Same Game, Different Format
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
President, Avalanche Press
February 2011

A few days ago, we put out a Call to Arms, to mobilize the entire Avalanche Nation and break us out of the pattern of slow releases we’ve suffered for the past several years. The response has been overwhelming, with most of you just asking how you can help. There are more than I can answer quickly, so we’ll be running a few of these essays talking about some needs.

Already there have been some specific offers and suggestions, and you’ll be seeing the results of those in coming weeks and months. There are some specific areas where we could definitely use some very exact assistance; they’re exciting and could easily transform Avalanche Press into what it should always have been.

We have a lot of under-utilized resources and capabilities. Here are two we need some help executing.

Foreign Editions

It’s the holy grail of the American game publisher: the foreign translation deal. With the stroke of a pen, you sell as many copies as a couple of your largest distributors combined. We’ve had a few of these, though none are currently in print. Lys Fulda, our longtime marketer and VP, believed seeking them was a waste of effort since so many discussions would end getting dropped at the discussion stage, usually after a lot of effort had been expended on mock-ups and translations. And often, the foreign partner is fronting for a foreign printer, requiring that you make your game parts there amid talk of how American-made games are “mere rubbish” (direct quote).

But we don’t need to go that route. The game counters have always been designed to be independent of language, for this very reason. There’s not much text on them, and it’s almost always just a name. We print everything else (including the sleeves for our new-model boxes) either ourselves in our own facility, or a mile down the road. We can do very small quantities using that capability, and the actual printing is very fast.

We also have Susan Robinson. I don’t praise Susan’s work here as often as I probably should, but she’d probably just edit it out anyway (she posts the website content). Susan was news editor at the old Birmingham Post-Herald, and considered by many of my old colleagues to be the best at her job in the Scripps Howard organization. She’s preternaturally fast and she’s accurate. With good text, we can have the new edition ready for press in a matter of days.

So we already have all the tools necessary to turn out editions in other languages, and to do so quickly and efficiently. We have the network to sell them. We’re missing the most important ingredient: the translated text. And that’s where you come in. We need translated rules, charts and box text. A lot of that (at least the rules and charts) already exists. We need it; if you have it or know where to find it, please send it. And we also need people skilled enough to proof the rulebooks and other items before we print them.

We need this. It’s something we couldn’t have done in past, as we lacked a true print-on-demand capability. Now there’s no reason not to release a new game with four or five simultaneous editions in English, French, Italian and Spanish. But we can’t do that without your help.

Which languages? The break-even numbers are pretty small. But we’re not really capable of handling text outside the Latin alphabet, so even though we have a good customer base in Japan and have done Japanese editions in the past (our most successful foreign editions), that market needs to wait. I’m most looking for Italian and German, since I’m reasonably fluent in them myself, and French as that’s where we have the best distribution. Spain is also a good-sized market for us.

Which games? Pretty much whatever you feel like, but I’d really like to release Kursk: South Flank and Soldier Emperor: Player’s Edition in simultaneous multiple editions (Frontier Battles is too far advanced to wait for translation). The text for South Flank and Soldier Emperor is done, so with good translation teams there’s no reason we can’t do this. These would be identical to the regular English edition in all respects except language: no stickered boxes, no stapled rules.

Electronic Editions

For many years now, we’ve fielded requests for modules allowing play of our games over the Internet. I’ve read a number of interesting “insider” accounts of why we’ve never allowed this — none of them true, some of them pretty bizarre. The actual reasoning is kind of boring. In the early days, we had an artist who was dead set against it and furiously argued that it was not worth the threat to the intellectual property rights. No one else really cared one way or the other, and the policy flew along afterward on autopilot.

Our goth marketing princess would bring this up on occasion, usually in her “why haven’t we ... ?” format, and by then I had an actual reason: We had built up a large catalog of games and supplements never released in electronic media, and that presented an opportunity not to be thrown away lightly. Come up with a program to do so profitably, I told her, either as a marketing adjunct or a direct generator of cash, and we’d do it. And other than authorizing one German guy to make a module for Panzer Grenadier: Airborne, she got no further.

Frankly, it also didn’t help that for every polite and well-reasoned request for permission, there would be an angry, obscenity-laden demand questioning my intelligence, parentage, sexual practices and species origin (and uniformly winding up with a rant declaring that all our games suck anyway). One guy threatened to set himself on fire. Rather than reply to those, I just hit the “delete” button and didn’t give it much thought.

It’s time we did this, but it has to be done with care. We’re not granting blanket permission. First we need to hear from people with experience: to advise on how best to accomplish such a program and to make sure it generates actual cash flow, and then to execute the modules themselves.

This is going to happen. How soon and on what scale depends on the response. If you want this, it’s time to volunteer.