Having followed the Daily Content for some time, and now reading the Gold Club Insider, I have come to realize that while we gamers may think that you spend most of your time thinking about ZOCs and CRTs, it's really all about printing and boxes.
— Brian McCue

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

That's pretty close: I actually spend most of my time thinking about money. But printing and boxes are what make the money to keep the business operating, so they do all weave together. And boxes are at the center of that pattern.

Since Avalanche Press began, we've used what's known as a rigid set-up box. It's made of chipboard (a thin but tough form of cardboard), and every box we've made has been ordered at 48-point thickness. Yet those who own many of our games know that the thickness is not consistent; generally if the box was made in the U.S. it's thinner than one made in Asia.

The cover is printed separately and then laminated to the chipboard box. Depending on the vendor, this is done in the same facility or it comes from a different source. Sometimes each step takes place in a different company's shop.

Boxes are expensive and hard to make, and the price generally drops if you make many of them of the same size. So for example if three new games are to be released in coming months, you really want to order all the boxes at once and get a price for 15,000 units instead of paying for 5,000 three times. Even so, it's a huge outlay of cash, and you still have to ship and store these boxes, about 20 pallets' worth.

That's very difficult for us, but we have to have boxed games — they're the core of our business. The boxes take longer than any other component (about eight weeks, plus transit time, barring snags — and there are always snags) and, in an era where "trade credit" has become a quaint historical concept, that's a very long time for our money to sit idle. And that's assuming you can find someone to make them — the last couple of vendors with whom I tried to seal contracts went out of business before we completed the deal.

I'm not going to class that as bad news — the feeling of relief that we hadn't given them any money is much too strong for that — but it did serve as a powerful catalyst to change the way we make boxes. We can make just about every other component of the games on demand. And then all of that flexibility is shackled to a 10-week box production cycle (counting shipping time).

So what I wanted was a print-on-demand box. And by reverting to some older technology, now we have one. Using an old computer game box as a model, the new type starts with a rigid set-up box identical to those we've used in the past. Except that it's just plain black, all around.

Around that black box will go a sleeve, printed on the same heavy cardstock material we use for the maps in games like August 1914 or Coral Sea. The sleeve will be identical to the covers we used on the old-style boxes. The overall look will be little changed; the only difference is that the two end panels (the smallest of the box's six sides) will be black. All of the boxes will be the standard 2-inch-deep size we use (like Jutland or Road to Berlin).

The changes for us are profound: Instead of bringing in 20 pallets and trying to find room to store some of those boxes for up to five years (and sometimes longer), we'll bring in about six pallets at a time and use them up in 30 to 60 days. Instead of waiting 10 weeks for a new box, as long as the black box supply is on hand it'll take two or three days to get the sleeves — from a vendor who's a five-minute drive away.

And we have a lot of products on which to use this new method. A few weeks ago in our Gold Club Insider newsletter, I included status updates for the three or four projects then on the verge of shipping. There were some confused respondents upset that other projects weren't mentioned, and one really nasty e-mail indicating that since I only mentioned those games that clearly meant that anything not mentioned had been abandoned and so I had "betrayed (our) customers" and needed to die soon.

Since I'd really rather not, here's a list of every boxed game at some stage of work. Books and supplements aren't listed, just boxed games. Please don't threaten my life over a book that's not listed; I'll update those later. This is roughly the order in which the boxed game will appear:

Battles of 1866: The Frontier Battles
This is probably the most highly awaited of the long-promised games, despite its quirky subject (or maybe because of it — it's doubtful there have ever been or ever will be other board games concerned with the Battle of Trautenau). Counters are in the house. Sleeve art's been ready forever, just needs to be adjusted for the new print method. It's close enough that we'll start taking orders for it again today.

Panzer Grenadier: Kursk: South Flank
This one's currently getting a lot of attention from the fan base, and that level of pre-release buzz bodes well. Since I'm not personally involved with this one it could easily vault ahead of Frontier Battles; it really depends on whether the new counters for this one complete printing faster than the big paper maps for Frontier Battles (and I think they might).

Red Desert
This one's been more or less ready for production for a long time, and I'd like to see the end of it soon. It's gotten a nice treatment with big counters, and should be a very nice product with those thick pieces we've started using. I'd like to run the counters for this one alongside those for South Flank but I don't know if we can pull that off.

Infantry Attacks: Fall of Empires
It has the same number of counter sheets as Kursk: South Flank and Red Desert, so it's tempting to put it in the Red Desert slot. Physically it's slightly larger than August 1914, with 660 counters instead of the 583 in its sister game — it needed a lot more cavalry pieces for the division-sized battles I wanted to include. Plus Austria-Hungary sends three separate armies into battle (Imperial, Austrian, Hungarian) and each gets its own color scheme.

Ironclads: Hearts of Iron
This one has to be printed separately, because its counters use a different die pattern than any other boxed game except for two of them way down the list and, with the process we're now using, every sheet in the group has to be cut by the same die. They're big ones, the same size as those in our Zeppelins supplement or Rome at War games, and this is going to be a beautiful game. But it has to be slotted a little lower on the schedule since it uses the same tactical map as our Great War at Sea games. The new introductory game for that series, Pacific Crossroads, sold many more copies than anticipated and pulled a lot of other GWAS games out the door with it. The map stockpile's going to need replenishing first.

Army of Lappland
This is the one currently on my table, as I get the final map and counter materials to the art staff (that means: hand it to Susan). I finally went with standard-sized counters in this game because I wanted to use a lot of them to maximize scenario coverage and provide a lot of optional formations: the Finnish light brigade and extra mountain division requested by the German command and the U.S. and Royal Marines and Canadians that Winston Churchill wanted to land from the sea. All of the campaigns are there (1941, 1942 and 1944) and considering the scale, there are a blizzard of scenarios. Going to 1/2-inch counters allowed the full battlefield from Kirkenes to Murmansk to fit easily on a 22x51-inch map; I'm pondering whether that should be 1-1/2 paper maps or six heavy cardstock panels, and leaning toward the latter. The day of the "real wargame" may well have passed, but at least we're sending it out with a very good example of the type. This one should be very well-received.

Panzer Grenadier: Kursk: North Flank
All of the German Army scenarios from the old, combined Citadel design are in this volume, even though some of them took place on the south side of the offensive. That'll surely cause some sort of OCD overload and possible brain explosion in a few gamers (south can't be north! ahhhhhhh!); since the alternative is to just ax those scenarios from the boxed game and sell them separately later in a supplement I think they'll learn to live with it. It's a standard Panzer Grenadier game otherwise and with Mike Perryman and Doug McNair at the controls, that means it actually could be slotted right after South Flank. But we need to get some of these other titles out ahead of it.

Battles of 1866: Königgrätz
This is going to be a very big game, and I'm uneasy about mixing the printing style of its counters (originally, it would have re-used those from Frontier Battles, plus new ones). It might be OK that way — none of the Panzer Grenadier players seem to mind the upgrade to their Hopeless But Not Serious pieces — but I'm not sure. Anyway, this game will have a battlefield of four paper maps (two large ones, two half-sized ones) and huge armies surging across them. I was expecting to take a financial beating on the first 1866 game so this one couldn't be too close behind it on the schedule. Thanks to making the boxes on demand, that's not likely to happen; our break-even points drop significantly with the new method so I think even the 1866 games will make money for us. On top of that, I could easily be wrong about its sales potential: I thought we'd get hammered on August 1914 and it's already a very good seller and cash producer. In any event, Königgrätz wasn't prepped for production yet because we expected to need to recover the financial losses from Frontier Battles first, so it pretty much has to be in this production slot.

Battles of 1866: Custoza
All of the above goes for Custoza as well. We always would have produced the game, because we promised we would, because it's done, and because I am a very very stubborn individual. But now that we can actually profit from it, it's only a question of scheduling. The new box-production model does give us some options: We could do a simultaneous release, which would have some marketing advantages, or we could slot this one further up the schedule. Because Custoza is physically easier to produce it would be the one to move up the line.

Fading Legions
Everything but the maps is in the warehouse, and has been for some time. The maps have been shifted to cardstock (like Infantry Attacks or Panzer Grenadier) and they print very quickly. This one will actually ship before anything else on the list.

Soldier Emperor: Player's Edition
Box production was the issue for this game, and the new method pretty much allows us to bring this one out at will (our will, and the will of cash flow). Scenarios have been re-done along with the rules.

And that's it for the boxed game lineup. Later this week, I'll look at books and supplements.