I’m having real difficulty wording this without sounding OTT and, well the only other word that springs to mind is fawning.  Strange one for a Scouser, I know, but bare with me.

If you read my previous games post you’ll know about my recent ebay purchase and its condition. Well I thought I’d give you an update. You see I’d decided not to send the game back to the seller as he’d only palm it off on someone else and I’d still be out £20 in postage. So I thought that I’d contact Uwe Eickert at Academy Games and see if I could buy a couple of replacement counters. I was fine about paying for them as at the end of the day they weren’t at fault. It was a deceitful ebayer, his poor packaging and a post office that likes to play football with parcels. And besides, Academy are a small company producing a quality range of products to an appreciative user base and they deserve to be supported.

Uwe had been away at the Essen games fair and on his return sent me a message offering to replace the box for the cost of postage. So not one to look a gift horse in the mouth I jumped at the opportunity expecting the bill to include some kind of token price for the counters. But no. He was just throwing them in. So I’m getting a new box and the counters for the cost of postage. Customer support or what.

Now, I’m currently getting 1200+ hits a week here and of them I suppose less than 1% will be proper gamers so I’m sure the rest of you would be surprised to hear this little tale but the customer service provided by boardgame companies is just about the best of any industry I’ve known.

Considering most of them are operating on seriously tight profit margins and investing years of development into each product they still bend over backwards to support their customers. It’s not hard to search on the Geek for examples and it never fails to astonish me. You’d also think that customers would then be inclined to take the p**s but on the whole I think you find they don’t. There’s a great deal of mutual respect between the designers, publishers and customers, especially as often the distinction between those three is blurred. Yes there’s the occasional grumbling on both sides but all in all there’s just a whole lot of love (unless we talk about Games Workshop but then that’s a whole different story) ,  support and encouragement.

But this particular post is mainly a big shout out to Academy Games‘ who have provided more support than I expected or asked for. Thank you. (that wasn’t too OTT was it?)