You’re a considerate, yet careful host, Tom. Your hospitality is noted.
Got it, thanks! I’m taking notes…
Boardgaming PsyOps Rule #1: Set an open beer on the gaming table. Talk with your hands and swing your arm over the bottle every now and then.
Compass is as Compass does.
I’m just glad I seemed to have gotten Stellar Horizons ok. But yeah I certainly had some trepidation with their production history.
Bad counters were endemic back in the day–poorly cut, or poorly printed, or both. Not fun to see those sorts of things still going on, but physical goods be physical goods I guess.
Looks like Compass also printed the box cover upside down.
Always with the excuses for the poor, poor publishers, wombat. 😀 No excuses here, read the whole tweet thread. This was a failure of QC again. Coupled with beating up consumers who question their processes after receiving “corrected” materials.
Not making excuses at all; it’s unacceptable now, and it was unacceptable then. My point is that physical goods lend themselves to problems like this (though digital goods have different sets of challenges). While good quality assurance is necessary, and clearly not something many companies are doing well, the fact that you are manufacturing things physically introduces the near certainty that something will go wrong.
Production errors are one thing. Being an asshole to your customers is another thing. But shrieking “fake news!” in all caps in an angry email takes the cake.
There’s nothing like injecting your right-wing grievance politics into a conversation with a customer to show your true colors.
-Tom
Huh, didn’t see anything but the image in the post. I finally saw there was a link, and yeah, that stuff is utterly beyond the pale. So bizarre.
Yeah, I’m glad that I cancelled the preorders I had with compass earlier this year. I wont have to deal with the headache of their crappy qc and service.
I had one counter sheet from ‘Korea’ that was miscut more than I would accept (none of them were dead on perfect, but the other two were okay). I emailed Compass and they sent out a replacement, which was also not dead on perfect, but good enough. Regarding the thinner counter sheets, it sounds like Compass printed both the thick ones that shipped and a bunch of duplicates on thinner stock. The replacement they sent me was of the thick stock, but I know some people are requesting the thinner sheets because the thick ones are almost too thick. They are difficult to punch and clip.
I haven’t been paying attention to what Compass has been saying on CSW, but if they are comparing themselves favorably to GMT on this particular front, that’s ridiculous. I have been buying GMT games (among others) since around '99, and I literally don’t recall the last time I had counter issues with them. Not sure it’s ever happened.
The rest of ‘Korea’ looks great, but the counter centering issue is real. It’s happened with other Compass releases, too, and it’s something they need to get sorted out.
(I also have Compass games where the counters were centered perfectly.)
There was discussion in this thread where many (not I) said that, “Hey on the Designer Commemorative editions Compass are releasing there won’t be any issues, because the designer is involved, so that’ll take care of that.”
Yeah, good times…good times.
Bill Thomas’ reaction via email (It can’t be Krantz, that just isn’t his style) is the last straw. I’ve been boycotting them until they get their s*** together for three years now. Now, I’ll be blackballing them. Loudly. Actively. Anywhere I can.
Harold is right in his tweets too about the “Did you watch the Town Hall?” comments. I have. Once. Like a year ago. After watching Bill Thomas blame the customers then for questioning their QC practices and writing off games that, at that time (and still are), were still completely broken three years after relase (!!?!) as “those people need to go to the Facebook group for rules discussions.”
I decided I didn’t need to attend any more Compass town halls anymore while John Krantz tries to trot out Bill Thomas to somehow get a brave PR face on their problems and then watch Bill make things worse and John look uncomfortable as Bill defeats the very purpose of why John is even having a Town Hall.
I’m beyond even talking about this as I write this now. F*** Compass.
I think that was more about the design process of say the Herman title or Maxwell titles, versus something like Starkweather’s stuff. I don’t know that any of them have any input on the physical production. I imagine that is all Bill and his son.
But yeah, f*** them.
I just found I had a misprinted counter sheet for my copy of World in Flames. ADG apologised profusely for the error and sent me a new one straight away! The quality of the printing is otherwise top notch.
So, given my past history in the print industry (I even had an engaging conversation with @Brooski where we perused his game collection and how the evolution and history of print was apparent from the changes in manufacturing of them, no really!), I took a look.
So this is clearly a QA problem where the print specs and manufacturing specs are not properly toleranced. In print you set up bleed, keep aways, and tolerances to account for equipment. In this case it looks like they set their image keep aways too close to the trim area. Standard is 1/16", to account for bounce on the die cutters (which these were clearly done on). You can go lower, but it will decrease run speed. 1/32" is doable, but pretty aggressive. I remember doing 1/64" bleeds, but those are registration nightmares, and lead to large increases in make ready (printed sheets used to dial in registration. Unusable! If you’re making 1000 items, and use 1500 sheets of make ready, you are more than doubling print costs!).
These look to maybe be designed with 1/32" bleeds. My guess is they insisted, but due to the print run size and profitability, the printer didn’t/couldn’t spend the time and paper to properly register. I can see the conversation already. Customer insists on dumb thing, doesn’t want to pay the extra to do it right, printer does it but the bounce is outside of tolerance because they only scheduled 1 hour to die cut the whole job because they’re barely making any profit on this job anyhow.
Voila, counters where images bleed onto their neighbors.
This is also why, usually, you have 1/4" between rows. Any closer and the die board becomes too brittle to survive long runs.
Let me know how that Uboat game is.
For sure, will do but it might be a bit. I get a sense many of his Leader games are variations on a theme. I’ve enjoyed Sherman Leader and this might be similar mechanics.
So we have a trip coming up, and they’ll be some down time during the travel. But travel means no access to even a semi-permanent table. I’m curious what other board wargamers do when you go on vacation. Do you take smaller games with you? Leave everything behind?
I was thinking to take a rule book or two for some newer games to get a start on the learning.