Ode to the Last Giant
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D., President, 119694_avalanche Press
February 2010

Over the past few weeks, we've started to initiate a huge array of changes at 119694_avalanche Press. They're going to take a while to integrate at the same time we're producing new stuff, but slowly they should have a noticeable effect. Some of these are huge changes — we finally have an in-house bookkeeper, Ilene Bryan — and some are small.

When I decided to publish Alamein — I can't slough this off as a group decision, because it landed on my desk and I made the call — the plan included many large games. Maybe not all in its weight class, but quite a few with the large, double-sized box that Alamein sports. As events played out, we only actually published one of them, Leyte Gulf, which is now a hard sellout. Two of them we eventually split into smaller games. And the others got cancelled.

So that leaves us with just one game in the double-sized box. And that creates all sorts of pain for Beth, bringing her red-headed persona to the forefront. It won't fit in the standard shipping cartons we use for every other product that comes out of the warehouse — Alamein has to have a special one that's twice as long. It also won't fit in the standard shrink-wrap we use — Alamein has to have a special, wider roll.

The ultimate purpose of 119694_avalanche Press, like any business, is to make money. The means to that end include good products and great customer service, and we're working hard on those. But those means also include a number of principles I've been learning from Peggy Gordon. Simple business buzzwords about Lean Office and the Toyota 5S system, guaranteed to make the eyes glaze over but carrying kernels of hard truth.

And here's one of those: Stuff has to be easy to do. That's not how it was expressed in the material Peg pointed me to — it was much longer with a lot more $10 words — but that's what's at the heart of it. That has an impact on everything we do. And it means that Alamein is a problem, because it's not easy to do. It's hard to handle, it creates more shipping damage reports than any other product in our line, and it incurs added expenses that relate only to this one product. Worst of all, it slows shipping and creates its own sphere of customer service issues, spreading unhappiness even to customers who didn't order the game and would never think of buying it (because Beth was beating the shrinkwrap machine with a broom handle to make the oversized roll fit instead of packing their orders).

And so it has to go.

Alamein sold well for what it is, but was not a good seller compared to our other games. It did about what we expected as a Classic Wargame, but it was never intended to generate the same sales numbers as a Panzer Grenadier game. There are probably 180 to 200 available copies on hand, about half of them fully assembled; we are overdue for comprehensive inventory but won't start that mind-breaking job until Ilene is fully up to speed on her many new tasks (including a lot of customer service). That's the number of boxes, and I'm pretty sure the counters and maps will only come out slightly ahead of that number, as was the case with Leyte Gulf.

Effective immediately, the retail price of Alamein is dropping from $199.99 to $99.99. We'll look to move out every existing copy as quickly as possible, which means we'll be marketing it harder than usual with Daily Content and our other standard means. And once it's gone, it won't be reprinted.

Will we ever do another giant-sized game?

I don't know. We should get Brian Knipple back on the design staff later this year, once he's done using his engineering skills to save America, and he does specialize in such games. They don't sell very well, but their market is very easy to measure. Well, it was before September 2008 — nothing's easy to measure any more and as I've written elsewhere, we have many reasons not to adopt the Ransom Model of pre-order sales. But anything we do in that regard will have to fit in the standard 2-inch-deep box we use for games like Jutland or Road to Berlin. Stuff has to be easy to do.

Lys Fulda, our marketing guru, strongly believes that we should not break the $75 price point, and I listen when she speaks. Usually, anyway. If $75 is a problem point, $100 is a bigger one. Cone of Fire and Cassino '44 will have to stand as the crown jewels of the naval and Panzer Grenadier lines, never to be equaled in size and splendor.

I don't bear the same grudge against Alamein that Beth does, or Doug McNair. Doug labored very long and hard to develop it, as he always does, but he always gets into this frenzy and loves what he does. Not this time. He hated Alamein from the start, believing we could have done three or four other games with the same effort. I think he's right. For myself, I don't particularly like to work on giant-sized games, even though I find that when I do get a chance to actually play a wargame, it's usually a large one. But I just don't see well enough to study the center of the map without leaning over the table and elbowing players out of the way. And then a game of that size is far more likely to go to press including stupid mistakes, and I do hate that.

It was a grand experiment, and it did produce a very nice package. Pick them up while you still can; if they're still here when we're done with the company reorganization I don't know if I can stop Beth from setting them on fire. We will employ the Viking Funeral sales pitch if we have to.

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