The Making of Cassino
Mike Bennighof
May 2009

In our new home, we get visitors. Some are gamers wanting to see the "candy store," as most call it. Some are local business people and workers, dropping by to say hello. Some just wander past on their way to the Whistle Stop Cafe for their fried green tomato fix. Most of them ask the same question.

"How do you think up all this stuff?"

I never know quite how to answer that, and usually tell them that I'm sure there's a name for the condition. I design most of the games and write most of the books, and only partially to sate my enormous ego — usually I design the games demanded by our marketing princess.

We do get outside submissions, though not nearly enough of them, and they tend to cover whatever struck the designer's fancy or, as Rob Markham puts it, "whatever Rob's reading now." And sometimes they just show up on the doorstep, perfectly fulfilling a need.

So it was in July 2007, when Dave Murray submitted a detailed design summary for a Panzer Grenadier game on the Allied assault on the Abbey of Monte Cassino. It was exactly what a publisher demands in the submission guidelines and almost never sees: a five-page .pdf, describing the historical situation, game parts, maps, scenarios and everything else. And best of all, the designer was also submitting some very well-done game maps, a weak area at 119694_avalanche Press.

It seemed definitely worth a shot. I had some reservations: Our games taking place on "historical" maps of the actual terrain, while very popular with the hard core of Panzer Grenadier gamers, do not sell at a rate anything close to the same numbers as those with generic mapboards. There are two others in the catalog, Beyond Normandy and Guadalcanal, and we'd always intended to add more — Panzer Grenadier was meant to embrace many types of product. We had one on the back burner, on the Ortona battles of 1943, but I didn't expect to see it for some years yet.

Doug McNair would have to develop the game and he was wildly enthusiastic, but I've learned through hard experience to trust the judgment of Lys Fulda when it comes to product choices. Broken psyches of game designers lie in her wake, but hard choices have to be made in a hard business. And she's not always right; while at Diamond Comic Distributors she did advise that "Airlines 2" — still our worst publishing disaster by far — was a good idea. But she's the one who has to sell these things, and so she has to be supplied with suitable tools for her very difficult trade.

She was much less excited about the Cassino project, pointing out that the "generic" games sell better because they fulfill more of the consumer's perceived needs: They can be about any battle within a given broader topic rather than being limited to just one.

"If you want to do this game," she said, "it has to have a price point under 50 dollars. And even then, don't expect any better numbers than Beyond Normandy. Don't pile the hopes of the company on this thing and expect it to play savior."

Looking over the components list, it appeared that Cassino would have one map and three sheets of counters plus a generic marker sheet. We probably had at that time 20,000 to 30,000 marker sheets in the warehouse — at least according to the inventory reports — and so it was actually slightly smaller than Arctic Convoy or Bismarck though it would not sell as well as a Second World War at Sea title (not much in this corner of the game industry does). I decided we were safe at the $49.99 price and approved the project for production.

At that point, I turned over most communication with Dave Murray to the art and development departments. In Dave's defense, he did write a memo in his inimitable fashion (a .pdf with artwork) that states the game's playing surface is "approximately the size of two PG desert maps." I must have overlooked that at the time; it came in on my birthday which was a round number that year so maybe I was drunk. In any event, I had the firm impression that the game had one map and it was only reinforced by our staff artist's references to "the Cassino map" or "Dave's map."

That map would be the cause of several changes at 119694_avalanche Press. Lys still didn't think much of the project, but was deeply impressed by the maps, and at a staff dinner she demanded that all of our map artwork meet or exceed that standard. It was pointed and uncomfortable, but that's exactly what a good XO does. We've worked together a long time; at any moment I could have quietly touched her and she would have backtracked and let it slide. I kept my hands to myself, and the next day tapped Guy Riessen to take over the Panzer Grenadier map line.

We actually prepped the game for production in early 2008, before a number of problems cropped up in the schedule as detailed elsewhere. And at that time I still expected it to have one map, but not until Susan Robinson took over its preparation in the summer of that year did I realize how large it really was. It would not fit on one 22x34-inch sheet, or even on two. It might have just barely fit on two of the oversized sheets we used for Alamein with no overlap between the maps and with hexes sized to be just-barely-usable. It was a map Brian Knipple — the prince of push-the-budget game designers — could only love.

And just like many of Brian's maps, it would have to be expanded. I told Susan to re-size it to four 22x34-inch sections, with a healthy overlap between them, a task she passed on to Dave. Gamers don't like to push their game maps up edge-to-edge, but rather lay them one over the other — and for any who do want them placed edge-to-edge, they can always cut them down to size themselves. And the small hexes (another Knipplism) would prove a hindrance when many counters were stacked on them in adjacent hexes; I asked Susan to expand the map size to fill four 22x34 sections and this yielded bigger hexes and a much more comfortable play experience.

It also yielded a much larger production price, but that wasn't the only problem.

The sample scenario hadn't given away the problem, but when I began to put together the counter manifest (the list from which Susan works to create the sheets of counters that go in the games) some things seemed odd. Over time I've come to write all the manifests for our games, to serve as translator between "gamer" and "graphics" languages — for example, the artist doesn't know and doesn't care about movement factors, she needs to know that the number in the upper right corner is wrong. And the ratios in Dave's lists were very different from other Panzer Grenadier games. I went to the full scenario submission, and discovered why.

Leader assignment in Panzer Grenadier scenario writing is both art and science. A formation gets a number of leaders in proportion to the number of maneuver units present in the scenario, based on its overall quality, combat experience, status at the time of the battle, and numerous other "soft factors." Roughly this translates to very good armies getting one leader for every two other pieces, not-so-good armies getting one for every three, and most somewhere in between. All of the armies that fought for Monte Cassino were in the "very good" category, and a couple of them were even better than that. And all of them came from highly educated societies, another factor in leader assignment. But there were not nearly enough leaders in the counter mix to support the size I suspected a force fighting on four full-sized maps (among the largest areas we've covered in Panzer Grenadier) would reach.

Sure enough, most of the scenarios granted all sides far too few leaders, and little to no leeway in choosing them — I like to increase randomness in Panzer Grenadier games by making sure some leaders will be left in the box unused even in the largest scenarios. I worked up ratios for all of the divisions involved at Cassino and told Doug to apply them to the scenarios (which suddenly made them work much better on his game table) and increased the counter mix accordingly.

The counter mix as submitted, for some reason, was also very short of machine gun units (HMG and WPN). I made sure Dave was actually mistaken in this, and after his confirmation added them and passed that instruction on to Doug. Dave had also committed the Knipple-like sin of expanding the counter mix by placing a one-sided combat unit on the back of another, something banned in Panzer Grenadier games (only lowly transports are treated so shabbily). All of that moved the counter mix from three to five sheets.

Meanwhile, as development continued, Doug reported that some of the scenarios were very large and very intense, particularly the campaign games. One marker sheet would not do; the game needed a second one. I told him that was fine, since we had plenty in the warehouse — not knowing that thousands of the "complete" Panzer Grenadier games listed on the inventory actually were not and would need that piece added to them. Four counter sheets had become seven.

Seven counter sheets and four maps could not be supported on a $49.99 price point. The price would have to rise: first to $74.99, and then to $99.99 since I didn't assimilate both of those changes at the same time (I'm not sure now which came first, probably the maps as that's the steeper cost shift). I had not only broken Lys Fulda's magic barrier, I doubled it.

The other option of course was to leave the game at a lower price point and hope that "The Market" would magically fix things by providing more sales at that price. Yeah, and I don't believe in the Easter Bunny, either. And there's a very measurable effect when one product has a lower price than one that's physically comparable. Cassino with four maps and seven counter sheets would be compared to Cone of Fire with three double-sized maps and three counter sheets at $99.99 or Road to Berlin with eight boards and five counter sheets at $74.99. The response would not be "Hurray! Cassino is a great deal!" but rather "Expletive you! Cone of Fire is a ripoff!" A manufacturer has to enforce more or less consistent pricing across the board.

Getting Cassino to press proved an adventure in itself. We pulled it from our Chinese printer following some shenanigans over the Arctic Convoy contract, and decided to move production to the United States even though that would be much more expensive. After the first American vendor went out of business in the middle of the project, without bothering to notify us, we settled on another set of bidders.

	Carefully packed game boxes from a Chinese printer. Flimsy boxes from our American printer, wrapped ever so lovingly.

And along with pricing, there definitely is a cultural difference. Every one of our Asian vendors carefully packed the game boxes in cartons, 20 or 40 per carton (depending on the size of the game box) with tissue paper inserted between each box to minimize scuffing. Though instructed that the goods had to be "carton packed," our American producer flung the boxes and lids onto unpadded wooden pallets and wrapped them tightly with plastic wrap, assuring that large numbers of them would be crushed or stabbed with rusty nails. They also used substantially lighter chipboard than the same "40 point" board used in the Far East, and I am not at all pleased with the result. Cassino is a heavy game, and when Susan dropped one last weekend during assembly the corner crumpled.

Seeing how this upset her, I told her it wasn't her fault. "Watch," I said, picking up a copy of Road to Berlin (with a box made in Shenzhen Autonomous Region). I flung it backhanded against the wall, hard. It made a loud hollow smack, and fell to the floor. Unmarked.

"American game boxes," our last, Bush-bashing Chinese printer once told me, "are uniformly of rubbish quality. I cannot believe you put up with such shit. No Chinese game maker would tolerate it."

Somewhere, there is an American box maker who still takes pride in their work. We'll keep trying them out until we find one.

Thousands of these game pieces ended up in the trash due to misalignment by our American printer.

The game pieces as placed in the boxes actually look pretty good, and are of good thickness and well die-cut. It's the ones you won't see that are the problem: probably one-third of them are failing quality checks due to front-back misalignment, where the Chinese failure rate was nearly zero (as long as no saboteur was loading them into the die-cutter twice). They were also delivered not carton-packed, as specified, but in huge sheets of eight which we're expected to separate ourselves — something for which I really don't have extra workers.

The maps are as beautiful as they promised to be when Dave first handed in his proposal; actually they're much better than that. They also printed well, and came folded and carton packed.

And then there's the game play. This one is very well-designed, and shines in its campaign games — a new feature for Panzer Grenadier though one we'll borrow for other games and supplements. As Dave Murray's first published game design, it's an impressive start, and it shows that he's also somehow cloned Brian's attention to detail and innovation, too. I suspect we'll be doing more of these.