Golden Journal No. 25
Land Battleships:
Publisher’s Preview
by Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
January 2024

Ha ha, you fool! You fell victim to one of the classic blunders! The most famous of which is “never get involved in a land war in Asia,” but only slightly less well-known is this: Never publish a wargame magazine.

Vizzini didn’t actually say that in The Princess Bride, but he might have, because it’s true. Wargame publishing is really hard, but magazines are even harder. Even so, I always wanted Avalanche Press to have its own magazine, but also, to never have its own magazine. I worked at wargame magazines long ago and I remain permanently scarred by the experience.

I intended our Golden Journal to partially fill the role of a magazine, to spread word of our wonderful games and provide cool additional scenarios, pieces, maps and that sort of thing. But it wouldn’t be a magazine; instead, we’d publish it when we damned well felt like it.

We started our little non-magazine at Number 25, keeping the sequence of the two dozen home-made little rags our rattling, battered the office printer pumped out on colored paper. It marked a serious upgrade, with the same style of die-cut, silky-smooth pieces as our games and books, and a small booklet just like the books we make. with Golden Journal No. 25 is a “real” book and a really fine little product.

Our theme is the T-35 Land Battleship – the coolest tank ever made. It looked like something out of a dieselpunk nightmore, but it actually existed (61 production models rolled off the lines, following two prototypes; 48 of these were with the 34th Tank Division in June 1941 when the Germans attacked. Of those, ten immediately broke down and never left the divisional tank park). It’s not a fantasy or alt.history concoction, but it looks enough like one that we’ve used it in some of our alternative games.

I’ve wanted to publish something devoted to the T-35 since before there was an Avalanche Press. So we have the story of the tank’s development, a thorough description of its strange five-turreted features, the story of the 34th Tank Division (the only formation to operate the T-35 in combat), and two huge scenarios befitting the huge tank.

Usually, a Golden Journal is built around one game. For No. 25, the theme game is Panzer Grenadier: Fire in the Steppe, and you’ll be able to play the scenarios with just that one game. Fire in the Steppe has plenty of playable scenarios with a reasonable playing surface and reasonable playing time; I figured it was time to use all eight of those maps in the game and send lots of troops into battle either alongside or against the hordes of T-35’s. There are some Panzer Grenadier players who ask for the larger scenarios (so they can use them for team play, or because they have no life outside Panzer Grenadier play - which is a lifestyle choice that we most definitely endorse).

Of course, there actually were no massive tank battles involving battalions’ worth of land battleships: most of them broke down on the way to battle. So these are battles based on the sort of battle the T-35’s designers and early commanders had in mind, riding them into action against fortified German positions or against masses of enemy tanks. Other than that really vague guidance, I just made them up (which, let’s face it, is the standard for a lot of “historical” wargames; well, that or Wikipedia which is pretty much the same thing).

We have some other cool extras for Fire in the Steppe; an analysis by the developer, and a Random Events Table. Early Panzer Grenadier games had Random Events tables, and I disliked them from the start. But players asked for them, and now they have one for Fire in the Steppe, though I’ve altered it to bring it more in line with actually possible outcomes than those early versions.

As for the pieces, we have eight of them for the modernized T-35B, a proposal that almost came to fruition to upgrade the armor, suspension and engine to make the tank more reliable and a little faster. That project came to naught as the Red Army’s Armor Directorate preferred a new vehicle.

And then we have the proposed T-35C upgrade, a considerable increase in fighting power with new armament, better armor and a considerable upgrade in engine power so it can waddle forward slightly faster than a duck (but still, not much faster). There are also four T-28C medium tanks with the same main armament upgrade (the T-28 and T-35 shared the same main turret), and four of the SMK prototype that was in the running to replace the T-35 as the Red Army’s heavy tank (a simplified version, the KV, was ultimately chosen for production). I have a fondness for the SMK (named for Stalin’s crony Sergei M. Kirov, just as the KV bore the initials of fellow accomplice Kliment Voroshilov); it appeared in the first game variant I ever wrote and published, at the age of 12.

In action, the T-35 could not live up to the fighting power seemingly promised by its size. Though bristling with weaponry (three cannons and seven machine guns ought to count as “bristling”), the technology of the 1930’s couldn’t provide adequate horsepower to move that load at a reasonable speed and still include adequate armor, while the suspensions and drive trains available at the time were likewise inadequate to the task.

And that’s what we’ve got in our Golden Journal No. 25.

You can order Journal No. 25: Land Battleships right here.

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Mike Bennighof is president of Avalanche Press and holds a doctorate in history from Emory University. A Fulbright Scholar and NASA Journalist in Space finalist, he has published a great many books, games and articles on historical subjects; people are saying that some of them are actually good. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama with his wife and three children. He misses his lizard-hunting Iron Dog, Leopold. Leopold was a good dog.

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