Space Empires 4X - Reprint with Larger Counters

Started by son_of_montfort, January 30, 2012, 11:24:51 PM

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son_of_montfort

Some of you war gamers probably missed the excellent space 4X war game, Space Empires 4X released by GMT last year. It plays like a table top version of the PC game, but has a distinct "war game" flair in both the combat and the general strategy (which simulates fog of war, growing colonies, production capacity, hull sizes, fleets, carriers, mine-laying/sweeping and many other awesome things).

GMT just sent out a missive saying that the expansion for the game, Cosmic Encounter, would include larger and thicker tiles for ships. Now this is a problem for previous owners, given that hiding your ships is a large part of the game and different tile thickness would be a clear give-away. But never fail the GMT crew (some of the best in board gaming) - they plan to not only sell and upgrade pack for $15, they will package the entire set of tiles from the first game in the expansions, at the new thickness, with no extra charge! Now that is customer service.

Below is the email sent to me from GMT informing me of the situation:
QuoteHi guys!

This note is for all you Space Empires players who have asked us to look at our policy regarding the thicker counters included in the Close Encounters expansion. As you probably know, based on player feedback from the now sold out first edition of Space Empires, we decided to included thicker counters in the 2nd edition and also in the Close Encounters expansion pack. That's fine for everyone who buys the 2nd edition of Space Empires, but it leaves the guys who bought the first edition in the unenviable position of having to either buy the 2nd edition or buy the $14 set of thicker counters that we are providing on the P500 list.

We spent some time this past weekend discussing this issue and the feedback we'd received from several customers who just really didn't think it was fair that they should have to buy new countersheets in order to play the Close Encounters expansion. And after reflecting on it a bit, we've decided that we agree with them. If we were in their shoes, we wouldn't think it was quite fair, either. At the end of the day, this was our choice to go with thicker counters and essentially our mistake in not recognizing that this was going to create a situation where the hidden movement aspect of the game was messed up for 1st edition owners who bought the CE expansion (because it would be obvious that the thicker counters were the ships from the CE expansion). We've decided that our original "we'll provide a thicker counter set at an inexpensive price" approach is insufficient to meet our commitment to provide solutions that completely satisfy our customers, so we are going to fix this. Here's what we have decided to do:


    We are going to include the set of 4 ½ thicker countersheets from 2nd Edition Space Empires in EVERY copy of this first edition of the Close Encounters expansion (shipping 3Q this year). We're not changing the price of Close Encounters at all - we're just including the extra 4 ½ countersheets for you - on us. This should take care of everyone who bought the first edition of Space Empires and also buys Close Encounters, as they'll have all new counters for their original game that will match the thickness of what is in CE.
    We're going to leave the $14 P500 item for the thicker counter set up on the P500 list for those of you who don't intend to buy Close Encounters but would like to get the thicker counters. For the rest of you who currently have an order for that set of counters, please go into your account on our website (or call our office ladies if you'd prefer) and delete that item from your order.
    For those of you who bought the 50 sets of the new counters that we had available a couple weeks ago, if you would like a refund of your purchase price on those, we'll gladly provide it. Just contact our office ladies via online chat on our website and they'll take care of you.

We hope this course change will be a welcome solution for all of you, and apologize for any inconvenience or angst that our original approach caused. We hope you have tons of fun with Space Empires and later this year, with Close Encounters.

And some pics of Space Empires 4X (not my pics):





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