The Guards Belong
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
May 2010

As the very first of our line of comb-bound scenario supplements, Panzer Grenadier: Red Warriors came into existence to make use of the stockpile of counters left over from the series' second boxed game, Heroes of the Soviet Union.

Brian Knipple designed Heroes of the Soviet Union, and came up with a pretty good package given the physical limitations of the product (two maps, one sheet of counters). But at the time we hadn't settled on the model we use now for boxed games and supplements. The Fulda Rules only came afterward: all boxed games must be fully playable with the components in the box. Half of the scenarios in Heroes did not, and half needed something from the series' first game. Heroes sold pretty well, but when it sold out we decided not to reprint it and to put all eight of the original map designs (with new artwork) in the Deluxe Edition of Eastern Front. What I didn't realize right away — inventory control in the old Virginia warehouse being strictly nominal — was that we still had a fair number of counter sheets left over.

Re-cast into a scenario supplement, the new Red Warriors drew scenarios from the old Heroes game and a set that Mike Perryman did for our long out-of-print and mostly forgotten supplement book called Tank Battles. Mike told me the other day that he cringes when he looks at the old Tank Battles scenarios, and while I don't think they're that bad, they're not as good as the ones we've been publishing for the last few years. Doug McNair re-developed all of them to bring them up to current standards, and the result is a set of 20 scenarios taking place during the 1942 Soviet Operation Mars.

I wrote a scenario preview that claims the scenarios I designed can be picked out by their overly verbose introductions and conclusions. While there's a lot of truth to that, I usually replace the ones Mike Perryman writes since they're often pretty brief. So this many years later I'm not really sure who designed the Red Warriors scenarios: If the title involves blood, death or dismemberment it's probably a Knipple design, if it includes the word "Blues" it's a Perryman, and if it has some pretentious literary allusion then I likely did it. But they all have the McNair development touch, which is really the only thing that matters.

Along with the 20 scenarios, Red Warriors comes with a sheet of 165 playing pieces, most of them Soviet Guards. All told it's quite a nice package, and well worth picking up. I imagine we'll re-visit Operation Mars and these scenarios again someday, but with so many Panzer Grenadier supplements in the pipeline and a renewed commitment to boxed game production, that days is many years away at this writing.

Anyway, here's a look at the toys of Red Warriors.

Front Line

The Guards rifle platoons are better than the regular line infantry of the Red Army of Workers and Peasants, with greater direct firepower and usually higher morale. We changed the design slightly for Road to Berlin, for better visibility and to give the Guards a different insignia than the RKKA.

Along with the higher-firepower infantry, the Guards cavalry and machine gun platoons are also slightly stronger than the equivalent regular army units. They usually have the same weapons as the RKKA,but are better supplied with them and their rosters are more likely to approach full strength than the regular units. "Guards" reflected more than an honorific; soldiers in Guards units received better pay and burial benefits (not a minor consideration in a primarily agricultural society, where a family could be devastated if charged for a soldier's funeral) and were more likely to be literate.

Leadership

The leaders in Heroes of the Soviet Union are actually very different than the original game designer intended: the morale and firepower modifiers were to have been reversed. But Brian turned in the counter manifest with the firepower modifier in the right column (it's on the left side of the counter) and the morale modifier in the left column (it's on the right side of the counter). Peggy Gordon laid them out the way they were on the sheet: left number on the left, right on the right. Brian signed off on the proof. Their resulting disagreement over who was at fault was an ode-worthy epic.

I didn't have much of an opinion, then or now. None of them have a modifier greater than 1, and the grand total is 11 left-side modifiers and 9 right-side modifiers — did it really matter? I did find the whole thing pretty amusing; I don't think Brian knew that Southern women would use words like that.

Heavy Weapons

We've changed our outlook on these since the publication of Heroes. Or more accurately, I've reached an opinion (I didn't have one at the time). Brian gave Guards 76.2mm artillery slightly better anti-tank capability than their RKKA counterparts; I tend to think the weapons ought to remain the same and we should show the difference in better morale and leadership (soft rather than hard factors).

With some exceptions, Panzer Grenadier shows "hard" factors (firepower, speed, armor) on the counters and "soft" factors (morale, initiative, leadership) in other ways. That's an intentional split; a few units get better firepower because their guys are just that much better (or inversely, lower ratings because they really suck). But mostly, counter ratings are an exercise in cannon-counting.

Tanks have all the same factors as their RKKA counterparts except for direct fire, which is usually one higher than the RKKA. I kept that in Road to Berlin, rationalizing that Guards units had better ammunition supply and were more likely to have anti-aircraft machine guns mounted, but I'm less sure of this now and if I had it to do over again would probably keep the tank ratings the same for both Guards and RKKA. But you can make a case for the better guards numbers, and that's how Brian chose to rate them.

Secret Weapons

There are a handful of RKKA units in the mix: penal troops and Katyusha rocket launchers. The prisoners have special abilities, and are assigned almost exclusively to suicide missions of some sort. The rockets are powerful weapons and the Germans usually have no answer for them.

The Germans

There are 52 German Army pieces in the set, and they were included to support those dozen scenarios in the original Heroes mix that did not draw on parts from the first game in the series. In hindsight this was a mistake: I should have let Brian use the full 165 pieces for new units and draw on the original Eastern Front for German tanks, infantry and leaders. All of the Germans reproduce units found in Eastern Front.

The Air Force's Army

The German Air Force fielded its own ground forces during the Second World War, and they make their first appearance in the Panzer Grenadier series here. There's just one battalion's worth, and they are truly bad troops with terrible leadership. They do have an 88mm anti-aircraft unit that helps a lot. But mostly they're in the set to give the Soviets someone to stomp all over. Someday we need to revisit the Air Force's Army with a much larger set of pieces and array of scenarios.

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