Austerlitz:
The Destroying
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D., President, Avalanche Press
July 2011

Last week, we had to hurriedly move our office and warehouse to new locations when negotiations to reduce our space at the old location broke down. The down-sizing came earlier than I really wanted, and that means we’re pretty cramped for storage space.

Over time, we’ll need less and less space: we’ve switched to a new model of box manufacture, with a generic core box covered by a box sleeve. The first of these, for Panzer Grenadier: Eastern Front, has already been released. Since the one type of box will suffice for every title, eventually our box storage space will only be a fraction of what we now need – and this time, I made sure we have the clear option to reduce our space as time goes on.

But for the moment, our storage space is stuffed full – so full, that’s it’s been very difficult to extract items we need right now, like those generic black boxes. Over time, valuable boxes are going to get crushed by the weight. That means some of the less valuable items have got to go, and they’ve got to go now.

And so it’s time to say goodbye to Napoleonic Battles: Austerlitz. It’s the most over-represented title in the new warehouse; while we have more copies available of some other titles, those sell much better and we’ll eventually sell all of them. Austerlitz likely could last 20 years or more at its current sales rate.

Starting immediately, Austerlitz is dropping in price to $9.99. And yes, you still have to pay shipping for it – dropping the price doesn’t drop its weight. That price will only last until we’ve managed to extract all the Austerlitz components from the new warehouse.

When I made the decision to publish Austerlitz, Lys Fulda, then the company’s vice president, cautioned me to think very carefully whether or not we really should do it. The earlier Napoleonic series we’d done never sold well, and she thought we should concentrate our resources in our top-selling series instead of ego gratification. She was absolutely right, but I went with Austerlitz anyway. Rob Markham had designed the game some time earlier, and I wanted to make use of it and re-launch the series. Diversity, I reasoned, was a good thing.

Rob turned in a good game design, but as with most of his games the map came in hand-drawn in heavy marker. It was hard to decipher, and I told the developer to re-draw it before it went to the artist, because she’d never figure out what it was supposed to look like. Doug McNair was a very good game developer, but my wife’s kindergartners have a much better artistic sense. His new sketch map wasn’t a whole lot better than Rob's.

At the time we had several projects under way, and Austerlitz was supposed to be quick and easy to complete. I considered re-drawing the map myself, and probably should have. Maps for this series require a certain mind-set; given good source materials they’re not that hard to do, though they do consume a lot of time. But Doug cautioned that drawing the map over again would invalidate the scenario playtesting, and I decided to go with what we already had.

There are some very good reasons to use artists from outside the wargame world: for one thing, their work is rarely wedded to hide-bound convention. This has served us well for games like Gazala or Arctic Convoy. And then there’s Austerlitz: not having a good vision of what the battlefield should look like, the map artist did her best to re-create the sketch map. The ugly, atrocious Markham-McNair hybrid sketch map. I should never have allowed the thing to go to press, but we had deadlines to meet and I sent it forward.

The counter set is probably too busy, but at least it looks very nice. The rules are outstanding – I’ve been working with them a lot over the past few days as I’ve returned to game design now that the move is done. They’re the basis for the new series rules that will go into Battles of 1866: Frontier Battles, and they’re very well done. Austerlitz is a very good game; it’s just not presented well.

At least not on the inside. Unfortunately it’s the boxes that are taking up too much space, and trashing them is going to be painful. It’s one of the best package designs we’ve published, designed by Beth Donahue around a painting by Keith Rocco. The boxes are so good that at one point I seriously considered commissioning a new, attractive map just to salvage them. Instead, this week my 10-year-old sons will start joyfully hopping up and down on them.

But a new map and those pretty boxes can’t overcome the biggest problem of them all: Austerlitz is a Napoleonic battle, and Napoleonic Battles, the series, just doesn’t stand up in the marketplace to others like Panzer Grenadier or Second World War at Sea. The destruction of Austerlitz brings an end to the Napoleonic Battles series. If we ever return to it, it’ll be in Playbook format with smaller playing pieces (like those in our naval games) and the resulting smaller maps. Right now there are no prospective titles on the horizon.

In the past, we’ve disposed of a few dying titles by threatening to set them on fire if they did not sell out by a certain date. Viking Funeral marketing worked very well – many gamers took to the internet in pants-wetting fury, helpfully spreading the word and selling more copies. We never had to actually burn any games as all of them sold before the deadline.

I really doubt all the copies of Austerlitz will sell, and this time we won’t burn anything: our sometime shipping whiz, Beth Phillips, loves the Earth and all its creatures and will take the flattened boxes and the counters off for cardboard recycling. The maps will become packing material. And that will be the end of Austerlitz.

Diversity is a good thing, but it has to be diversity that consumers want. There will be new series launched in coming years, as we expand our naval games into new eras and the Panzer Grenadier franchise into modern times. But Napoleon is off to exile, so pick up this fine game while you still can.

Save a copy of Austerlitz from Lizzie Borden's recycling axe! Order Austerlitz right now!