GMT April Monthly Update
Hi everyone!
I hope you are all well.
It’s an incredibly busy time at our offices this week, as our office and warehouse folks finish up our lastest P500 shipment (see below) while also transforming the warehouse configuration so that we can host the Weekend at the Warehouse here starting this Thursday.We’re all looking forward to seeing about 125-150 of you for four days of gaming fun later this week.
We have a great mix of designers and developers who are planning to attend this time. I always love seeing these team members and catching up with them during the convention and during our team dinners on Wednesday and Friday night. As of this writing, I know of the following team members who plan to attend:
Mark Aasted Mike Bertucelli Adam Blinkinsop Stephen Bradford John Butterfield
Jason Carr Ananda Gupta Chris Janiec Kai Jensen Michael Lahl Mitchell Land
Sam London Bruce Mansfield Mark Simonitch Jerry White
One of the things I always get to do at these weekends is to meet with these designers and developers and see new games as well as development progress on existing titles. So, for example (this is NOT a complete list), I’m eagerly anticipating a “secret project” that Sam London is showing me Wednesday afternoon (I’m hoping for a sports game as I’d love to see us do more of those). I’m also looking forward to checking out the newest version of Wings for the Baron that Stephen Bradford will be bringing with him. Luke and Kai and I had so much fun playing that with Stephen and friends in Tempe last summer. Jason Carr will be bringing Lenin’s Legacy, a game I LOVED when I played it with Matthias and Engin back in November in San Diego, as well as a new version of Twilight Struggle: South Asian Monsoon, which sounds really cool, and a few new titles as well. Adam Blinkinsop has a couple of designs that I want to check out, too—a space game already slated for P500 and another that I heard about through the grapevine and am very intrigued to see. Inevitably, there will be more, and usually one or two designers bring “completely out of the blue” designs that I had no idea about beforehand. With so many talented designers and cool new games, it’s an exciting time to be both a game publisher and a game player. I’ll do my best to update you on all of the games I get to see at the convention in next month’s newsletter.
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We also had a bunch of mostly East Coast designers all together at Circle DC con about ten days ago. I hope many of you east coast gamers got to attend and play a bunch of cool games. Here’s a pic from Jason Matthews of a bunch of GMT designers and developers (and Cole Wehrle, who’s definitely a friend of GMT) at the convention:
Updates, Solitaire Play, and a Series (!) for Volko’s new design Coast Watchers!
I’m hugely excited about this new game from Volko. I love interesting historical topics that haven’t been the subject of a game before, and that’s certainly part of the appeal of Coast Watchers. But I love game SYSTEMS, and like many of you, I’ve played a TON of different systems over the decades that I have enjoyed in our hobby. It’s just not that often that I see a game where BOTH historically and system-wise I think, “wow, I have never seen anything like that in a game before,” (the last one I can remember was Jerry White’s Atlantic Chase) but Coast Watchers is such a game. Once again, Volko has crafted something amazing