Hundred Yards. It's always nice to see our games receive plaudits or awards, and our friends at The Players' Aid are among the gaming voices/opinions that we most respect. So we were thrilled to know that Grant named Mike Denson's The Last Hundred Yards as his top boardgame of the year for 2019! Congratulations, Mike, and thanks to both Grant and Alexander for continuing to play, review, and support our games!


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Imperial Struggle - Images from Scott, Sales, and a VASSAL Module.

First off, for those of you who haven't seen it yet, here's a set-up pic of Jason and Ananda's latest masterpiece, Imperial Struggle.



Thanks to Scott Mansfield, who takes such high quality pictures of our games. We post them on our website on the game pages, but you can also follow Scott on Twitter at @scotts_table.

We're thrilled with the quality of both the art and the play value in this game. We feel like our design, development, and art teams knocked this one out of the park. Initial reviews and AARs are outstanding, so we're hopeful that our customers are going to love this one as much as we do!

Sales-wise, we printed 10K copies of this game, thinking that would be enough for a year. But initial orders from both individuals and distributors have spiked beyond our expectations. That's certainly a lot better than "nobody wants it," but I wanted to let you all know that it looks like this one will not be in stock for long - maybe 2-3 months based on current orders and interest. So, if you want a copy of this one, you might want to pick it up this summer, as it's likely this print run won't last long.

For those of you who'd like to experience the game while yours is still on the way to you, Joel Toppen has created a beautiful VASSAL module. You can get it from the VASSAL website, here:
http://www.vassalengine.org/wiki/Module:Imperial_Struggle.

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Some Resources for Filling Your Downtime. We've had numerous requests from customers to give them some ideas of what GMT-related material they can read or use online to help fill the downtime many of us are experiencing. Here's a list of some resources and recent articles that we hope you'll find helpful:

• Lee's AirBattle Website. If you're a fan of any of the air games and series that we've published with Lee Brimmicombe-Wood, check out his website for more info and resources. Note that most of the six game/series pages on his site includes a Downloads link, where you can get files with new scenarios, tools, and additional information about the games.
• GMT Games on VASSAL: We have VASSAL modules for most of our games. So if you're missing face-to-face play, you and your friends can continue your gaming fun playing on VASSAL. The link at the start will send you to the VASSAL.org page that lists GMT Games available.
• InsideGMT Articles. If you're looking for reading material that includes more background and detail on our games, especially upcoming P500 games, InsideGMT has a LOT of it. Check out the latest articles here, or use the site's Search function to pull up all the articles about a game of your choice. Also, later in this update in the InsideGMT section, Rachel has included a bunch of links to various article series that you may find interesting.
• GMT Website. The main page lists all of our most recent shipments and new P500 additions, plus sections below detailing all our latest News and Recent Additions to the website. Click here for the P500 Pre-Order Page to browse or make orders. You can use the Search function from any page to quickly find a game page for any in-stock or P500 game (and for most of our out-of-stock games). Each of those game pages contains a list of online resources specific to that game.
• Our GMT Games Facebook Page. Feel free to drop in here to discuss or ask questions about our games with over 6,500 other GMT enthusiasts.
• Play our Digital Games! You can now play digital versions of Twilight Struggle, Fort Sumter, and Labyrinth—all from our friends at Playdek. See the Digital Games section later in this update for links to the apps on various platforms.

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Digital Labyrinth is on Steam Early Access for PC and Mac! It's here and it's really good—even on early access. And the latest update included Mac users! Playdek is clearly still working on streamlining and fixing bugs (that's what early access is for), but already we're getting lots of good feedback from players and reviewers. If you'd like to see what a walk-though of a turn looks like, check out this video of the game's Tutorial by our friends at Gaming Rules! Enjoy!

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Wing Leader: Legends Testing Update from Lee Brimmicombe-Wood. (I thought you might like a peek inside what Lee's WL test tracking looks like - GB) 

Regarding the fourth expansion set, Wing Leader: Legends, we just finished testing the scenarios this week. After 25 weeks and 216 plays, we are done. However, we still need to finish testing the Kursk campaign, which will take us to the end of summer. Still need another 60 pre-orders to make the cut.

Below is the test tracking spreadsheet that we just signed off this week. - Lee