Star Fleet in England

STEVE COLE WRITES: After our week in Germany, Leanna and I caught a quick flight over the channel to England, where we spent a week in London with our good friends and customers John and Victoria Crawford. While we did see the usual tourist stuff (Buckingham Palace, Horse Guards, Saint James Park, Trafalgar Square, Number Ten, the Tower of London, the British Museum, the Natural History Museum, the Imperial War Museum, Harrads, and of course Stonehenge and Avebury) we were there primarily to talk to British retailers and British customers.

We had the opportunity to see several. John Crawford has been a fan of the Star Fleet Universe since it began, and walked us to the shop where he first bought the pocket edition of SFB and to the shop where he bought Volume 3 of the Commander’s Edition, among others. All of this was during his spectacular walking tour of downtown London-Westminster. While I suffered horridly (I don’t walk much at home) by the end of the week I was walking long distances without trouble, and plan to continue walking a mile a day to get back into shape.

Our primary focus was a meeting with British gamers at Leisure Games in Finchley. (Finchley is part of Greater Metropolitan London. The actual "City of London" is only one square mile around the Tower of London.) We met with the shop managers, and had a detailed conversation of their business. (Leisure Games is the largest mail order retailer of our products in Europe. Their store functions both as a walk-in retail store and as a vast mail order warehouse.)

Several individual gamers drove or took the excellent public transportation system (often two hours or more) to meet with me at Leisure Games and discuss new products and new company directions, and to get their games autographed. It was great to see many customers who had previously just been names on the BBS or on mail orders. The British customers are overwhelmingly miniatures players, and were excited to see the new ships which we had brought to Leisure Games (all of which sold out while we were there). The British players want STAR FLEET OPERATIONS (which used to be called Module V) to generate scenarios and manage campaigns. They pointed out to me that because of the more limited set of ships and special rules in Federation Commander that the version of Star Fleet Operations to support FedComm would be simpler and easier to design than the originally intended version (designed to support the much more detailed Star Fleet Battles engine).

Those who attended included myself and John Crawford, plus: Bob Cochrane, Michael Ng, Martin Wilkinson, Dan P Ibekwe, Mark George, Jonathan Amery, and Michael Wheatley.

I want to thank John Crawford again. He and his wife Victoria took a week’s vacation in order to escort Leanna and myself around London, and we wouldn’t have seen half of what we saw without them.