g2 Collectibles and Hobbies

I’m in the process of moving the blog off our website and on to the WordPress site. You can find the new blog at g2ch.wordpress.com. I like WordPress, but keeping it on our site is something that causes me extra work maintaining it. This seems like a better solution since it gives us what we really need, a place where we can post updates and interesting news without the maintenance. Since I’m losing the majority of the maintenance task, I hope to be able to spend that time posting more gaming news and updates here.

Happy 4th of July! I’ve spent the night putting together descriptions and adding some items to the site. Some of these are older titles like Memoir ’44 and Citadels where we had one left sitting on our shelf and some of them are newer like the Maltese Cross dice we had Chessex custom make for us. We actually have several more items in waiting as well and I will be adding these items to the site over the coming week.

My wife has actually been slowly updating Gamescience dice as well. We picked up a new stock of certain colors at Origins directly from Gamescience. I had the opportunity to speak with Aaron Witten a couple of times and got some news on new processes Gamescience is using. The big change right now is all of the newer dice coming out of the molds are being hot clipped. From what I have seen this helps out significantly with the point on the die where the sprue is cut off. It’s still visible, but it is cleaner and easier to file if needed. I like what I see a lot. Aaron also told me that they have a better color matching process in place now and the colors are more likely to stay consistent between runs. Mixing plastic colors is a real pain and it can often lead to some variation between different runs. This new process solves much of that pain and I think it will be another positive step for Gamescience dice. Beyond the dice talk, I had a pleasant conversation with Aaron about general business and games we both enjoy. I went over to simply talk some quick business and ended up having a great conversation that turned out to be one of the highlights of the convention for me.

For now, it’s time to think about the holiday. We are looking forward to fireworks tonight! I hope everyone has a pleasant 4th. Steve @ g2ch

Origins is nearly here! Just 8 days to go. My friends and I try to go every year. For me the highlight of the show is the exhibitor floor with all the new product and demos going on. I always have an eye out for new and interesting things for the shop and the previously owned game selection gives me a chance to look for items for my personal collection. And I of course enjoy the gaming and seminars. Outside of the games there is the fun of hanging out with friends having a brew (or two) at Barleys, gyros at Mykonos Gyros in the Columbus Convention Center Food Court, and treating myself to a Buckeye Milkshake from the Krema Nut Company (which one can only have a few times a year due to fear of death from excess).

It’s always a great time and well worth the investment. If you are anywhere near Columbus, Ohio I would highly recommend you try and make it to Origins when you have the opportunity. Check out the Origins website for more information. Steve @ g2ch

Just finished up posting some new dice bags. We’ve actually had these on eBay for a while and I just never got them posted here. Lately the extra large velveteen bags have been quite popular so I thought is was time that I make them available here as well. I hope to add some more dice in the next few days as well. Steve @ g2ch

We’ll be taking Easter day off. Please feel free to send an email if you have any questions and we’ll be happy to respond on Monday. Happy Easter! Steve @ g2ch

Just a month ago I was complaining about freezing rain and being out of power. How trivial that seems today. The news out of Japan is epic in proportion. If anyone is wondering where and how they can help, MSNBC has posted a good resource page on this here. Not much to say at the minute really. Just wanted to spread this link to one more place. Steve @ g2ch

There appears to be a very real chance that we will not be shipping on Tuesday. Like many areas across the U.S. Midwest, it seems like freezing rain is moving in on us in a serious way. I just checked outside a while ago and it has started. From what the news is saying it looks like it is not supposed to stop until at least noon on Tuesday and then we get a second hit in the afternoon.

I am hoping that it will not be half as bad as the local weathermen are saying and we can be back to normal on Wednesday. My worst fear is a complete loss of power with possible ice buildup and high winds predicted for Wednesday. We’ve been through this sort of thing before though and if that happens we will be back up and running as soon as we can get access online again.

So basically I am writing this to let everyone know what is going on in case we suddenly are not reachable (preparing for the worst). Likely that will not happen and we’ll be operational on Wednesday as usual (hoping for the best). To all of our fellow Midwesterners in the snow and ice with us, be safe. Everyone else, please wish us all luck that this thing will just be an overhyped storm that we are laughing about tomorrow. Will be interesting to see what Tuesday morning brings.

Update 02/01/2011: As expected we did no shipping on Tuesday. Everything is ice outside right now and it is still coming. It is about a quarter inch thick on pretty much everything in sight. This is going to get interesting if it keeps building up.

Update 02/03/2011: Shortly after I posted that last update, we lost power. It came back last night (Wednesday) around 8:00 pm eastern time. So we are back in business this morning. If you sent a question or have an order in, we will be working extra today to get everything caught up. Thank you for your patience and understanding. On a side note, heat is a wonderful thing!

With the Post Office closed for holiday today, we decided it would be a good time to do some inventory. We ended up with a nice box of surprises, items we thought we were out of, things we forgot about, etc. We’ve been working this afternoon to post a few finds on the website and eBay. These include titles like Acquire, Nexus Ops, Hellas, Lost Cities, Palazzo, some eM4 miniatures, Puerto Rico, Formula Motor Racing, and more.

On the way are things like Duel in the Dark: The Complete Edition Expansion, Yinsh, Zertz, Dvonn, Gipf, Tsuro, Doom the Boardgame, Doom the Expansion, Cartagena, and a few more.

This is what happens when you pack titles away in boxes and think “I’ll get to those later.” On the plus side, it is fun to see older titles I have not seen for a while pop up.

UPDATE (Jan 6, 2011 1:08am): I have made corrections at this point and our site again appears to be speaking to the Post Office server fine. This means it can now get rates for shipping when placing orders. If anyone experiences problems ordering, please let us know and I will look into it as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience and thank you to those of you that emailed us to let us know there was a problem!

(Original posting on this follows)

In an excellent start to the New Year, our shopping cart is currently not working. On January 3rd the US Postal Service updated its shipping API and when it did it broke multiple small merchant’s shopping carts. Unfortunately, no one at the USPS felt it necessary to tell merchants that it was updating anything, so we discovered this when a few of our customers were nice enough to email us and we started looking around at message boards online. Right now, I am working to get the corrections in place that will allow our site to connect to the Post Office server again. I’m not happy with this, but overall the USPS has always offered good service to us and I think as a whole they do a great job. I just wish this particular department of the USPS would invest a bit more in communicating with its customers so we could prepare for these changes before they happen.

I hope to have the fix in place and tested very soon. I will update this message when I have that complete. Until then, if you have an eBay account we do have our store there as well. Please accept our apologies for this inconvenience. Steve @ g2ch

We will be taking a couple of well deserved days off, back in business as usual on Monday.

Along with the announcement, I want to take a moment to thank each of you for making our little family business a success. We’ve been selling online since the year 2000. We started out off and on through eBay long ago. Then in 2003 we went full time and haven’t slowed down since. At this point, we’ve had the opportunity to serve and interact with many people all around the world and the experience and relationships we have built have been incredibly rewarding. Thank you for your vote of confidence in our business, your trust in us to take care of our customers, the connections to your lives that you share with us, and everything else too numerous to name. It is an honor and a pleasure to serve you all. Thank you.

We wish you all the best for the holidays and your preparations for the New Year!