Ode to Achievement
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D., President, Avalanche Press
June 2011

Designing wargames is an unusual occupation, and over the years I’ve probably done over 100 of them (depends on how you want to count supplements and new editions and such). It’s not exactly “fun,” at least in my experience, as it’s more a matter of exercising your craft. That can make it extremely satisfying, when things go right.

What I’ve finally discovered after multiple decades of pounding my head on the wall is that you can, indeed, try too hard. You can’t be successful trying to craft the game you wish someone would publish (and that even you might not actually play, if you were really honest with yourself). You can’t be successful if you’re using the game design as a platform to show off how clever you are, or how much research you’ve done, or how many languages you speak. You’re successful by following the same tenets that govern every type of publishing: identify what the audience wants to the best of your ability, and then deliver it.

I’ve done things both ways, and discovered a few things, some of which have only lately have become clear to me. One is that it takes a lot of effort to be unsuccessful. Another is that even unsuccessful games do have fans, often fanatical fans, so you can’t trust the feedback too much. Note here that I’m talking about games that are not as commercially successful as they could have been, not abject failures. We’ve published abject failures (Airlines2 among others) and those not only sell poorly, the feedback’s pretty vicious, too (yet even Airlines has its fans).

The most successful games I’ve done here at Avalanche Press did not have much of a lead-up to them: I identified the topic, choosing what I and others here believed had the best chance to sell well. When I’m not indulging in self-handicapping, I’m actually pretty good at picking them – it’s not like it’s very difficult. So with the topic chosen, then it’s a matter of doing some preliminary research to identify the game’s parameters: chiefly its physical size. Once that’s known, there’s still an enormous amount of work to be done but it’s pretty straightforward.

Last week I looked at some games that I chose to do because I think I knew they would only have limited appeal. Then I could craft them as wonderfully as I wanted and not be noticed. That doesn’t pay the bills, and that doesn’t satisfy anyone including me. That said, I’ve also created some games that were very successful (by this industry’s standards) both commercially and creatively. Here’s a look at some of them:

Great War at Sea: Jutland
While we did an earlier game on the same topic, I never really thought of this as a second edition. I approached it as a new game, and decided on the orders of battle and map area without any reference to the old Northern Waters game. It’s a big game, but filled with smaller scenarios. I had all the needed reference materials on hand in my personal library, and the scenarios fell together pretty easily.

Despite the size of the game, it has very few errors in it (I’m aware of just one minor typo), it has very good scenarios and a lot of variety: Dutch battleships, Russian super-dreadnoughts, Estonian destroyers, Finnish gunboats. It met its deadlines and met its sales goals. And it’s still one of the top-selling games in our line. Beth Donahue did the map, while not as fine as her later naval game work it’s perfectly suitable. The Terry Strickland cover’s from a period watercolor and one of my favorites.

Panzer Grenadier: Elsenborn Ridge
This game grew relatively quickly, from a suggestion by superfan Jay Townsend for a mid-sized Panzer Grenadier game, something smaller and less expensive than large ones like Road to Berlin. We’d long talked about doing a sequel to Battle of the Bulge, which covers only combat in the southern sector of the Ardennes campaign. So one day I settled in, read a couple of books, identified the fighting on which I wished to concentrate and picked out the key terrain. I drew the sketch maps and started on the scenarios; there were only a few glitches in the design process, none of them having anything to do with the game itself – other duties kept calling me away and sometimes I forget what I was trying to do when interruptions happen.

The result is the best Panzer Grenadier game I’ve designed myself, and one of the best in our catalog. It’s a tremendously good seller – even in its boxless form we can’t keep it in stock. To my knowledge it has no errors and it’s just about the highest-rated boxed game on the comprehensive listings of Panzer Grenadier Headquarters. I do wish it had a better title, but that’s about the only flaw I can find in it: it has great maps by Guy Riessen, and Beth Donahue gave it a fine cover.

Infantry Attacks: August 1914
All the others on this list are part of mature series, so their rules sets were already in good shape before I even started on them. I’ve heard that this means it’s “not real game design,” whatever that means. And maybe it’s not. I don’t really care; I’d much rather give people fun games to play, and placing them in series with established, unchanging rules means they can break open a box and start playing right away. If you learn how to play one Panzer Grenadier game, you can play them all, and over 1,000 scenarios are suddenly available to you.

I stalled working on the infantry Attacks rules for a while, I guess because I hadn’t worked on a new rules set in so long I was a little intimidated by the prospect. Once I got into it, it wasn’t that hard to put them together the way I wanted them. A lot of my concepts did not survive the development process: I tried to give infantry a skirmishing ability that I thought was pretty cool and gave special abilities to light infantry. And the artillery system gave batteries and off-board increments more flexibility in changing their targets/missions than they have in the final product. It’s a policy here that I’ve always enforced rigorously: the developer has the last word. I did sneak a little remnant in anyway, “forgetting” to delete the Cold Steel markers because I just thought they were really cool (even if they’re not really needed in game play).

As for the rest, it went pretty smoothly. The parameters were clear; I had good source material, and did the maps, counter manifests and scenarios in a couple of weeks. John Galati did the cover, and Christopher West the maps; both turned in outstanding work. The final product’s simply outstanding and I’m really happy with how it turned out; there is one odd printing flaw in the counters that I’ve never seen before or since: the back of one strip is missing (German Landwehr companies) even though it’s present on the proof – that means it was there when we turned it in. By the time anyone noticed, we’d shipped hundreds of them already so it was “accepted.” I doubt I would have insisted on a reprint anyway.

Second World War at Sea: Arctic Convoy
All of the more recent Second World War at Sea series games have been satisfying, but this one sticks out as a success just because it went so smoothly when so few projects seem to do so. The operations in the Far North took place pretty much in isolation, so each scenario is self-contained – there’s no need to account for stuff happening off the edge of the map, because on three sides there’s nothing off the edge of the map except ice. On the fourth, both opponents considered the area a separate theater and didn’t mix forces and missions.

Once again, the scenarios flowed fairly easily; for a theater with so much secondary literature, it was more difficult to nail down precise orders of battle than I would have expected, but they’re all there and accurate as far as I know. Developer Doug McNair had some difficulty with the ranges of some ships expected to toil all the way across the map. I was ok with just upping the fuel allotments of transports (they’re generic, after all) but he wanted to hold to the system as written, and made it work fine.

I think this one’s the best of the Second World War at Sea games, and it sold extremely well. Beth Donahue did her best artwork for us on this game, in my own opinion, with a great map and very nice box. The box is a little cramped – it was printed in China, and as with some other projects the manufacturer cut a few corners by just reducing its size. There are only a couple dozen left, and it’ll transition to the new-style deep box as soon as they’re gone.

The Future?
When I was in graduate school, my advisor, Jamie Melton, had to observe me lecturing (Emory actually takes teaching seriously). The topic was the Revolutions of 1848, and I didn’t think it my best work. “You’re looking for nuance,” he advised, this being his role. “You spend years seeking out deeper meaning, and when you’re asked to explain it to someone the nuance gets in the way of the story.”

He’s still right, of course. When I’ve just told the story without looking for nuance, the results have been very good. These are the games that still leave me a little in awe when I think that I had a role in their creation. They’re all team efforts, of course, but there’s a real thrill when everything comes together like you hoped it would.

The days of nuance are over; we’ll be concentrating now on games we’re pretty sure you want: Panzer Grenadier: Alamein, Second World War at Sea: South Pacific, Second Reich and some others. Now that we’re making boxed games again, we have to make good ones.