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Frontier Battles: A Preview
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
February 2011
My friend Shad asked me a question a few weeks back about some of the changes we’ve made to games while they were in production: increasing their size, or splitting them into smaller packages.
“At what point,” he asked, “does this become self-destructive management?”
Now that we’re wrapping up one of the most-changed of these, I think I can safely answer that: from the start. These things are hard enough to manage through production, and introducing changes only prolongs the agony of all concerned.
When I conceived of doing a set of games on battles of the 1866 Austro-Prussian War, I think I actually believed it would be a reasonably simple project. After all, we’d done two games based on American Civil War battles, and one of these featured two battles that sort of linked together (Chickamauga and Chattanooga). It would be a mere matter of scenario writing to translate that game system. So easy that we could put all the 1866 battles in one box; I’ve been known to write 10 Panzer Grenadier scenarios in a day, so this game would take, what, a long weekend?
I actually used to know a designer who’d brag in private about the “one weekend wargame” (in public, of course, he’d cry about all the hundreds of hours of hard work he poured into his creations). They’re never that easy. But I did think the game that became Battles of 1866 would be relatively straightforward. There would be a lot of work, but nothing I couldn’t handle.
The original Battles of 1866 was a huge game, as it was supposed to be. It would make full use of our Asian printers’ capabilities to do relatively small numbers of large components at good prices. We’d stuff a double-sized box with maps and scenarios and pieces. As originally offered, Battles of 1866 (at first called, stunningly, The Bohemian Campaign) would include four major battles fought out on six full-sized maps with scads of counters. Some time later I decided to expand the package with one more battle and map plus another scad or so of pieces.
That vision fell apart when major changes came to Avalanche Press: We moved the warehouse from Virginia to Alabama to save the company from massive cost, and moved printing from Asia to the United States to save the company from delays, misprints and interesting business practices.
At American prices, in our reduced circumstances we simply could not afford to print such a monster of a game, which would now cost many times its original budget. And I realized something else one day in the warehouse: Even if we could print it, we did not have the space to receive components for a game that size.
Something had to give. So we decided to split the game into three parts. And it’s the first of these, Frontier Battles, moving into actual final production after all these years. And even after the split, it’s a very big package. It’ll be one of the largest games in our catalog, with only Cassino ’44 and Cone of Fire topping it for sheer size. Here’s what you get:
The Box.
This is the first new game to receive our new-model boxes. They’re the same standard size we’ve used for years, 2 inches deep with a “face size” of a little under 9 x 13 inches. The finish of the box itself is black satin. Over that goes a sleeve, on the same heavy stock we use for book covers, with all the usual information and graphics. They look great and relieve us of massive storage and up-front costs. For example, this first shipment will be used for Frontier Battles, Kursk: South Flank and several re-prints. In the past, we’d have paid about the same for the Frontier Battles boxes alone, and then had to store them for many years afterward.
The Maps.
There are three of them, of increasing size. Trautenau is 22 x 17 inches, Gitschin is 34 x 22 inches and Skalitz is 51 x 22 inches. They’re by two different artists; you can see a preview of one of them here. Until yesterday, the plan was to print those as three 34-by-22-inch paper maps, with the rightmost third of the Skalitz map and the Trautenau map printed together and bust cut apart at the printing plant. Skalitz would then be played as two maps placed together to make the full-sized playing area.
Instead, those are going to be made up of twelve 17-by-11-inch heavy cardstock mapboards, just like the Third Reich Deluxe Map. I hadn’t really considered this until a big restock order came in from an online retailer along with feedback that they are enormously popular with his customers. They have been with our direct buyers, too, so it’s a good opportunity to use them again.
That has some huge benefits. First off, it gives the game a patina of deluxe-ness, and after gamers have waited so long for it, they deserve a little extra. Next, we can print them much faster, days instead of weeks. And finally, while they will be significantly more expensive than paper maps, we don’t have to spend as much up front for them (we only have to make what we need) and don’t have to store them for use in 2017. It’s yet another change, to a project plagued by them. But it lets Frontier Battles slip into the release lineup right now.
The Pieces.
  
There are four counter sheets, one of them half-sized. We printed this last spring alongside those for August 1914, so they’ve been in the barn for some months now. As with their near-sisters of the Rome at War series, the pieces are oversized (1.34 inches long by two-thirds of an inch wide). They’re the slightly glossier type rather than the more matte-finished counters from Spice Islands.
The Battles.
Five battles take place on the three maps; the Trautenau map is used for both Trautenau and Soor, while the Skalitz map also is used for the Battle of Nachod. All of them have the painstaking attention to detail players of these series expect; the Austrians and Prussians were gracious enough to return to the same battlefield and fight again a few days later (although, obviously keeping the needs of future gamers in mind, the armies were oriented in different directions). Each has a small “battle booklet” with all the usual special rules, set up and victory information plus some background on the battle.
The Rules.
This took a little extra work as the developer left the company before they were finished. The final product will be instantly recognizable to anyone who’s played our other “rectangle” games, and if you’ve played Gettysburg or Chickamauga, you can dive in right away. There are some special rules for frontal assaults: the defender gets to shoot first, but if he doesn’t drive off the attackers a higher-morale assaulting unit will do very bad things to a lower-morale defender.
For those familiar with the various series, the new series rules give “War of the Empires” the same treatment as the latest editions of Rome at War and Napoleonic Battles. The most noticeable of these is the absence of a “command radius” rating for leaders; everyone gets the same radius now. There’s a series rulebook, just like other series games of ours, but for now there are no plans to use it anywhere but in the three 1866 games.
  
The History.
The game’s topic is an unusual one; I know there was a pretty strange boardgame/miniatures hybrid game that covered these battles many years ago but otherwise I’m pretty sure no one has ever published a game about them. This is not the sort of history that evokes instant recognition among even the most informed gamers (and some of them are very well informed). Each of the battle booklets has a description of the action, a good bit more than we usually include, but I still had the idea that we should go into greater depth than that.
Doug McNair’s idea was to publish a guidebook similar to Enlightened Warlords, with game history and strategy. This would be something we could throw into shipments of pre-order buyers to give them a little something extra, and would help sell the game at the retail level — because it’s going to be a hard sell at the retail level.
With three or four weeks between placing orders for the paper maps and receiving them, that wouldn’t have been a problem. But there’s no way such a book could be made ready during the much shorter window of the cardstock printing. Plus, I’m a terrifically poor writer of game strategy: I don’t play games very often, I usually win a lot more often than I lose, and I have no idea how. I move the pieces where it just feels like they need to go. So if we’re going to include strategy, and I think we definitely need to do so, then we’re going to need the help of people who’ve had a chance to play the games more than once or twice on a playtest map.
After hanging on to this Holy Grail game for so many years, I guess I should feel some sort of pride or elation at its pending release. Instead it’s more a feeling of long-delayed relief, as though a burden will soon lift. It’s a really fine package, especially with the deluxe-style maps. Shipping day can’t come fast enough.
Click here to order Frontier Battles TODAY!
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