Thinking About Books
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
President, Avalanche Press
August 2010

I never outgrew newspapers.

I liked the rush you got every night. I loved writing on deadline. I craved writing to space. It absolutely validated my existence that, when shit happened 20 minutes before deadline, I was the one city editor Bill Gerdes turned to and said, "Get it."

Looking back, of course, I can see some other angles that were much less evident at the time. It appealed to my worst self-destructive tendencies; having a body shot through with adrenalin at 11:30 p.m. was a recipe for decades of insomnia and years of alcohol abuse. I don't sleep well after drinking, else I would have easily become an actual alcoholic, but I certainly poured in massive amounts in an effort to achieve a little calm.

I sleep a lot better these days, and I can thank Lys Fulda for helping me find the peace to do so. I don't drink often and only drink a lot every couple of years, I guess because I just don't feel the need. But I do have the need to write, and it belongs alongside alcohol abuse and insomnia because even though many people consider it a positive trait, I have little more control over it than I did over drinking or not sleeping. And it leads me into trouble, thinking I can write my way out of any problem. The thing is, a lot more often than not, I actually can.

So we decided some time back to harness that madness to the company's needs, and replace the lines of scenario-only "zippies" and downloads with full-fledged books. So far it seems to be working well, because I really can crank out the copy. Lately we've been slowed a bit because I had to do some warehouse work myself, and I had some very minor surgery from which I've taken a long time to recover (a secondary respiratory infection and really unpleasant painkiller reaction).

At this point, we've settled on a fairly standard format though I still think there's some adjustment to be made. Usually the book includes a number of scenarios, and background articles that relate to the scenarios. Some of them have new playing pieces, some don't — those with pieces are more popular, but the gap is less than I had expected.

The books are a very good product for us in many ways: They don't tie up a lot of resources, their profit margin is very good and they fulfill the Lys Fulda dictum of "something the customer can take into the bathtub." When she hands over sales duties to John Phythyon next month I suspect we'll continue to keep books in the middle of the product mix (what with John having been an editor here in his last hitch), but they'll always be a support element. They can't exist without the boxed games.

But writing them still gives me that deadline adrenaline fix.

Anyway, here's a look at books in the works. As with the boxed game summary, these are roughly in order of appearance, but I can't guarantee nothing will be shuffled. The last three in particular could be moved up:

Great War at Sea: U.S. Navy Plan Scarlet
At this writing we're in the proof stage, which means it may be done if you're reading this a few days after its posting. This project went surprisingly smoothly, so you can look for more like it in the coming months. It's got 25 scenarios, broken unevenly into four sets.

Panzer Grenadier: Black SS
Mike Perryman did a huge number of scenarios, so this one is heavier on that score and lighter on background than similar books. The counters have been on hand for a while, and the scenarios and special rules are done, so we should have this out soon after Plan Scarlet.

Second World War at Sea: Combined Fleet
This is physically very similar to Plan Scarlet, with its focus on our Coral Sea and Midway games. The scenarios hew much closer to "reality," with most of them based on actual war plans of one side or the other that failed to come to pass. Plus the usual background stuff.

They Shall Not Pass
Our first game-in-a-book, this has been more-or-less done for a while but we decided to go with a new map and that's what stands between this product and publication. It's what we're thinking will be the standard format: game rules, game strategy, historical background.

Panzer Grenadier: Go For Broke
Mike Perryman wrote the scenarios and John Vanore did the background text — as much as I like writing, I like other people writing even more. The counters are on hand (they're the right half of that Workers & Peasants sheet, for those keeping score at home) so launch should not be too terribly difficult. The troubling thing about writing lines like that last one is this: I actually believe them at the time.

Panzer Grenadier: Panzer Lehr
Like Black SS, this project started out as just some extra counters showing a well-known division in its own color scheme. And then stuff happened: the people who were going to make the counters turned out to be a one-man shop that couldn't make prompt deliveries. We probably should have cancelled the item but Mike Perryman designed a great set of scenarios featuring the Panzer Lehr Division, so we converted it to book format. Its counters didn't fit in the same press run as Workers & Peasants or Black SS, so it has to occupy a slot a ways down the list.

Fortress Malta
This expansion set for Island of Death, with background articles by John Burtt and Davide Pastore, has been ready for quite a while now. It has 280 standard-sized counters, to match the original game's size, and that held it out of the last set of books-with-counters (since we have to use the same die-cut pattern on every counter sheet in a given group). I'm not sure exactly when we'll print the counters for this one, but I'd like to do it very soon.

Western Desert Force
The second of our game-in-a-book line, this is William Sariego's take on the North African campaign, in concept very similar to the wildly popular Defiant Russia. It's have three cardstock map panels, 140 1/2-inch counters and background and strategy pieces as well as the game rules in the book. Paul Dangel finished development some time back, so this one can be made ready very quickly.

King of Kings
This was a fun project and I'd like to get it out the door, so I can do more of them. It's a book for Rome at War, focused on the revived Persian Empire and two of their neighbors, Palmyra and Armenia. First we need to get Fading Legions back into print, since the book is intended to help push its sales, and that should happen within the next couple of weeks. And then there's the special-sized counter die, one we don't use that often. There needs to be a matching book project (see below) and if we can afford it and be ready, it would be more cost-effective to print these when we do Ironclads: Hearts of Iron, which uses the same pattern.

Panzer Grenadier: Inland Navies
I haven't actually done a whole lot with this aside from draft the counter manifest, because the counters for King of Kings need a matching sheet for production purposes. There are 44 large river monitor pieces: Soviet, Romanian and Polish. And two battalions' worth of Soviet marines, two companies of Romanian marines, 11 Soviet gunboats, 10 Soviet landing craft, and one Finnish gunboat. It should be a popular package, and we might even get a few ship nuts interested in Panzer Grenadier.

Infantry Attacks: Needs a Title
When I designed Road to Berlin (in 2004 or 2005; not sure anymore) I intended the maps to be usable for a book on the Polish campaign of 1939. That means they're also perfectly suitable for the Polish campaign of 1914, in which the German Ninth Army drove on Warsaw and almost reached the Polish capital. I sketched out the scenarios for this book when doing August 1914, and it would also include a set from the Second Battle of the Masurian Lakes. Those would use the standard maps from August 1914 for the most part, but they'd take place in winter with special rules for snow.

Panzer Grenadier: Winter Soldiers
This one's been on my mind for quite a while, and I've had the background material more or less ready. When we designed the first Battle of the Bulge game, it had no Waffen SS pieces, so we skipped the operations of SS units in the southern half of the campaign, including the assaults on Bastogne. Elsenborn Ridge, the game based on the northern half of the campaign, doesn't have any river terrain, as I needed all four boards to represent key terrain like the Twin Villages. The scenarios would cross over between the two games to cover the river crossings of Battle Group Peiper, the SS at Bastogne and similar actions. With no counters, this one could be inserted into the lineup pretty much at any time.

Great War at Sea: Franz Josef's Navy
Like Plan Scarlet, this is a scenario book with background articles, in this case focused on the most interesting topic of all, the Imperial and Royal Austro-Hungarian Navy. There are three sets of scenarios, all based on Austrian war planning rather than actual events (though I did draw on real plans, or at least studies): the Triple Alliance (Austria and Italy on the same side), the Three Emperors (Austria and Russia on the same side) and a set of late-war scenarios to make use of all those modern ships planned-but-not-completed. We always need to have a few projects like this on hand to keep our pipeline full.