Infantry Attacks: A Preview
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
August 2007

Many years ago now, in the early 1980s, my good friend Richard Craft gave me a copy of a game called Soldiers. It seemed like a very old game from the dawn of wargame publishing, which meant it might have been all of seven or eight years old by then. Time has a way of compressing as it goes by.

	Russian infantry on the attack, Przemysl, 1914.

I played it quite a bit, and found it fascinating. The designer, Dave Isby, had created a World War One variation of Panzerblitz, the grandfather of tactical games like Panzer Grenadier. It shared all the flaws of Panzerblitz, with odds-based combat rewarding you for jamming your troops into huddled masses, but began to show evolution away from the original. Leadership played no role, but unlike Panzerblitz, at least some rudimentary troop quality rules had begun to creep in. And it had just one map, which served as the battleground for scenarios ranging from China to Africa to Belgium to Poland. But best of all, it had Austro-Hungarian units.

I put Soldiers away soon, and never took it out again until just now, yet the ideas stuck with me. I wanted to create a game that actually captured World War I tactical combat. A year or two later Jack Greene asked me to design the game that became Panzer Grenadier. While the design specifications clearly called for a game of World War II tactical combat to replace Panzerblitz in the Avalon Hill stable, from the start I had a Great War version in mind. That's the origin of the cavalry rules in our current game, which started out much more complex, with separate "mounted" and "dismounted" pieces and rules for changing from one state to the other.

The God of War

Selling the First World War in wargame form can be difficult, but we've done well with Great War at Sea and with They Shall Not Pass. Yet we hesitated to bring out a Great War version of Panzer Grenadier for years, despite a very good showing in a "future game topics" poll we did. The fans clamored for more World War II games, and we delivered. But I never gave up on the idea, and when we launched our Classic Wargames program it seemed a natural fit.

Infantry Attacks is very similar to Panzer Grenadier; we felt this to be an important aspect of the game system both for marketing reasons and for ease of play. Experienced Panzer Grenadier players should be able to transition to this game very quickly. They'll need to read the rulebook carefully, but we note the differences and will probably issue a primer of some sort here as part of Daily Content — sort of a Five-Minute Guide.

Units are infantry companies, cavalry squadrons and machine-gun platoons. In Panzer Grenadier, infantry platoons get most of their firepower from their light machine guns, mortars and other support weapons. In Infantry Attacks, rifle companies are just that — 100 to 200 men with rifles. While they can fire at standoff ranges, to make much progress in an attack they need to close in and tackle the defenders in assault combat.

Assault combat does not necessarily mean troops are engaging in hand-to-hand combat with shovels and knives, though it can. Mostly it reflects combat at close range, where grenades (rare in 1914) are tossed and rifle fire becomes much more deadly. Getting to that close range usually means getting past enemy machine guns, which are very powerful though extremely slow — excellent on defense, but not much help in the attack.

Russian machine gunners from a cavalry division, East Prussia, 1914.

Artillery is the god of war, and has its own phase. Players plan barrages at the start of each turn, and can execute drumfire against enemy units, or interdiction fire against hexes to slow units trying to move through them. The Russians have the best artillery, though it's often hampered by ammunition shortages. The Germans have excellent medium and heavy howitzers, but their 77mm light cannon is useful only in direct-fire support. Austrian artillery of 1914 is almost all equipped with "steel-bronze" barrels and is distinctly second-rate, though it receives excellent pieces by 1918.

The system's designed to handle tanks, and these will appear in future games, assuming the first two meet their sales targets. Each piece represents two vehicles at full strength, just one at reduced strength. They're pretty much unstoppable by infantry, with anti-tank guns still rare in this era, but are often mechanically unreliable and are not much faster than infantry.

Infantry and Grenadier

Map scale is also the same as Panzer Grenadier, 200 meters per hex, and they are compatible — you can lay Infantry Attacks maps alongside those from a Panzer Grenadier game to create your own scenarios.

All these references to Panzer Grenadier don't mean you have to play that series to enjoy this one. Infantry Attacks stands alone as its own series, with a complete set of rules and charts.

	Austrian gunners face the Russians at Przemysl, 1914.

The first volume, Empires End, covers the fighting at the outbreak of the war on the Eastern Front. There are three antagonists, Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia, clashing in 50 scenarios. Most of the battles are infantry fights, and take place during the opening months of the war when maneuver was still considered the key to victory. Attacks must be planned carefully, to make use of artillery preparation, and players will soon see that the generals of 1914 were not as stupid as popular historians make them out to be: It's very difficult to stand against a well-planned, well-supported attack. It's even more difficult to execute one.

Cavalry is still an important arm, and all three armies have large numbers of horsemen. Quite a few scenarios pit cavalry against cavalry, and the charge is more important than in World War II. Some units aren't even allowed to fight dismounted.

All of the armies have units of varying abilities; Austrian Kaiserjäger mountain troops are probably the best troops in the game. But some of the same army's Landsturm brigades are of astoundingly poor quality, having been thrown together from "excess personnel" at the start of hostilities and rushed into battle. Austrian cavalry is very good, and the Landwehr (the professional army of the Austrian half of the monarchy) and Honved (the Hungarian equivalent) troops are not bad. The Russian Imperial Guard is present, and most Russian units are still very solid in 1914. The German line regiments are of excellent quality as are their officers; German Landwehr (third-line troops, in contrast to the Austrian Landwehr) units are quite poor.

Working on this game has been professionally quite satisfying. The underlying Panzer Grenadier system did not need excessive modification, and the chance to add Austrian units to a popular game series is never a bad thing. Plus I get to watch gamers try to pronounce "Pryzemsyl."

Click here to order Infantry Attacks: Empires End today!