Ode to Daily Content
by Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
November 2005

Last year, we decided to highlight our Thanksgiving Week sale by adding a piece of content to the Web site every day. That would add a lot of work to my 16-hour days here, but hopefully would help bring more traffic to the site, and spur a few sales.

Liz Fulda, one of the corporate directors and our marketing manager, had wanted more content on the Web site for a couple of years. Her predecessor had asked for “things left over from the games” to be placed on the Web, but that posed a problem: If we didn’t put it in the game, it’s almost always because it wasn’t any good. Liz phrased it differently: What would you have included if cost and sanity were not barriers?

That yielded a lot of ideas. Not too long after we founded 119694_avalanche Press, we began talking about publishing a magazine to support the games. That required a lot of resources, and in the early days we had serious problems maintaining focus. On just about anything. A magazine would have quickly fallen behind, and yielded more customer anger and unpaid bills than increased sales. The option of a Web magazine, however, was one that Liz had pointed out long before.

That became a viable option when we hired Shane Ivey in early 2004. Shane had been one of my students back in my earliest teaching days, but more importantly, brought a raft of professional skills in editing, layout and Web design. We now had the capability to do a Web update every day. Something, Liz quickly emphasized, that other game companies in our weight class could not easily duplicate.

So through December, the experiment continued. When we met those deadlines, we extended it on through all of 2005. Daily content hasn’t always been daily. We’ve missed a few days, 23 times over the past 52 weeks by my count. Most recently we missed three days last week due to staff illnesses.

Most of the pieces are historical background, often with free downloads of extra game pieces. That’s because that’s what I can write. We also updated almost all of the site’s product pages — some of them, especially those dating from the site’s earliest days, were terribly sparse of information and of uninspired design. So far, we’ve done more than five dozen free downloads of new game pieces, something I’ve always enjoyed creating.

Over the course of the year, more contributors joined in the daily effort. William Sariego has been a steady source of great content for his Defiant Russia game plus many others. David Meyler, Greg Guerrero and Kevin Canada have all added great historical pieces. Someday, Andrew Preziosi will join them. But my personal favorite has to be Shane’s April 1st piece, “Gandhi: The Resisting.” That one generated a lot of mail — almost all of it from deeply worried wargamers, a couple of them as angry as the Belligerent Mahatma himself.

Among my own work, well, it’s got to be "Tears of the Penguin". The artwork really makes this one. I enjoyed giving Napoleon a balloon unit, though (as I should have predicted) someone wrote in to argue the probabilities of making a hydrogen-filled balloon explode when hit by a cannon ball. I wrote all of the unsigned content pieces; since the doctoral title seems to throw my favorite rejected game designer into nearly-fatal apoplexy, I really should sign them every time in hopes of removing the “nearly” part.

We’ve been heavy on rebuilt product pages, because we needed them, and on historical background/variants, because of my limitations. What I wanted and could not provide were solid, in-depth strategy pieces like the old Avalon Hill General used to run in the 1970s. I despaired of seeing such things for our games until Liz recruited the man who wrote the best of those old guides, J.R. Jarvinen.

He came through with several detailed, well-written and -argued analyses of Granada. They are easily the best pieces on this site, and show the depth of strategy, and the fun, in this game that we never managed to articulate in any other fashion. Next in his sights is Rome at War: Fading Legions, another excellent game with fine qualities that we’ve never really managed to fully expose.

Not long afterwards, Doug McNair returned to the 119694_avalanche Press staff, this time as a full-time game developer. Strategy pieces soon arrived for America Triumphant and Gazala, and an ongoing series of looks at his favorite game, Soldier Kings.

In upcoming weeks, we’ll increase the ratio of strategy pieces, pretty much in place of the page rebuilding, while continuing to offer historical background/analysis and free downloadable game variants. And there’s some interesting stuff in the line-up: the Dynamite Cruiser Vesuvius, Italian airships, American colliers, the Siege of Tsingtao, early aircraft carriers, German Battleship Design Principles, West African Soldier Kings, the Potato War, Ireland in World War II, Libyan Oil, Polish Submarines, Persia in the Napoleonic Wars, Dutch battlecruisers, Julian the Apostate, Napoleon in Palestine, the Battle of Chattanooga, the French 75, Para-Marines, Imperium card play, Sumatran Kingdoms, Prussia’s needle gun, Indian State Forces, the Croiseur de Combat, the Invasion of Elba, Finnish Marines, and the cannon named Karl.

We’re always looking for new authors for Daily Content, our version of a Web magazine, and in addition to the undying glory we do offer compensation. There are some games desperately crying out for treatment:

Operation Cannibal
I hate this game. There’s nothing that terribly wrong it, but it represents so many of my mistakes as a publisher that I just can’t bear to write about it. From the drab cover to the small size (it was torn asunder from a perfectly good game of one full-sized map and 420 counters; why I thought this was a good idea, I have no clue) to the multiple printings of its counters (never, ever ever ever trust a freelancer to handle proofing!), I despise this game and yearn for the day it enters Valhalla.

Eylau
Many of my warm feelings for Cannibal apply in equal measure to Eylau. I can never love a game after I’ve stood under the Alabama sun and chucked cartons full of counters into a dumpster while sweat pools under my feet. I did manage to write a variant for it, but that only made me hate it more, since we really should have included those units in the game to begin with and I just plain missed that they’d been missed. I know there are people out there who love this game; please put your love in writing!

Gettysburg
I think this game was jinxed for me the moment our art director, Peggy Gordon, compared the original cover to . . . well, that’s not important. The Keith Rocco painting on the actual box is quite nice, and the game plays very well. It should be getting the same Web content attention as other flagship games, but the problem is, I didn’t work on it and just don’t know enough about the campaign to write intelligent background material.