Making History Come Alive
August 1914 Launches New Game Series
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
April 2010

"So just how does a pacifist become a military historian?" one of my friends from graduate school, Yaël Fletcher, asked me one day. She would go on to become a driving force in Historians Against the War, a group opposed to the American invasion and occupation of Iraq. "Because your grandfather was an Austrian general, right?"

Not exactly — though I have no love for war, at the time the memory of brutally murdered friends and their toddler was fresh and raw, leaving me adamantly in favor of massive and violent NATO intervention in the former Yugoslavia. Principles are a lot harder to hold once they lose their abstract nature. This many years later it's still awfully hard not to type [a Croat phase I'll delete lest it invoke an e-jihad] on every remotely related occasion.

Anyway, it's actually because of my grandmother, an American holding pretty staunch anti-war views of her own. My grandmother believed that I needed culture and learning, making sure I was exposed to art and music — she belonged to the Chautauqua Institution and early on I knew the classics. And she thought I needed to read much more broadly than the children's literature and science fiction available to boys in the 1970s. It would be my grandmother who introduced me to The Lord of the Rings, and later to Monty Python and the X-Files. In the summer when I turned 11 (I think; I'm not clear on this) she pressed a pair of fat paperbacks into my hands: The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman, and August 1914 by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. I still have the copy of Tuchman here on my desk, but seem to have lost the Solzhenitsyn.

I sat underneath her willow tree that summer and read them both cover to cover. I didn't know real stories could be told that vividly. As she intended, a new world had opened to me. As she probably did not intend, the course of my life had been determined.

Over the years I would lose my infatuation with Tuchman; I still like her work. But Solzhenitsyn's book, a slightly fictionalized account of the 1914 Tannenberg campaign told from the Russian point of view, stayed in my mind ever since. Solzhenitsyn did not simply tell his story, he showed it. War to Solzhenitsyn was not simply the movement of men and cannon, but a complicated dance of violent emotions. Two scenes stuck with me for decades: a boy in Rostov charting the advance of the German armies by penciling in the front lines on a map, but promising his parents that "they will never reach Rostov," and the Narva Regiment lining up in the forest for a close-range firefight with the Germans, described in riveting detail.

Solzhenitsyn made history come alive; and maybe even more impressively, even in translation his prose came alive. I knew that I wanted to write stories like that.

Despite that early influence, once I became a professional designer of military history boardgames I don't think I ever seriously thought about designing a game on the Tannenberg campaign until fairly recently. I'd long wanted to do a First World War sequel to our Panzer Grenadier series, and decided to open the series with a large volume on the Eastern Front in 1914. Originally, this game would have covered the entire front, but to keep its price reasonable and physical size manageable, we cut it in half. And so was born August 1914, the game.

Throughout the design process, I wanted to craft a game that brought the events to life for players on the game board just as Solzhenitsyn had for me so long ago on the printed page. That's a very tall order, and probably not even possible. But nevertheless I'm still very pleased with the results. It's pretty much impossible to judge one's own work, or to predict how consumers will really receive a new product, but at this stage I really think August 1914 is one of the best two or three games we've ever produced.

There's a special thrill to holding the actual box in your hands — the new-glue smell arising from the pallets bearing thousands of brand-new boxes might have something to do with that. And this one is a very nice box, designed by John Galati. John did our Red Vengeance box and has been part of the Avalanche Press family for a long time now, probably six or seven years. I hope you'll be seeing a lot more of his box and book cover design in the future as well. He was sort of limited in his design choices, as we wanted the August 1914 box to form a visual whole when displayed alongside Beth Donahue's cover for Fall of Empires, the second game in the series. I liked his design when I saw the proof, and it's grown on me — not least because it's the only game in our lineup with this particular color scheme, so it really stands out when stacked alongside the others.

Previous printers shipped the cardstock maps we use in Panzer Grenadier and now Infantry Attacks to us flat and we had to fold them ourselves. The new, local printer handles that step for us, so the process of running every map through someone's hands is gone, but at least we get to handle them when they're assembled carefully into stacks. Under our Andy Angel method, maps are sorted into game sets of six each, which are then stored in the huge numbers of empty paper cartons generated by our in-house printing plant.

I like the look of them. The maps are by industry veteran Christopher West, who did a lot of map work for Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro but is new to our lineup. They're a somewhat different look than we've had in the past, but that was what I wanted for this game series: the maps should be interchangeable with those of Panzer Grenadier games, but they shouldn't look exactly the same. You can see a preview of them here.

Since the playing pieces have the same basic information as a Panzer Grenadier piece (direct fire, bombardment fire, movement) we decided they should have those figures in the same places so as not to confuse players of the other system. But at the same time, we didn't want them to look just like Panzer Grenadier's distinctive counters either.

When we first brought out Panzer Grenadier, the initial art director thought all the counters should be colored in earth tones, and that's why the Germans and Soviets have the color schemes they possess in that game series. But it wasn't long before we ran out of earth tones, and now we're starting to run out of colors. So for Infantry Attacks, we applied that knowledge and planned ahead a little bit.

The counters keep the concept of the earth-toned background, at least so far. Once we move on to other theaters we may need to broaden the palette. They sport a bright stripe across the top for ease of national identification: Germans have their black-white-red tricolor and Russians are green. In the upcoming Fall of Empires, Austrians are imperial yellow.

Since most of the units represent companies rather than platoons, they have more figures on them. At one point we were going to completely change the look, and Beth Donahue actually created a new set of figures, but we decided to stay within the graphic bounds laid down by Panzer Grenadier and avoid innovation for the sake of innovation.

These are the first we've done with our current printer, and I like the work very much. The die-cutting is spot on, and the printing very sharp. And I just like holding the pieces to a brand-new game.

Each copy of the game has a rules package much like those in Panzer Grenadier games: a set of series rules, a sheet of 165 marker pieces, two chart cards and a time record card. The rules themselves — the core of any game design — are pretty solid thanks to months of development by Doug McNair and a lot of work by his teams of testers. They took full advantage of production delays to forge a very complete rulebook. The game's seen a lot more pre-release testing than, well, any game I can recall. I'm really pleased by the results: The game does what I wanted it to do.

And much like the games in its sister series, August 1914 has a weighty scenario book. There are 40 of them this time, and they're presented in a similar fashion to Panzer Grenadier scenarios. They're concentrated on a very narrow slice of time: the battles of Gumbinnen, Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes, fought over a period of about six weeks. Keeping that narrow focus allowed me to construct a campaign narrative out of them, something I've always wanted to do in a scenario-based game. Despite taking them all from just those battles, there is a pretty wide variety: cavalry battles, cavalry raids, meeting engagements, frontal assaults, delaying actions and a lot more. Including the Narva Regiment's fight in the Jabloken Forest, that stood out to me in Solzhenitsyn's work.

I've been asked by a number of friends, and fans as well, if it was really such a bright idea to launch a series of First World War tactical games. I tend to think it was: Avalanche Press was truly born as an ongoing enterprise with the launch of the Great War at Sea series, at a time when both naval games and World War One games were viewed as sure-fire losers. It's only fitting that another World War One series marks its rebirth. Great War at Sea games became best-sellers, and over the years we've sold tens of thousands of them. And we launched that one before the game industry's premier marketer worked here.

If it's not clear yet, I don't think I've been this excited by a new release since before I worked at Avalanche Press. Just because we don't publish stuff here just to exalt our egos doesn't mean we have no pride in our work — and I'm very proud of this one.

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