Counter Quality

[vince hughes]

Whilst I want to keep genuine opinion on the board. For example, my recent experiences with APL and its produce have been negative (for me that is, whilst other tastes differ), I do at the same time like to keep things polite. And that is something I will continue with as I don't want to see these boards become mini-me's of the snark seen on CSW and BGG by self-appointed big-wigs and quite frankly, nobbish arse-holes (excuse the profanity please). Admittedly, my humour at times and also insistence on points in the past have sometimes rattled a cage here and there, but EVERYBODY on here has always ended up apologising and/or remaining friends still. So lets be sure to keep debate on keel, fair and genuine.

With that all said and the newer posts above, I think some of my irks have turned out to have been justified by MB's decision to now go back to die-cuts and away from what for me have been the quite ugly and ill-produced laser counters. They have smelt, burnt, and stained along the way and have come out with at least three different thicknesses. In individual games, this would not bother me, but in a game series where I EXPECT consistency of product they failed miserably to me as a customer. On top of that, there were the rather disgraceful boards in Lib 44 and the coup de grace for me of course were some of the changes to the rules I couldn't accept.

Conversely and fortunately and perhaps even ironically, my loss was APL's gain and all this seemed to have saved APL as it finally meant product out the door. Unfortunately for APL this meant delivery to a smaller but confirmed fan base as many items were GC order only or were never sent to game stockists not only abroad, but in the US too. My wavering at this level of product has meant that I and a few others online have left AP either as customers and more sadly as PG players too. How many others we don't know of I have no clue if any at all? In my case, it was by happenstance as I started to look at other games and found a couple I have liked. One of which is a platoon scale game of WW2 anyway, TCS. I was also fortunate enough to offload to buyers the product I did not like before re-makes were done (Kursk BT, Lib 44, Russo-Japanese War) and at very decent prices too. It might not be so easy in the US as those titles are more available, but the 2 x PG titles in the UK will be very rare indeed. That lifted their value.

So in summary of this rather long diatribe, my position has not changed and in fact has rather hardened. But above all, given that there are so many different views here as there are persons, lets make sure that posts are polite and not in a fashion that inspires lash-back rather than feed-back.