The End of Soldier Raj
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
President, 119694_avalanche Press
October 2009

At age 2, my daughter informed me of her future career choice: she would become an orca tamer. When she became a big girl, it would be her life's work to leap aboard killer whales and then ride them until they became calm and docile, much like breaking a horse except a lot wetter. My wife hesitated to take her to Sea World, lest our toddler spot the tank of killer whales, scream "or-caaaaa!", fling herself in and commence the taming.

The market for domesticated orcas is probably about the same size as that for board
wargames, so there must be some kind of genetic component to this quixotic compulsion. I was about a dozen years older than that when I decided I wanted to run a company that made wargames — not just design them, or somehow work on them, but to be in charge of a massive game-making empire. That delusion probably had a lot to do with my actual career path through journalism and professional history, picking up all the skills I thought would be necessary (never imagining that my days would actually be more like yesterday: haggling with suppliers, figuring payroll deductions, unsuccessfully deciphering health insurance rules and the day's great triumph, beating the loading dock's automatic door opener with a hammer until it submitted to my will).

What appeared to be the heart of the job was the careful procedure of choosing the games to be published. I'm not sure exactly what I thought this entailed, but somehow I imagined a set of complete games in their pretty packages to be oooh'ed and aaah'ed over, and maybe played a few times each, before one of them would be selected for production. That seems to be a commonly held delusion; I've worked at one other publisher that actually had a committee to choose games for production, and years ago fended off demands that we set one up here. It wasn't easy to keep a straight face while dispatching that childish fantasy.

Actual choices have to be made on a very nebulous basis, with two key questions: can we make it work, and can we sell it? Both of those have as much art as science behind them. Every now and then we get a complete submission that's actually ready to be played and weighed, but the fate of most products is decided by nothing more than a single-page proposal. Sometimes the designer makes the proposal, and sometimes we ask for it.

Soldier Raj was one of the latter. It grew out of one of the former, the game that became Soldier Kings. Doug McNair added card play to Rob Markham's initial design, resulting in a very good multi-player game. Soldier Kings greatly exceeded our sales projections — quality of game play does not always equal better sales — so of course we pressed Rob for a sequel, that Brian Knipple christened Soldier Emperor.

Soldier Emperor did not do as well, though it eventually sold out. We gave it a deluxe treatment, to enable it to serve as a crossover product and compete against Euro-style games. That was a mistake, as the hard-mounted game board boosted the price into wargame zones while elitists sneered that it was made in the United States while everyone knows real games are printed in Germany. But it was beautiful, with large thick pieces — each sporting a painting by Terry Strickland — and a cover by veteran animator John Pomeroy.

And so we decided on a sequel. Well, pretty much I decided on a sequel and talked marketing princess Lys Fulda into it over her better instincts. Normally she approves all new projects, to make sure we don't make mistakes like this, and normally I listen to her no matter how much I want to disagree. But this time I knew better and wore her down.

Soldier Raj — the game had a couple of other titles before we settled on that one — would expand Soldier Emperor into India. I'd played another popular Napoleonic strategic game when still a teenager, and had long wanted to design a game expanding that concept to India. Rob did the initial design, and I wrote the scenarios for it.

I was enormously proud of the product that resulted. Terry Strickland did a great package design and map, and more of the little individual paintings for the army pieces. It's a beautiful package, with those "decadently thick" game pieces and a map on a heavy paper stock that just feels velvety to the touch (I've tried to get this paper for other games ever since, with no success). It's all by one artist, allowing the integrated design that we rarely get to deliver, and it shows her at the top of the form that would carry her beyond 119694_avalanche Press to enormous critical and commercial success. The scenarios came out very well, representing a great deal of research and covering 80 years of warfare — exactly the kind of difficult historical work I really like doing. And the game plays very well, too.

But it's about India. What the bloody hell was I thinking? And it wasn't even a Holy Grail game!

The game did sell out, but only because Lys — who is, as defined by her IQ, a genius — swung a deal to move 1,500 of them through a vendor outside the usual game industry channels. Otherwise the game just barely broke even. It was not a stinking dinosaur-killing disaster in the class of Airlines2, but we definitely could have put the resources to better use. When in doubt, do another Panzer Grenadier game.

These days, we have the line of Print-n-Play downloadable games to absorb such
idiotic ideas. Soldier Raj would not exist in physical form if it came up today. We normally make more sets of maps and counters than boxes, as they're easier to store, so even though the game is officially sold out there are the makings of several hundred more copies complete with everything but the box.

For a while I had the idea to re-do the game with a new map, figuring that the game's real problem was that the Nizam of Hyderabad has only one territory. I'm not sure why I even entertained that useless thought for even a few seconds — games are products, and they succeed or fail based on many factors, none of which include the arcane details of game play. If I want to give the Nizam a bigger country and blow up the rest of India to match, we have the download line and it's a pretty easy product to put together. But no amount of tweaking the game removes this salient fact:

It's about India.

Partial view of the Soldier Raj game map

So Monday our temp guy, Glenn the hypnotist (that's his real job), came into the office for an afternoon assignment. We're trying to make room for a massive shipment due in a few weeks, so I told him to go into the back room, find the Soldier Raj components and pitch them into the trash. He came back a few minutes later.

"It's just too beautiful for that," he said. "You sure you can't just give them away, and maybe make a few extra sales?"

It had taken some teeth-gritting resolve to tell him to trash those lovely maps and playing cards and counters to begin with, so I relented. Or maybe he hypnotized me. For the next few days, we'll run another promo: With any purchase of the boxless Soldier Emperor Special Edition or Soldier Kings, we'll add a boxless copy of Soldier Raj for free. Actually, if you buy any boxed game and send us a Contact note you can have Soldier Raj added, too.

And then I'll have to put away childish things, and tell Glenn to resume the trashification of Soldier Raj. Because as much as I'd love to be an orca tamer, too, sometimes reality has to intrude.

Click here to order Soldier Emperor and Soldier Kings NOW!