TF22 (aka "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Bootleg FMP...")

SuperflyTNT wrote: Games Workshop has owned Ameritrash since the 70's. That's enough of a reason to gloat, Matt.

No way I'm buying this. Not on a bet. I'll wait until all of you boys get it and report on it. The question is whether you can tell the truth after dropping 150$ sight-unseen!

Pffft. Take that "can you be honest when spending $150 sight-unseen" shit somewhere else; it's weak sauce to a wargamer. $125+ is a standard retail pricepoint in this moldy corner of the hobby and I've bought expansions at that price. Le Franc Tireur and Heat of Battle ASL modules come immediately to mind. It will be eons before I'm far enough along in the ASL world to get to playing them (especially Nazaire which *really* puts the "advanced" in "Advanced Squad Leader"); I've learned the very hard way that, if I'm interested at all in the topic, it's just cheaper to buy new and shelve it than to wait "until I'm ready." The runs are so small that it's simply guaranteed it will be OOP and going for triple the original MSRP within a few months. E.g., I think I paid $25 for this "Swedish Volunteers" set--with its dozen scenarios, a few rulebook pages, and half-sheet of counters--simply as a throw-in with a larger order; I recently had someone offer me $150 for the thing because it was lasted about 6 weeks before completely selling out.

And, yea, I've most certainly spent a pile of bread and come home with some absolute fucking dogs at that price. I'm sure there are others if I thought about it--particularly when it comes to OOP games--but Decision Games' reprint of Highway to the Reich comes immediately to mind. You'd think it wouldn't be that hard to NOT fuck-up a game that had already been floating around for 30 years by the time they decided to reprint it. I'm a dumbass for not realizing that they changed the scale [so that the old game couldn't be played with the new components] before I bought it; they're idiots for making the rulebook actually WORSE than the original as far as I was concerned. It also ensured I wasn't about to cough up $300 (I think MSRP was $400+) for the War in the Pacific reprint as that one is far more complex and the original rules were...uh...troubled to begin with.

I keep that game on the shelf as reminder to read up on shit first...

Fuck Decision Games.

I hate how they stop us playing those classic SPI games on VASSAL and I HATE that to play War in Europe by email you have to buy their lame CD for $60.

I am never, ever buying anything from those thieves again and that includes S&T and WaW.

Message to DG, stop fucking up our hobby.

I too am on the anti DG bandwagon.

The Wacht "reprint" was a total fucking mess rules wise. Six years later and the designer has a bazillion other irons in the fire but has yet to issue fixed rules to Wacht 2.0. I sold my copy and made money off it thankfully. Yet supposedly in the next year he'll put out Wacht 3.0, Huertgen Forest, AND Atlantic Wall. The latter scares me - take the base "system" that he created for Wacht and layer in your typical chrome for a D Day game AND make it for a campaign that lasted 10 weeks.

Unfortunately, there seem to be enough people out there dumb enough to buy their stuff that they have no incentive to change their MO. I think their business model is actually clever. They maintain as low a profile on CSW as you can get; by keeping their potential customers in the dark they build up a customer base who has no clue about how much of a pump and dump scheme they are running.

The funny thing is that their stuff rarely comes up at auction. I think people buy it and are so overwhelmed by the mess that they just shelve it and never play it again, telling themselves they'll look at it but never get around to it.

On the other end are the dirt cheap folios that materialized out of nowhere last year. Word of mouth on them hasn't been good.