Golden All Over Again
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
October 2007

Seems we can't avoid drama when it comes to our free counter sheets for Gold Club members. When a shipping company decided to sit on a huge consignment of game parts for 43 days, our entire production schedule was distorted — and since we have to meet payroll and rent and insurance premiums and all sorts of other bills, it's not like such a disaster equates to "everything as before, just 43 days later."

The new Gold sheet, our second for club members, has 77 of the 2/3-inch counters we typically use for the Panzer Grenadier series of games. And so the free set is strongly biased towards that series. A full 60 of the 77 pieces are for Panzer Grenadier games. But while the first set included many "small counter" ships from existing games upgraded to "large counter" status, all of these counters relate to published or upcoming pieces in our ongoing series of Daily Content articles.

The greatest number of different variants, however, belongs to Soldier Kings. You'll get the armies of the Kingdom of Naples, the expanded fleets and extra army for Sweden, the army and fleet for the Republic of Genoa and the less-than-mighty army of the Pope. There are also three pieces for an upcoming Content variant.

For naval fans, there are also the three Martian fighting machines from my personal favorite among the Content variants I've done myself, Great War of the Worlds at Sea. These are a little smaller than the huge pieces we put in the download, but they still look impressive on the tactical map. And our naval fans needed something in this set.

I tried to avoid pieces for out-of-print games in our last set, and continued that trend this time. After all, part of the reason we do this is to entice you to pick up games you don't already have, so the wonderful freeness of these counters won't be wasted.

We just brought Edelweiss back into print with a totally revamped new edition after having been out of stock for about 72 hours. The counter set is the same as in the first edition, and that means it does not have separate leaders for the German Army mountain troops. Now, the scenarios don't need their own mountain leaders, the standard ones work just fine, but this isn't about need, it's about utter coolness. And the mountain leaders really do look good. There are also a couple of tank counters from the Edelweiss set with their proper values.

Another Content piece of which I was particularly proud was the Ottavio Variant, named of course for Ottavio. The fascist state committed a number of unspeakable crimes, many of which modern Italy has yet to confront. Among them, the excess care for corporate profit that led the Italian Army to send brave men to die with badly outmoded equipment for the sole purpose of keeping profits high for the corporations in which those same leaders held large blocks of stock. Sadly, Italy would not be the last great nation where venal criminality ran rampant in this fashion.

Our variant focuses on the licenses for modern tanks that Italy easily could have obtained from the Germans, but never sought (well, probably could have obtained — read the article). The counter sheet has PzKw IVF2 and PzKw IIIJ tanks in Italian colors, ready to do battle with the British but this time with quality on their side. "Our turn to do the wiping out," as the unnamed Artilleryman says in War of the Worlds, "and them running and dying."

And the Italian tanks seen in the desert were actually an improvement. On the opposite end of the scale, we also have the tanks with which Italy almost went to war in 1940, the obsolete Great War era vehicles that were still in service in Italy and Albania when the desert battles began.

Lastly, there are the Wagons of Doom. There are so many things we always want to cram into Panzer Grenadier games, and transport units seem to be the ones we cut to fit them in. As a teenaged player of wargames, I always hated the "pretend X is actually Y" solution and swore we'd never do that with Panzer Grenadier. And while we've held to that with combat units, we've been pretty bad about substituting trucks and wagons of one nationality for another. The Italian Army has had a central role in two boxed games (Desert Rats and Afrika Korps), been the focus of a book supplement (Fronte Russo) and played a minor role in a couple of other supplements. And in none of those have we provided so much as a single Italian wagon.

Next time out, it looks like we need to do standard half-inch counters; we certainly have plenty of Daily Content pieces that use them. We'll aim to do those around the turn of the year. And they're for members only, so sign up now.