| A Farewell to Zippies, Round Two
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
April 2010
At the end of 2009, we decided to do away with five of our comb-bound
supplements, the scenario add-ons that our marketing genius Lys Fulda calls
"zippies." I went into the reasons here, but the short version sums
up as: they have a limited shelf life, and once they've been in print a
while their slow sales reflect badly on the entire line.
After an afternoon conference, Lys and I agreed to do away with 14 more,
which covers all of them currently in stock. All of the reasons for the
January reduction apply, and then some: now that we have new boxed games in
the pipeline, we have to cut down on the overall size of the Avalanche Press
catalog to ensure solid sales through the distribution-retail channel. And
there's another: We're going to replace this website in the coming weeks.
The underlying platform is 10 years old, several lifetimes in web-time, and
it is horrifically difficult to edit and update. Cutting these products now
removes 14 product pages from the huge workload that lies ahead, some of
them supporting very marginal sellers.
Some of these will get re-used over the coming years; either the scenarios
or the pieces or both might get rolled into new book supplements. But in the
future we'll do more books instead of zippies, and probably make any new
zippies exclusively available only directly from us. That will allow us to
keep making these for the hard-core fans, who really like them, without
dragging down the boxed games, since distributors and many retailers don't
have the time to break down our line into separate categories. If August
1914 sells 3,000 copies this month and Red Warriors sells two, that's an
Avalanche Press average of 1,501. We can't have that.
Anyway, here's a list of what's going away the first week of May:
Panzer Grenadier: Aachen 1944
Panzer Grenadier: Roer River Battles
Panzer Grenadier: Siegfried Line
Panzer Grenadier: West Wall
Mike Perryman did these 40 scenarios as part of a proposed boxed game on the
fighting around Aachen. But we already had Elsenborn Ridge with
pretty much the exact same mix of units and playing boards. So we decided to
break them up into a series of 10-scenario supplements, and they came in
very handy during the Year of the Move.
Panzer Grenadier: North of Elsenborn
North of Elsenborn came out before the four Perryman supplements, and
actually before we knew he'd been working on them. It's set during the same
campaign — the fighting near Aachen in late 1944 and early 1945. I designed
this one myself, and enjoyed putting my late friend Belton Cooper's Third
Armored Division into some more actions.
Panzer Grenadier: Army Group South Ukraine
Panzer Grenadier: Panzer Lion
Panzer Grenadier: Romanian Soil
Mike Perryman did these as well, but they were not parts of a boxed game —
each set came in separately and I'm pretty sure they were designed
separately. They set around Targu Frumos in the spring of 1944, when the
Soviet grand offensive was finally halted on the Romanian border. Most of
the scenarios involve the Grossdeutschland Panzer Grenadier Division.
Panzer Grenadier: Blue Division
Many years ago I'd thought about doing a supplement based on Spain's
volunteers who fought for the Axis in Russia. We did this one and South
Africa's War together, to follow up on Red Warriors.
Panzer Grenadier: Iron Curtain
It's been a couple of years since we brought this out, and I don't know why
we did it in this format. We ran the counters at the same time as our very
successful Great War at Sea: Zeppelins book, and should have issued
this as a book as well. It was my decision, it just wasn't a very good one.
Panzer Grenadier: Red Warriors
This was the very first "zippy." We crafted it to re-use the stockpile of
counters left over when the old Panzer Grenadier game Heroes of the Soviet
Union went out of print. Mike Perryman did half of the scenarios, with the
other half coming from the old game after heavy revision by developer Doug
McNair.
Panzer Grenadier: South Africa's War
This is another one I now wish we'd done in book form — there is a lot more
South African action still to be covered in North Africa and in Italy. But
it filled its role at the time we released it, and was a very popular
supplement. It's one of the few with an African theme, and we shoul dhave
been doing more set in that theater.
Second World War at Sea: Strait of Magellan
I designed these scenarios because I wanted to use Japanese, British and
American ships and planes on the maps from Cone of Fire. I knew that
George Marshall had brought up an Axis threat to the southern tip of South
America, and built the scenarios on his brief comments.
Great War at Sea: South China Sea
This one exists because we discovered a stockpile of old maps from the long
out-of-print game U.S. Navy Plan Orange in the warehouse, and wanted to make
use of them. There weren't enough maps to justify a book project, so Kevin
Canada designed the scenarios and we experimented with a separate hit record
for each scenario. The fan reaction didn't come close to justifying the
immense amount of additional layout work that went into this booklet, so
that's the last time we'll try it. |
