Designer Mobilization
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
President, Avalanche Press
February 2011

About a decade ago, Avalanche Press branched out of wargames and began a two-year plunge into role-playing games. Our role-playing books made us legends in the game industry, “an unholy blend,” as one reviewer put it, “of hard-core history and soft-core porn.”

Looking back, it was a wonderful adventure. Mostly because, as is the way of things, the painful parts become funny once you’ve had enough time and self-lubrication to mellow them.

In professional terms, though, it brought an enormous revelation: a game can tell a story. That’s informed most of my game design work since (though I rarely actually “design a game,” as the old men of wargaming would define it — I’m really a writer of scenarios). I don’t know that I’ve really hit the mark the way I would like. I’ve written scenarios that gamers really like, and total packages (a boxed game or a supplement) that are very popular. But I’m still after the set of scenarios that unfolds one after the other to tell the story of a battle or campaign. We’ve actually managed it in a game I did not design, Brian Knipple’s Beyond Normandy. I’m still looking for that sort of accomplishment. 

As many of you have read, we’re both reviving our line of small scenario supplements and sending out a call for more game design recruits. Panzer Grenadier took an evolutionary leap forward thanks to Dave Murray’s Cassino ’44 design work, and I’d like to see more of that. I’d had vague notions that Panzer Grenadier could be used as a campaign system, but didn’t know how to bring that about. Dave did it.

So this week, we’re doing two things in that regard. First, we’re putting out a call for more outside involvement in the game design/development process. Our bread-and-butter game series are a decade old or more, but as Dave showed with Cassino, they still have room for breathtaking creative development. We want those new ideas.

Second, we’re reviving our line of small scenario supplements, sold in both download and hard-copy form (download-only if they include new counters). Cassino was the labor of many years; even the more rationally sized books and boxed games are a lot of work. The 10-scenario format gives the scope for a tight focus on one particular formation, battle or campaign. And it’s also the sort of project that a part-time game designer can complete in a reasonable span of time and get to see his work in print.

For example, I’ve been looking at the oldest Panzer Grenadier supplement, called Armata Romana. This was intended to add the Romanian Army to the first edition of Eastern Front, with a sheet of counters and some scenarios (I don’t think we ever settled on a number). Some of those scenarios were scavenged for the deluxe edition of Eastern Front, but that game couldn’t include Romanian Guard or Frontier troops and did not have enough infantry and support weapons for the bigger scenarios. I did put in enough cavalry pieces to make sure we could use all those scenarios, because I like cavalry actions.

So I’m thinking now of a pair of 10-scenario supplements, each with a small download of counters, split either by formation between the Guard and Frontier actions or geographically between the fighting in Bessarabia and that in front of Odessa. The latter would allow Dave Murray’s campaign system to be adapted here.

There’s also a tighter focus on the other items required: these supplements would draw only on Eastern Front for pieces and boards, and maybe at most Road to Berlin for more boards to flesh out a huge campaign battlefield. So both theme and component requirements need to be focused.

There’s also another change: we’re going to tackle less esoteric topics in the supplement line. In the past, if we came up with something we might like to include in a boxed game or book someday, it got set aside. No longer. We’ll still set aside the obvious hot topics (no Panzer Grenadier: Alamein downloads) but previously off-limits topics like Land War in Asia or Romanians against the Reich are now open.

Panzer Grenadier is a marvelous game system, and a great tool for historical study (well, as much as you can say that about a game). The scope of potential topics is pretty much unlimited, so there’s no need to hoard the good ones like some dragon’s treasure.

The two naval series don’t have nearly the scope, though, and we do have a number of books in the pipeline as yet unannounced. What I really crave is a campaign system. I know both Great War at Sea and Second World War at Sea will support it; the first SWWAS game was supposed to have one but it wasn’t very good and couldn’t work with the counter mix. Some dude still regularly damns us on the internet for dropping it.

Infantry Attacks doesn’t have the huge array of boxed games that Panzer Grenadier enjoys, so there’s less material on which to draw. But we have a very nice supplement coming up on the Estonian War of Independence, with a download but otherwise only drawing on August 1914. As Infantry Attacks uses the same ground scale as Panzer Grenadier, all of those maps are available for design use.

Much as I like these ideas, I don’t plan on doing many of them myself: we need to pipeline filled with boxed games. It’s time for some others to step in. You think playing these things is fun? Designing them is a whole new level. Drop me a line and sign up: mike@avalanchepress.com.