Notes from the Revolution
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
August 2011

During the development of Soldier Emperor, I knew I was going to like the game. Well, at first I sort of hated it since I had to re-draw the map and was supposed to be working on something else (Road to Berlin, I think, but I’m not sure). But I liked it enough to consider expanding the scenario count to include the French Revolutionary Wars.

After some study, that project fell to the side, like a lot of things I consider and then never get around to actually doing. For one thing, it certainly looked like the Revolutionary Wars would need a different map, or at least a lot of modifications to the Soldier Emperor map. The counters wouldn’t be too terribly difficult to squeeze into the mix, but the deck of cards would need a few additions.

I decided not to muddy the very clean Soldier Emperor package. If the game took off we could always do an add-on in the future at some point. I put my notes aside and didn’t think about the project for some years.

Soldier Emperor spawned only one of its planned three connecting games, Soldier Raj.  Soldier Raj was a beautiful game, possibly the best-looking we’ve ever produced, but it was about India. There are over 1 billion people living in India who care about India very much; the planet’s other 5-billion-odd, well, not so much. And it had a fairly stupid title – we should never have tied ourselves to the “Soldier” label. Weak sales for Soldier Raj put an end to Soldier Liberator and Soldier President (another really poor title), and meant we wouldn’t be doing any add-ons, either. The idea of four connecting games spanning the entire globe really appealed to my megalomania, and part of me's still disappointed at their cancellation.

Time passed on, and through hard necessity we had to learn how to make new types of product, and how to make the stuff we already did in a more efficient manner. New ways of making game boxes allowed us to bring out a new edition of Soldier Emperor. And it even gives us options for the return of Soldier Raj, either as a boxed game or in our Playbook format (I waver back and forth on this; either way, it will get a new name).

And we also have new ways of presenting game expansions. When we launched our line of downloadable game supplements in late 2008, I put Soldier Emperor: Revolution on the list as one of the very first releases and got everything together for the download. While I’d been frustrated by Soldier Emperor, I liked working on Revolution: it came together logically, presented challenges I could overcome, and seemed to play out the way I intended (as much as the chaotic nature of Soldier Emperor can fulfill any such intentions). It looked to be a real winner, the sort of thing I wanted in our new download line. And then things started to go contrary to how we had planned.

When things go wrong, you tend to make your own bad luck. Tempting as it is to blame the Fates, or some deity, or just plain bad luck, it’s more than that. When you have major problems with which to contend, you get a little sloppy with other things because you just don’t have the energy or concentration to make them work right. And so it went with new boxed games in early 2009.

We had prepared a new set of rules and a completely new scenario book for Soldier Emperor, to be known as the Player’s Edition. I placed an order for a number of new boxes: for a new game, Panzer Grenadier: Cassino, and two reprints/new editions, Second World War at Sea: Bismarck and Soldier Emperor: Player’s Edition. We were in the midst of many other crises, and when problems arose with the files for the two reprinted boxes I didn’t feel we could wait to fix them or create new ones (I had no idea whether they could be fixed - eventually Soldier Emperor could be repaired, but not Bismarck). I substituted Great War at Sea: Jutland.

That left Soldier Emperor: Revolution adrift as well, since it didn’t seem to make much sense to release the add-on until the core game was back in print. I was disappointed, as I’d come to really like this project – as a download, the differing counter sizes no longer mattered. I know that some ego-mad game designers despise the download format as beneath them. It’s actually very liberating, and a lot of fun to work on a game when the physical limits have been tossed out the window. Only some of the limits have been tossed; make a downloadable game with 5,000 pieces and no one’s going to want to cut them out and glue them together. But you can have pieces of any shape and size.

This summer, we unleashed our new sleeved-box technology, and Soldier Emperor could finally make its return with those new rules and scenarios. But we needed some kind of hook to help with the launch. After some discussion, I recalled the Revolution download – this was an item we could offer as a sales inducement since it was just about done anyway. And offering it as a free extra would help generate more sales than just selling it as a download.

It’s a nice little product. As much as possible, it uses pieces from the regular Soldier Emperor game – I didn’t want to weigh it down with too much cutting-and-pasting before players can get to playing. It has two sizes of playing piece, the feature that meant it was never going to see print in die-cut-and-mounted format. There are new leaders, representing the men who led the armies of Revolutionary France and her enemies. And there are some armies and fleets for small powers that had gone extinct by 1803, like Venice, Piedmont or Georgia.

The scenarios follow the format of the Player’s Edition: one for every year of the period, plus a campaign game. The game plays somewhat differently than the standard game, with the French player not allowed to contract alliances in many scenarios and attempting to foment revolution all over Europe.

Since we’ll need to wrap up production soon, I’m going to have to make a decision on the map format: overlays, or a completely new map? There are some important changes, but also large swaths (like Spain, North Africa and the Ottoman Empire) that are unchanged. We may end up providing both, so the players can decide just how much ink they want to invest in the new game.

And pretty much, it is a new game – one that just happens to share a rulebook and many parts with Soldier Emperor. It has as many scenarios as its sister game. And like its sister game, it is great fun to play.

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