The Gold Club Free Library
We’ve given our Gold Club 69 free items ranging from complete games to full-sized expansion books (with pieces!) on down through the old-style Golden Journal. And they’re yours at no extra charge, when you join the Gold Club.

You can do that right here.

Let’s look at them:

1942: Moroccan Division
The new weapons of 1942: The Defense of France are in the hands of the Swallows of Death - the French Army’s elite 1st Moroccan Division: the MAS40 semi-automatic battle rifle, the new AMX38 light tank, the 75mm TAZ 39 anti-tank gun. The Germans get a battalion’s worth (each) of the planned but never produced heavily modified ex-Soviet T34 and KV tanks. And six new scenarios so you can play with them!

Land Cruisers: The Lithuanian Campaign
Imperial Germany's massive Land Cruisers travel to the Eastern Front to face the Imperial Russian invasion of Lithuania. It’s just as weird, and as fun, as it sounds. You get 88 pieces and 10 new scenarios; you’ll need Fire in the Steppe, Lithuania’s Iron Wolves and Land Cruisers.

Caribbean Empires
The Spanish-American War breaks out a decade later, as the United States and Spain deploy more and more modern battleships to contest control of Cuba in 1908. With 80 new pieces and 10 new scenarios. You’ll need Remember the Maine to play all of the scenarios.

Changsha Operation
The Japanese 11th Army’s offensive in Hunan Province in December 1941 and January 1942 was turned backed by stout Chinese resistance. With 88 new pieces and eight new scenarios. You’ll need Pusan Perimeter and Counter Attack to play all of the scenarios.

Peace In Our Time
In the fall of 1938, the German Army planned to invade neighboring Czechoslovakia, an operation abandoned when Czechoslovakia’s democratic allies abandoned her. We study this war that never happened with 10 new scenarios and 176 new playing pieces. You’ll need 1940: The Fall of France, Fire in the Steppe, Elsenborn Ridge and Broken Axis to play all of the scenarios.

River Battleships: Blue Danube
The Second Great War comes to the Danube, in this expansion for River Battleships. You get ten scenarios set in an engaging story, and 84 new playing pieces. You’ll need River Battleships to play the scenarios.

Plan Z: Battle Cruisers
A Second World War at Sea set with American and British battle cruisers converted into aircraft carriers, and the British light battle cruisers Furious, Courageous and Glorious modernized for the new war rather than converted into carriers. We included some of these ships in the new-model Golden Journal No. 28 British Carriers.

Second World War at Sea: Pocket Battleships
Alternative designs for the pocket battleship Deutschland - as a heavy cruiser, coast defense ship and small battle cruiser. Plus the original improved pocket battleship design for Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. You get 20 pieces, some background story and of course a handful of scenarios.

Panzer Grenadier: Fighting Irish
Originally, I wanted to create a whole book about the Irish Army of World War II and the battles it didn’t fight against the British and the Germans. It would be part of a whole series, including Lithuania’s Iron Wolves. That was a stupid idea, and so I scaled down my ambitions to include it in the Golden Journal. It’s a fun little set, with 24 Irish pieces and some scenarios so you can fight the Germans with them.

Second World War at Sea: Gin Palace
HMS Agincourt, the “Gin Palace” (she wasn’t just “a gin court,” she was so grand she had to be “a gin palace”) served under three flags in various Great War at Sea games. This Golden Journal modernized her as a battleship-carrier, repair ship, anti-aircraft ship, helicopter carrier, amphibious assault ship, high-speed oiler and a battle cruiser. And of course, under many different flags.

Panzer Grenadier: Blackshirt Division
A Panzer Grenadier expansion, I thought this a pretty cool concept, sending the Fascist “M” Blackshirt Armored Division to Tunisia to battle the British and Americans there. We did it first as a comb-bound expansion set with laser-cut pieces, just for the Gold Club, and ended up cancelling the proposal to expand it into a regular book. At least the download lets you still stomp on the Blackshirts anyway.

Granada: The Fall of Islamic Spain
This is a complete game - you can print and assemble everything you need to play. The subject is the final war of the Christian Spanish kingdoms against Islamic Granada, 1481 - 1492. It’s a beautiful game, with big one-inch-square pieces and a lovely map, and very easy to play. You’ll need 10-sided dice.

You can read about Granada’s Last War right here.

1942: The Defense of France
I really expected this to be a runaway best-seller when we offered it in expanded book format, but the audience disagreed and we ended up cancelling that project. This is the original format, a set of 10 scenarios and 88 pieces, featuring the drawing-board tanks of France chewing up the panzers. You get Somuas with long-barreled 47mm and 75mm guns, extra-heavy Char B1 breakthrough tanks, and a bunch more.

You can see the French tanks right here.

1940: The Fall of Luxembourg
An expansion for Panzer Grenadier: 1940 The Fall of France, we included the entire Luxembourgisch order of battle for 1940, which easily fit in the set of 24 pieces. Luxembourg wasn’t a big country, but wasn’t exactly tiny either - with a population of 600,000 and well-developed industry, it could have easily fielded a well-equipped mechanized division instead of a battalion of gendarmes in comic-opera uniforms. The actual plan to defense against a German invasion was to build huge steel doors across the roads leading into Luxembourg, lock them, and pretend no one was home. We included pieces for the big steel doors, too.

Second World War at Sea: FDR's Lost Warships
Extra American battleships, carriers, cruisers and destroyers, all based on the premise that Roosevelt ignored the Republican deficit hawks and kept spending money in 1937 instead of trying to balance the budget with the Depression still on and a new war on the horizon. He didn’t do that, and it cost jobs and later lives. When faced with a huge problem, you go big or you go home.

Great War at Sea: Turkish Black Sea Fleet
This was one of the early issues of the Golden Journal, and it presented the Russian Black Sea Fleet in Turkish colors, so they could come out and fight the Allies. This never happened, but the Allies feared that it could, so I thought it made for a very nice little Great War at Sea variant.

Western Desert Force
North Africa, regiment/brigade scale, 1940-42. This is a complete game, with a three-piece map (33x17 inches) and 140 pieces. It’s a good game, but we decided to stop supporting one-off games that weren’t part of a series so it wasn’t reprinted.

Panzer Grenadier: Maple Leaf Brigade
An expansion set with 88 pieces and 10 scenarios; we originally released this as a comb-bound expansion set with laser-cut pieces and had plans to upgrade it to a regular book with silky-smooth, die-cut pieces. But the gamers, they want completely new stuff, so that plan got canceled and now it’s a Gold Cub download.

You can see the playing pieces here.

Click here to join the Gold Club

See your Gold Club Insider newsletter for ordering information.