Exclusively From Avalanche Press
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
President, Avalanche Press
June 2010

I've been reading lately about anosognosia, defined as "the apparent unawareness of or failure to recognize one's own functional defect." The New York Times has been running a series. Put briefly, the incompetent do not recognize their own incompetence, because they are by their nature incompetent to do so.

Making good decisions in a wargame is pretty easy, at least it always has been for me. I usually can figure what I want to do and can tell whether my opponent(s) have seen the same thing I've seen. I'm not a player in the league of Brian Knipple, the best wargamer I've ever seen personally, but I can play well when I want to.

Making good decisions in business is a whole lot harder. The facts aren't clear most of the time: All the units have hidden factors, you don't get to see the Combat Results Table and you don't even get to see how the die-roll came out.

One thing that is kind of clear is that a constant stream of new product is very good for Avalanche Press. New stuff moves old stuff and keeps the customers interested. And so we're going to continue to produce small comb-bound supplements for our major series, including new counters. To keep them from overrunning distributor catalogs (and harming the vital sales of our new boxed games), they won't be sold through other outlets, but only through Avalanche Press. That also boosts our revenue from them, in turn helping us improve the flow of boxed games.

These direct-only supplements will become the home of the "Phantom Armies" mini-series: pieces and scenarios covering nations that could have fought in the Second World War, but for some reason did not. So far we've issued three of these in downloadable form: Hopeless But Not Serious, covering the Austrian army, Iron Wolves, covering Lithuania, and Waltzing Matilda, with the Australian Militia. We're just now issuing the first two in printed form, with real die-cut-and-mounted counters. Waltzing Matilda isn't likely to get a printed version. There certainly are several more I'd like to do: the Swedes, the Swiss, the Turks. The Czechs rate a book treatment.

There are also the alternative-history items like Grossdeutschland 1946, DAK '44 and Polish Steel. These tie in with our Secret Weapons book and the now out-of-print Iron Curtain. We'll probably give Iron Curtain the book treatment down the road. These aren't my favorites, but Lys our marketing goddess says gamers like alternative history, and sales figures so far bear her out. I don't see Grossdeutschland appearing with "real" counters, but there is one aspect of these I really like: Doug McNair designed the scenarios for both DAK '44 and Polish Steel, which meant I that didn't have to work on them until they reached the editing stage. I would like to see U.S. Marines with Pershing tanks and Piasecki helicopters, and have a hankering to do a "weird vehicles" supplement of various tank designs that never saw full production.

Finally, there are the historical subjects that are just very obscure. We did one of these in downloadable form, War on the Equator. I would really like to do more of these, because events that are little-known to most people fascinate me, and I'm much more interested in these than in the alternative history supplements or even the Phantom Armies. Currently, I'm eager to work on the Indian invasion of the princely state of Hyderabad in September 1948. It features horsed cavalry on both sides, tank battles (sort of — Hyderabad only fielded armored cars in its "tank" regiments) and Gurkhas. Others on my list include the Thai-French conflict of 1940 along the Cambodian border (not sure we have the proper terrain for this on our maps) and the Indo-Pakistani fighting in Kashmir in 1947. In all cases, there's not enough scenario-worthy combat to fill a book with 25 or so scenarios. I'm not really sure what we should do with these.

While there are a lot of potential topics for the two naval series, Second World War at Sea in particular, I don't expect to see many of them in this line of products. For our purposes, there are an infinite number of potential Panzer Grenadier and Infantry Attacks games/supplements. That's not true for Great War at Sea and Second World War at Sea, and both series are also much more popular than Panzer Grenadier. So we don't want to limit ourselves to the "zippy" format when we can make and sell many more books or boxed games instead.

Is there something you'd like to see in this line? We did DAK '44 because Brian McCue wrote in and suggested it. Let us know: customerservice@avalanchepress.com.

We have three new series, either just out or in the works. Infantry Attacks hasn't touched the higher-profile topics (if you can use such a term for any Great War subject) and I don't have any "zippy" treatments in mind and the suggestions from other designers really need to be in boxed formats. Ironclads and the modern sister to Panzer Grenadier also are too new to contemplate lightweight supplements yet. Rome at War, on the other end of the scale, is just not popular enough to support this type of product. It might become so after some more releases and some marketing, but it's not there now.

Unless these products crash badly, we'll keep doing them. Prices for making boxed games have risen markedly since we announced some of our long-standing projects (our box maker went out of business again, this time for good, and took the make-good for their previous four-month delay with them), and we're going to take a hit on a couple of them. These little projects help make up for that.

And I just like to do them. They feed my need for instant gratification, and enable my very bad habit of starting many new projects. They're also a great place for new designers to try their hand. And how many wargames have covered the Peru-Ecuador war of 1941, or the Hyderabad War of 1948? It's a fun line with which to work, an Anosognosiac's Delight.