Legion of the Crazy

By S. Craig Taylor, Jr.
January 8, 2004

For this column, I fully acknowledge stealing some thoughts and pithy phrases directly from comments by Jeff Billings. Which ones; I’ll never tell.

There seems to be quite a bit of controversy regarding our new Cher Ami Legion raging at several locations on the net. Some commentators seem to understand our position on not wanting to waste time and resources on play testers who don’t produce and why we did this but, in at least one case, a valued correspondent said he was ‘appalled.’ To that, I have to say that I’m not sure what is so ‘appalling’ and, if the Legion is a badge of dishonor, then Lost Battalion Games would prefer to go to battle with the hooligans at our side. Please allow me to explain the issues as we see them.

Yes, we understand your concerns. All of us here understood the risks when we went wheels up on this sortie and our recruiting poster on this freely acknowledges that we are crazy. When we sent out BRAWLING BATTLESHIPS for blind play test we had about a one-fifth useful contribution rate out of the people sent the product for testing. It is not just the cost of materials, shipping and handling that is unacceptable, it is the cost in the wasted time and effort. If a blind play test proves unproductive, there is little choice but to delay a game?s release and start another round of blind-testing with different people. In the future, we will undoubtedly have some people listed in our game credits who are not Legion members, but we hope to be able to be very selective.

The delays in finishing the Stalingrad campaign Higher Echelon Decks for BATTLELINES and the PANZER MINIATURES rules are a direct result of our corporate growing pains but inefficient testing results have not helped the situation. We have reached the point where our local play testing capacity, which served us well in 2003, can no longer handle the load. We tend to prefer direct action and unorthodox methods when faced with a situation where there are no proven solutions and a lack of action means no improvement. So here, in a nutshell, is the dilemma. If we only use the play testers who are skilled and active, we compete for a relatively narrow pool of people, have to find them gradually and are unlikely to sustain our desired growth. It is a target-poor environment full of clutter and chaff. Since there is no target-rich environment, we decided to try to thin out the false echoes. The Cher Ami Legion may provide fewer testers than what we were offered before but we hope to achieve more efficiency in administering the testing. There are many other game companies; we are entering the play tester derby late and running with the herd could result in death by starvation. So far, we have commercially succeeded in this market because we have not used tried and true methods and, in the Cher Ami Legion, we continue to ‘ride the horse that got us here. “Following the old British Royal Navy tradition of giving the sailors lousy working conditions and grog so they will stay for twenty years, we decided to try our own version by placing a barrier to help screen out those that are serious from those that are not serious. Will we fall flat on our face” Only time will tell.

We fully understand that play testing is hard work. Jeff developed computer games for over 20 years and paper games for 17 years. I conducted my first play test for Avalon Hill in 1961, when I was a teen-aged blind-tester for their original BISMARCK game. Since then, I have play tested over 100 board, card, miniatures and computer games. In addition to my own testing efforts on these games (let’s face it; it takes a lot of work just to get a product to the point where blind play testing is worth while), I have ramroded the play test programs on most of them. A low point came many years ago when I sent out six hand-made game copies that took me many, many hours to construct and assemble and only got coherent replies from one individual. A year later I found that one of those who hadn’t even replied was selling his ‘rare’ play test copy at the ORIGINS auction. His body still hasn’t surfaced. Don Greenwood, one of the hobby’s original grognards, was my boss for a dozen years at Avalon Hill, and we have frequently commiserated about these same play testing problems since the early 1980s. At times, it seems like a force of nature. There is a lot of serious experience and many past frustrations driving our decision to organize the Cher Ami-Legion. Lost Battalion Games has twelve potential products for shipment in 2004 if we can get them through testing and ready for market.

Play testing strikes a lot of people as ‘fun’ until they actually try it. A tester has to read and learn the rules and play the game a number of times to master it before making comments. There may be forms to fill out as the play test director needs specific information or wants play conducted in a certain manner. The game lacks final artwork, so some imagination is required to visualize the final game. It can be enjoyable but it is also hard work that can consume a lot of time. In most cases, all of this labor is repaid with a free game or so. So, since this is the case, let me discuss a few salient aspects of the Cher Ami Legion:

• You don’t have to join. If you don’t join you can continue to live your life as if the Cher Ami Legion did not exist. If you don’t join, we will not maliciously delay shipping products to you, jump up and down on your packages before shipment or direct Legion members or poison pygmy people to attack your house. We will not even rule you out as a play tester; it’s just that the Legionnaires will get first choice on what to play test.

• In addition to paying to join, we do have free ‘merit’ memberships that have already been awarded to such long-term friends of Lost Battalion Games as our local play testers and columnist Phil Gardocki. Since Phil has not play tested any of our products but has provided the Formation Forum column and helped us with convention demonstrations, you can see that play testing is not the only criteria for membership. For a short time, we are also running a discount membership deal for those who already subscribe to our Cher Ami newsletter. Once this is done, new members will be able to enter only by paying the full membership fee or, after nomination by Lost Battalion Games, by being voted in as ‘merit’ members by the other members.

• Even if you do not wish to play test, if you think we will be around for a while, the twenty percent discount on all future orders alone can be attractive, although a slight gamble. Letting friends buy through you, ordering games as gifts, etc. can make that membership fee get discounted away in a nonce. I have a friend who bought a $75 ‘lifetime subscription’ to S&T Magazine back in the early 70s. Even though S&T went belly-up ten years later, he made out like a bandit, paying only slightly over $1 per magazine with game. Quite frankly, I take our games very seriously, and member play testers who do not pan out will get no further play test assignments, although they are not otherwise at risk and still keep their memberships and twenty percent discount. For play testers (who will still get free games for their specific efforts), over the long haul, this discount system is a much better payoff than that offered by other play test programs.