SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT
By S. Craig Taylor, Jr.
Mar 9, 2006
In addition to all my other arduous duties, I have recently been assigned to “edit” Lost Battalion Game’s Cher Ami Newsletter. I put “edit” in parenthesis because I essentially end up composing most of the text as well as deciding where to place it and how to present it. Inevitably, lots of this verbiage is advertising copy. Face it; nobody does a “free” newsletter without sneaking in some advertising. For reasons that elude me, I have been writing advertising blurbs ever since I was with Battleline Games back in the mid 1970s. Even while I was at the old Avalon Hill Game Company they made me write the text for the back of the game boxes of any games I designed, developed, play tested and/or looked at sideways.
Only during my sojourn in the computer game industry was I able to theoretically avoid writing ad copy, as all those companies had crack staffs of well-paid college-trained marketing people, although those experts had little time to actually play the product and always wanted detailed descriptions and bullet lists of the features and best selling points of the games on which I was working as a designer, developer and/or producer. Knowing what information to ask for was the reason they made the big bucks. One lovely young marketing lady was so overwhelmed by my sagacious use of the words “New”, “Improved”, “Fun”, “Entertaining” and “Must See” that she told me I should move over to the “dark side” of marketing. I may do that yet but I still have this strange idea that, with hard work and a little more experience, I too can earn the equivalent of minimum wage designing games.
Be that as it may, over 30 years of writing advertising copy has thoroughly rotted my brain and led me to see the light and contemplate an antidote. “Good” advertisements string together positive words (“colorfully powerful and now with fewer calories and less chance of deadly side effects”), life-affirming sentiments (“easy to learn family fun that will amuse the family gerbil for hours”) and glowing testimonials (“my social life improved after playing the game and my skin cleared up”) to, theoretically, help sell the product. So, how would a “bad” advertisement appear? I’m talking about an advertisement that would have readers run screaming from the room, scrambling to buy something, anything, else. You know exactly what’s coming, don’t you, dear reader? Naturally, my wayward muse led me to actually compose such an “anti-advertisement”, which I now wish to share with you:
DELENDA EST BLOTTO mugs you in the park, follows you home and infects you like a plague. Leaving a trail of mutilated victims wherever it goes, DELENDA EST BLOTTO takes a horrid old game and turns it into something worse; much worse; oh, my; you betcha! DELENDA EST BLOTTO is really, really BAD. It’s no fun at all! The black-and-white and out-of-register Mapboard (think “3-D” without the silly glasses) makes a failed and confusing attempt to somehow use contiguous polygons. The unit counters are cut out by hand and printed on wax paper, making them downright impossible to pick up, move or read. The incoherent rules are printed on 100 separate and unorganized scraps of paper, and, assuming they are all there when our nearly sober warehouse staff assembles the game, most of them will be lost when the box disintegrates in room temperature weather conditions. Once you buy DELENDA EST BLOTTO, only the sweet release of death can save you from its tawdry charms. Buy one for someone you hate!
Just Look at These Testimonials:
“My brain went numb with terror!” – The Erudite Gamer
“Truly insipid and uninspired!” – The Gamers’ Gamer and Pocket Pal
“I laughed; I cried; I lost my lunch!” – The Emotional Gamer
“Send the children away and hide the womenfolk!” – The Family Gamer
“This game just fails so completely and on so many levels!” – The Analytic Gamer
“You expect this game to scatter when the lights go on! – The Enlightened Gamer
“I led torch-carrying villagers looking for the designer!” – The Active Gamer
Ah, I feel much better now. That’s
it. I got it out of my system. Did I leave out anything that says or smells
BAD? I fully expect to be dogged for this copywriter’s sacrilege for the rest
of my days by every “witty” reviewer (“
Well, gentle reader, it’s pretty
obvious that Unca Craig is just being silly again and needs to take his
medicine. My problem is I wanted to use this current Publisher’s Corner column
to say something glowing and expansive about the changes we have made to the
Lost Battalion Games website over the past months but it is just not the sort
of project that lends itself to obvious superlatives. There are new
SERGEANTS!
scenarios, including one that adds personal characteristics. Also, Jeff has
finally convinced me that four-point type is too small, so the longer and more
complicated free SERGEANTS!
online scenarios will increasingly now be multi-page documents with larger
type. We’ve also added new game FAQs,
PANZER
card lists and the “Ships of
BATTLEGROUP" article
(which can now be found with both the
BATTLEGROUP blurbs or in
OK, boys and girls, for once in a life of conspicuous bloviation, I am really at a loss for words. It’s too big, much of it still looks the same (although it isn’t) and many of the changes are locked away in the basement or attic like some crazy relative (oh, yeah, my family is the only one). Without hyperbole there can be no advertising copy, so what am I to do? The changes to our website are good, so an anti-advertisement, like the ranting that opened this column, doesn’t apply here. Revamping our holy of holies has been a major project here and it was more than just cosmetic surgery. The changes are hard to spot until you actually start strolling through our site; tramping mud on our carpets, turning on lamps, raiding the refrigerator, stealing appliances, torturing the pets and bouncing on the furniture. I guess what I am really trying to say is do a little surfing though our reorganized website and let us know what you think. We think you’ll be pleased.
Let’s see, I’m really
supposed to mention something else. Oh, yeah, we need a semblence of a real ad. Some time
back, we 
persuaded
Jeff to take a break from working on the website revision and he produced this
new shiekh of the desert sands tile set. So, now, we have the new LOST BATTALION
TERRAIN TILES DESERT SET and,
let’s face it, Jeff’s scars will be
allow even a clutsy, stubby-fingered individual like me to convert
SERGEANTS!
and other tactical board games into visually appealing desert miniatures games.
Mercy! This works the same as the European Set but there is less water and lots
of sand dunes. The system provides an attractive hex grid backdrop for use with
miniature terrain and figures. Add your own miniature buildings, date palm
trees, hills and other terrain to this hex grid and you can quickly recreate
barren 3-D battlefields! The components include 132 high quality
three-and-one-half inch hexagonal tiles which are printed on both sides. One
side features completely clear terrain in attractive and realistic brownish
ground tones and many of these also include sand dunes along the edges. The
other side includes roads, gullies and an oasis pond on the same background
color. These hexagonal tiles can be arranged in an almost infinite number of
ways. One set of tiles is more than enough tiles to recreate a standard
size SERGEANTS!
Mapboard, although multiple sets are necessary for larger game boards. A set of
tiles retails for $39.95.
