Love Letter Moving

Z Man Games announced it has acquired the rights to the Love Letter line of games, including Love Letter Premium and Lovecraft Letter, from AEG. What does this mean to you? If you are a consumer, not much as Z Man plans no changes to the game. Actually, you may see one problem. Z-man is notorious for lengthy out of stocks of its product (The On The Brink expansion for Pandemic has been out of stock since last summer and we don't expect to see it arrive before June) so I can foresee lengthy out of stocks for the game in the future.

Good Plan, Lousy Communication

AEG, publisher of Smash-up, Trains, Epic PvP and several varieties of Love Letter, announced their Pro Retailer program last March at the GAMA Trade Show. It was a pretty nice promotion, offering incentives and promotional items to retailers who agreed to purchase or pre-commit to orders of specific quantities of monthly upcoming items, such as Greedy Greedy Goblins or Archer. Like I said, great idea, one that we bought into for several of the promotions.

Unfortunately, the communication wound up lacking as AEG did not make clear how the ordering of their games was to be handled. Case in point, last June's release of Archer:  Once You Go Blackmail... The promotion was, buy 12 copies of the game and get additional promotional games and items. It sounded great and we agreed to participate. Unfortunately, the folks at AEG never discussed how the order was to be handled. I figured that either AEG would sell them to us direct and would send an invoice or would contact our distributor about the order. Instead, it turned out that the store had to take the initiative in the process and contact the distributor to put in the order. Due to this lack of clarity of communication,  we wound up not participating in 3 of AEG's Pro-Retailer promotions so far this year. Now that AEG has clarified the process, we will participate in future opportunities but 'tis a pity to have lost the previous chances due to poor communication

Kittens and Mystic Vale

Scott's weekly column for ICV2, this week looking at the launch of Mystic Vale and the return after a two year absence of Kittens in a Blender.

AEG and GW

This week's column on ICV2 compares the year long promotional campaign AEG launched for its lines to the 2 week blitz GW did for Warhammer Quest

AEG: A Year of Promotion

This week's column on ICV2 looks at the promotional programs AEG has put into place for their product releases for the rest of the year.

Castle Perilous Games & Books Stocking Stuffer of the Season

This year's Stocking Stuffer of the Season is AEG's Love Letter. There are several reasons for its selection this year:

1. Size:   Love Letter comes in either clamshell packaging or a small box, either of which wrap up nicely to fit in a stocking.

2. Price:  At $9.99 for most versions, Love Letter meets the $10 price point that many people look for in a stocking stuffer

3.  Playability:  Love Letter, in all its variants, is one of our best selling games and an award winner to boot. The reason for that is how quickly the game plays and how much fun it is.

For these reasons, Castle Perilous Games and Books happily selects Love Letter as our Stocking Stuffer of the Season.

L5R Sold

AEG announced today it was selling the venerable Legend of the Five Ring RPG and trading card game to  Fantasy Flight Games:

For twenty years, Legend of the Five Rings has held a unique place among
Collectible Card Games (CCGs). It is not only one of the oldest around, it
stands out by being driven by its story...a story that has, in turn, been driven
by legions of devoted fans. We at AEG are thankful beyond words to all of the
awesome people who have made these past two decades so special for the CCG and
that most definitely includes you, our valued retail partners.

The time comes, however, when any healthy enterprise has to take a step back and look
hard and critically at itself. We've now reached that time in the life of the
L5R Brand. The focus of AEG has progressively shifted toward other types of
games over recent years, so, after some hard and detailed analysis (and, yes,
some deep soul-searching), we've concluded that it's time to start a new chapter
in the story of L5R. Accordingly, the upcoming Evil Portents expansion for the
CCG, and the �Atlas of Rokugan� for the RPG, will be the final products for L5R
produced by AEG. The L5R Brand will continue under a new owner, Fantasy Flight
Games (FFG). We believe that the good folks at FFG, some of whom have themselves
been involved with the L5R Brand for many years, will do an excellent job of
carrying the L5R Brand and the story of Rokugan on into its next twenty years.
Fantasy Flight Games anticipates that its first L5R product will be a relaunch
of the card game as a Living Card Game (LCG), with a debut event at Gen Con
2017.

Of course, your most immediate concern is likely to be, what about L5R
card game stock I currently have in my inventory? How am I going to realize any
value from it? Well, we�ve anticipated this, and will be offering to you the
last AEG expansion of the CCG, Evil Portents, essentially for free. We hope this
will help you to leverage sales of your remaining L5R product. More details
about this will be provided to you in the coming days.

Too Much of A Good Thing?

Quite a hectic weekend so far with both Dragons of Tarkir and Star Wars Armada releasing on the same day and I have heard tales of stores blowing through their initial orders of each. Well done, WOTC and FFG, though we do need to discuss increasing MSRP on both products rather than making your Local Game Store absorb the extra reduction in margin. Work on that, would you? 

Meanwhile, last week I mentioned one trend I saw at the GAMA trade show that rather concerned me and that trend is the growth in the number of companies promoting events, typically some form of what the industry has come to call Organized Play. Although I agree that better events and Organized Play has had nothing but positive effects on the industry, the number of companies I saw at the GTS announcing they would launch an OP program or expand on an already existing one blew me away. Among the ones that I remember, Japaneme, Iello and Asmodee all discussed how they were expanding their OP programs, White Wizard Games promoted the tournament program for Star Realms, even Slugfist Games offered retailers the opportunity to purchase an event kit for Red Dragon Inn, while Catalyst promoted the OP program for their Shadowrun: Crossfire deckbuilding game. The most ambitious program I saw was from Upper Deck, which announced $10,000 championships for both their Legendary deckbuilding game as well as the relaunch of their Vs. card game. Couple this with already existing strong OP programs from WOTC, Konami, Bushiroad, Fantasy Flight, Pazio and AEG, plus probably 2 or 12 I have overlooked and what we have is an embarrassment of Organized Play riches, all focused on the Local Game Store (You will noticed I did not say Friendly. I take the Friendly in FLGS as a given. Very few game stores I have visited have proven unfriendly). This leads to a bit of a problem. Who will run all of these events?

Many game stores operate with a paper thin staff, often the owner and a few part time employees. Though nowise as bad as we used to see, most stores still see payroll as their second biggest expense, after rent and adding another employee seriously affects their bottom line. Most stores also run a full slate of OP events already (as I have mentioned before, most game stores have shifted to an OP driven model over the past decade), so the question becomes, where does the staff come from to run all of these new events and when does the LGS run them. Currently we have events already running every night of the week and multiple events on the weekend and we are not an atypical store. In economic terms, we have scarce resources and an allocation problem. 

When I tell companies about the staff shortage problem, quite often the tell me: “Find one of your customers who plays our game and we’ll make them a (whatever the name of the company’s demo team is).” That’s well and good, save for two things. 

#1 As a store recommended demo person, they quasi-represent the store, without any of the control the store could exercise over a staff member.

#2 The company eventually wants them to demo the game at other places, cutting into their ability to run events at my store.

That’s why the Envoy program announced at the GTS attracted my attention. If it works as described, it could help tremendously with the resource program and, provided the Heralds do get extensive training, assuage my concerns about problem number one as well.

The Return of the Microgame

This week  heralded the return of the microgame (yes, I know there are other microgames out there but most come from the small press), in a way we have not seen since the heyday of Cheapass Games, as AEG released a very nice cardboard display stand containing not one, not two but three variants of Love Letter, plus 5 other games, playable in less than 30 minutes and retailing for about $10 each. Apparently Japan and Korea are the new Europe (much like Orange is the new Black) as most of the designers for AEG’s microgames line come from those countries.  Love Letter, of course, hit the shelves last year and had done quite well, but AEG showed off most of the others at the GAMA Trade Show last month, impressing most retailers with which I spoke with both packaging and gameplay.

AEG really launched their micrograme line impressively too, not only with the aforementioned cardboard display stand but also including bonus copies of Love Letter and Trains. I swear, I have seen AEG give away so many demo copies of Trains, also from a Japanese designer, that I wonder, sometimes, if AEG has actually sold any copies of the game. Be that as it may, these additions make the AEG microgames an even better deal and one that I hope leads to a resurgence in microgames.