Small wargame publishers do not need extra lessons in humility. Every time a small publisher puts out anything, all of his foibles, inadequacies, and errors come home to roost. Once under the blistering lights of public purview and the inquisition of literally thousands of astute eyes, the publisher's finest efforts reveal all of their flaws. It's a lesson that hits home--making one redouble his efforts for next time, only to be reminded again "next time" that he is still mortal. Such is life.

In spite of hundreds of hours of final layout, editing, checking and rechecking, of sweated blood (I'd be more graphic, but that would be in poor taste...) and the extensive counter-by-counter examination cross-referenced with the designer's original roster and the final proofs, 18 of the 1680 counters in Omaha were printed with the wrong information. 13 of them were the Panzer Lehr variant Panthers, the rest had their backs screwed up in one way or another. Is this acceptable? It isn't to me and I'm sure it isn't to you. None of you need to be reminded of the tight resources of a small wargame manufacturer--Omaha's final artwork and checking was done in the main by one person-as are all our games-me. Given that fact, especially, I find no excuse for this sort of error in our games-especially in a monster like Omaha where errors like this will keep customers from noticing the thousands of things that did go right.

A player called me from Reno complaining (rightly) about the number of counter erTors he had seen recently from many different publishers. While I can do little to help the others, I can clean up my own act. And, I will, This caller was of a mind that we should issue new (corrected) counters for our games and even offered to pay for them. I have no objection to issuing collected counters-that is fair and correct-but I will not be caught dead charging people for them. When a person buys a game from us, he buys it in good faith that we put our maximum effort into what he is getting in the box.

While he cannot, reasonably, expect perfection (reality dictates against that), he should expect that his purchase will be of the finest workmanship of the skills we have available. If, later, an errata countersheet is made available--the original purchaser has the right to expect such counters to be made available to him at no charge. Perhaps a minimal postage fee, but no charge for the actual item.

The discussion with this player encouraged me to take a look to see how we could do this. A look back reveals 22 bad counters published in our 9 releases (including the ITQF 2nd Edition.) These include the 18 from Omaha, 1 from ITQF, 1 from Bloody 110, and 2 from Force Eagle's War. That means that before Omaha we had an error rate of .06% or 6 per 10,000 counters. Omaha (with nearly 5 times as many bad counters as all previous games combined) reduced the overall rate to .3% or 3 per 1,000.

Suggestion

Taking the caller's suggestion as valid (it is), the question then becomes How? The problem here is not that there are too many bad counters or too many of you-- but too few of either. Mounting and die-cutting even the smallest job is not difficult-we'djust slip it in with a game's counters and pay for however many sheets extra it was. That's the easy part. The problem comes in the printing. We can fit up to 14 copies of the errata set on one-half of our regular countersheets.

That means to cover the 2,500 games in our basic print run (which would be enough for everyone to get one to cover his set of games) we would be printing only 89 of our 560 counter-countersheets! Since this would have to be a four-color print job, it would be fiscally irresponsible to print these seperately-not to mention I'd hate to watch my printer laugh his way to the bank. Press runs of under a thousand are ridiculously expensive because of the small numbers. This method would not be sound and I owe you more responsible management than that.

Idea number 2 is to "slip them in using up some of the space to be allotted to markers in future games. The caller referenced Command Magazine and their publishing errata counters in the next issue. From a bimonthly magazine's point of view, that's the way to go. With us its different. Putting them into our next game would mean two things: Civil War players will find themselves paying for errata counters for games they might not care about and WW2 players might find themselves having to purchase a CWB game they don't want, to get the errata they deserved for free. Tying errata counters within series is a good idea (the one ITQF counter would be in Bloody Roads South, etc.) but itleaves thebulk ofthe bad counters waiting for the next TCS release which won't be till 1993. An alternati ve idea was to put the TCS errata counters into Guderian's Blitzkrieg. That would be acceptable to hard-core WW2 "at-anylevel" types but would do little for those that only like tactical games.

Another method would be to wait until we have enough bad counters to fill up enough of a counter sheet to make a separate run worth it--or so many customers that it doesn't matter anymore. While I don't want to eat my words, with the redoubled efforts at counter control in our next releases, I seriously doubt if the former will be any time soon. As for the latter, I can hope a lot...

Final Resolution

I will leave the final resolution to your feedback. In the end I will make a choice and resolve the issue one way or another. I will appreciate your calls, fax's, and letters regarding the above. Please address the specific method you would prefer or tell me you don't want us to worry about it (contingent on future games having very few, if any, bad counters.)

We have added a couple of new features since last time. First, our 24hr-a day, 7 days-a-week fax line is now open. it can be used for orders, rules questions, and comments. If you leave your number, I'll reply as soon as I can. The number is (217) 896-2880.

The second new communications method for us is GEnie. I check in most every day to see what has transpired. If you are on-line come say hello-- Category 4, topic 43. I will be happy to field any question, comment, or explain our reasoning about any matter.