Workers & Peasants: A Preview
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
May 2010
"I don't like writing," someone said (Dorothy Parker, or Ernest Hemingway, or any of a dozen others). "I like having written."
The quote's hard to track down because, apparently, many writers feel that way. I've never been one of them; I actually like the process of writing. I like the adrenaline surge, I like the sound of the keys clacking as I type and the blurring of individual clicks as I pick up speed, and I like the feeling of accomplishment as words assemble themselves on the screen at my command. I simply like doing this. The solitary nature of it suits me, and I definitely get a thrill from it.
So it's very pleasing that Workers & Peasants, the next Panzer Grenadier book supplement, marks a returned emphasis to books rather than downloads and the 10-scenario packets known as "zippies." Those did their job, and we'll still bring them out on occasion, but we've now successfully shifted the production emphasis back to boxed games and books.
Mike Perryman, Chicago's scenario-designing machine, has crafted 25 new scenarios for the book. All come from the 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union. They come in all sizes, with one using just one map, several just two, and couple that are much larger than the usual battles depicted in Panzer Grenadier games. They're split into four sections, matching the three Axis invasion sectors plus a set based on the October 1941 battle at Borodino.
And then there are the new counters: 165 of them, almost all drawn from the Red Army of Workers and Peasants. The big scenarios require large numbers of troops; the counters in the book make sure you'll have enough of them plus the leaders to direct them:
Leaders
 
The design work for Eastern Front Deluxe Edition is now six years old, which is kind of shocking. It's the last Panzer Grenadier boxed game not developed by Doug McNair (and probably the last Panzer Grenadier product period, though I'm not completely sure). Since then we've published hundreds more scenarios, and their quality has improved markedly in several aspects: clarity, game play, and historical truthiness (because it's hard to describe any paper and cardboard game as having "accuracy").
If I had it to do over again (and as the publisher, I sort of do), I would have put more leaders in the Soviet counter mix. A lot more. In too many scenarios, every leader in the game starts on the board, which means there's less variability in which leaders get picked. And the relatively small number of leaders compared to the Germans or Australians or Japanese, to cite just a few examples, slams a cast-iron lid on the size of Soviet forces in scenarios. There just aren't enough leaders to mobilize huge forces; this became obvious when we were working on the huge "The Troops are Abandoning Me!" scenario in the now out-of-print supplement Blue Division. I wanted the Spaniards to be facing a huge force, but we just didn't have enough Red Army leaders in any of the games.
The number of leaders provided in a Panzer Grenadier scenario is a pretty complex calculation. It depends on a lot of things: overall quality of the army, quality of the particular unit, its performance during the battle, the unit's origin (regular, reserve, ad hoc) and previous casualties, national educational levels, social stratification (this penalizes even elite Italian units) and a few others. All of which, careful observers will note, are subjective factors. Those rating the best (good German regular units of 1940 or 1941, the U.S. Army, Poland, Finland) might get about one leader for every two combat units. Those with poor ratings on this scale (Ecuador, German Air Force field divisions) might get one for every three or four.
Even so, there aren't as many Red Army leaders in Eastern Front as I should have put in there. The game works fine, but it does so because I left out the huge scenarios that would have exposed this lack (yes, I left some scenarios out of a game that has 112 of them). For Workers & Peasants, with its focus on very large scenarios, this became a problem.
And so we added a new counter sheet, starting with 25 additional leaders plus two more kommissars. When combined with those already present in Eastern Front, that gives the Red Army 38 leaders, enough to control a very large formation in battle.
Troops
  
The Red Army of Workers and Peasants comes to your tabletop battlefield with a pretty large array of forces, but I decided they needed more. Actually, this came about in backward fashion. When we moved the warehouse from Virginia to Alabama, there were no assembled copies of Beyond Normandy among the items we received in the new warehouse (this was true for a number of titles). When we originally printed that game, we included the Soviet half of the "generic" set on the third Beyond Normandy sheet. The plan was to use this, together with the German half (which I think printed alongside the leaders and markers from Soldier Raj, but I'm not sure), in both Eastern Front and Road to Berlin.
That was a complicated and ultimately stupid plan, made worse when it turned out that the original German generics had some printing flaws. We printed the two together when we did Road to Berlin, and that combined sheet has served since for both games. That made all those Soviets chopped off of Beyond Normandy surplus. I'm pretty sure the flawed Germans were trashed in Virginia. Or else they are among the items that somehow did not make the journey from Virginia. Or they're labeled for some other game and we haven't unsealed the cartons yet.
It's a sheet of 77 pieces, familiar to anyone who owns Eastern Front or Road to Berlin (and if you don't have Eastern Front, you really don't have much use for Workers & Peasants). So there's nothing new here: just more of it, so that all those new leaders can command large forces across huge swaths of ground.
Tanks
  
Since we gave the Red Army masses of additional infantry, it seemed like they needed additional tanks as well, to allow hordes of them to roll across the battlefield. it also gave us the chance to add the little letters that indicate which tanks have leaders, a feature we added with Road to Berlin. So there's an extra set of Soviet tanks, and since the numbers worked out exactly right, extra Romanians as well (with their little letters).
All told, it's a pretty pleasing package: 165 game pieces, 25 brand-new scenarios, and multiple background articles plus those unit-organization diagrams that so many of our customers love.
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