From the Publisher:
A Semi-Daily/Weekly/Monthly Blog of Stuff
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
President, Avalanche Press

27 January 2012
It’s a relic of the Stupid Ages of Avalanche Press, and there’s just no way Battles of 1866: Frontier Battles would get the green light today, at least by us: a $99.99 game based on five battles of the Austro-Prussian War, none of them the one battle of which maybe 1% of wargamers might have heard.

As stupid decisions go, it’s actually pretty far down on the list of those I’ve committed in running this company. The game appears to be very good, good enough to make me want to weep in frustration – if we had a game with art, design and play value like this on an actually marketable subject . . .

Even so, there’s a lot to be done to mitigate that. We have much better control of print runs than we did during the Stupid Ages, so there won’t be stacks of unsold copies piling up to taunt me – this game will not become another Airlines. A lot of Daily Content love will help. The Langensalza battle does fit on a 22x17 map, so it can form the centerpiece of a Playbook that should help move a few boxed games.

26 January 2012
I run a game company, but almost never actually play the games. The last few days have been an exception: I have to make sure the pieces actually fit on the Battles of 1866: Frontier Battles maps, and translate years-old scenario set-ups to match Guy Riessen’s maps. So I’ve been pushing around actual game pieces on actual maps to the exclusion of just about anything else. I’ll post some pictures when I can figure out how to upload them.

Trautenau is on the table right now, and I’m feeling much better about this game. There are three maps in the package, and this is the smallest. I’d been concerned that the battles just wouldn’t be that interesting, with most of them featuring one corps on each side, each of only four brigades. Would the game be interesting enough with only four maneuver units on a side?

Turns out they play fine, at least to my eyes. Those infantry brigades are tough, with eight steps each, as many as the largest divisions in Gettysburg or Chickamauga. And while only a handful of Union or Confederate units have that much staying power, every Prussian and Austrian brigade is that size. Plus there’s a light infantry battalion for each brigade, and a lot more artillery than is found in the American Civil War.

After taking so long to finally release, this game needed to be good. And I think it is: the Trautenau map alone hosts two historical battle scenarios (Trautenau and Soor), a combined campaign game, and variable reinforcement options for each of those. So what felt like it might be the weak link in the set turns out to be pretty good – though it is, of course, always hard to tell about your own work.

23 December 2011
Working so intensively with the War of the States/Empires series rules has me wishing I could use them in more games beyond the three 1866 titles. There is one battle left out of the set, Langensalza (Hannover vs. Prussia) and if I had the time, I’d put it together as a Gold Club special. There’s no way to get it out before the first of the three Battles of 1866 boxed games ships out, so it would lose a lot of its impact if it came afterwards. The scenario's not hard to do, but the maps in this game system are painfully labor-intensive to make.

The system began with the American Civil War so we could return there; some of the battles would fit nicely in our Playbook format. But there are just too many other projects already promised, or needed, or both.

22 December 2011
Finally healed enough to write at full speed. Some clown smashed a pickup truck into the loading door on the warehouse about a week ago; the guys from motorcycle repair shop offered to fix it, two dead ringers for ZZ Top, even call themselves Billy and Dusty. One of the metal door panels came down on all six of my middle fingers while we were working on it. “You sure can cuss for a skinny fella.” No idea how I didn’t break any of them.

So glad we dumped Chinese printing; they had a thing for reproducing maps at 95% or so of the original. The 1866 maps would have been a disaster. Trying them out today with actual counters on the actual map to make sure they fit – in this game system, the exact size of the counters and the areas on the map are hugely important. This is a huge game and is still just one-third of the original. What was I drinking when I planned to do all the 1866 battles in one box?

16 December 2011
Long hours of shipping stuff, figuring out old customer service, setting up print jobs, proofreading. Had two good friends come by to assemble games to help speed things, Duane Parsons and Robin Rathbun. Robin stayed for three days! And he brought up something I’d been mulling over with Comrade Sariego a couple of months ago: Civil War Era Panzer Grenadier.

The World War II system won’t work in the 1860’s of course, nor will its 1914 sister, Infantry Attacks. But the two series have a number of concepts that might form a solid basis: the initiative/activation subroutine, the primacy of leaders, and so on.

The real concept that fascinates me, though, is bringing the flexibility of Panzer Grenadier into a new era: a game with pieces representing squadrons, batteries and battalions (regiments in the American Civil War) plus leaders, but usable to represent many different formations. Ground scale would stay at that same standard 200 meters per hex, so the map boards remain interchangeable withPanzer Grenadier, Panzer Grenadier (Modern) and Infantry Attacks. And a game would have many dozens of scenarios.

Will it work? I have no idea, and won’t have an opportunity to try to out until well into next year.

11 November
Someone actually reads this - I got a complaint that the blog hadn't been updated! We have very large distributor orders for Christmas stocking - first time that's happened since before the 2008 financial crash. So I've been assembling, shrink-wrapping and shipping in sort of a daze for a few weeks now. Satisfying work but can be pretty tiring.

21 October
I don’t remember why I chose Frontier Battles as the first volume of Battles of 1866. I’m pretty sure it was because I didn’t think we should lead off with the huge Königgrätz map, the equivalent of three full-sized paper maps – the same game area as Leyte Gulf and just shy of Alamein. I’ve actually run across people who think that’s not an overly large game, but to my mind it’s huge. The five frontier battles are the opposite end of the game scale, much smaller and faster to play. They were supposed to be intro scenarios for the big Königgrätz fight, so I hope they’ll be exciting on their own. I think they are, but I really like the smaller games much better than huge ones – I just don’t see well enough to enjoy a game as big as Königgrätz.

20 October
I think I’ve actually enjoyed working in shipping. The new processes are so much easier to handle, and it’s a whole lot easier to work in a space with air conditioning and heat: the old warehouse had neither. It’s very satisfying to see the packages stack up and the list of pending orders shrink, but some time next week I’ll have to give it up and get back to game work while Jane Ehrhardt returns to shipping and customer service.

15 October
“So what game,” I was asked the other day, “would you work on if it were solely up to you?”

That turned out to be a tougher question than I expected. I think I’ve finally learned not to chase the “holy grail” game design. So I don’t really want to pour time and energy into the Battles of Prince Eugene or some such, even in a fantasy world where sales and profitability didn’t matter. It just holds no joy any more, and feels silly and self-indulgent.

The answer I would have given even a year ago would have involved some obscure topic of which few outside specialized historians had heard tell. Now I think the new game I’d most like to take up would be a space game that used the post-release game concepts for our Imperium Third Millennium (the simple space and planetary combat). I’d also like to write book supplements for Iron Wolves and Hopeless But Not Serious – I regret using resources on printed versions of them at all, but if we were going to print them, they should have been full-sized books given the general lack of knowledge on either topic. Iron Wolves in particular can support at least two dozen more scenarios, given the many potential conflicts faced by Lithuania between 1938 and 1941.

14 October 2011
The past week or two have been devoted to shipping: clearing out a backlog of orders so we can start fresh when we have new boxed games ready and return to the three-day-turnaround we had going before the Springtime Troubles. The actual shipping is so much easier now in our new location: we’re out of that dusty hole with no air conditioning in summer or heat in winter. Shipping games was a truly miserable experience, a lot like this.

I’d really like to see the “new orders” icon in our database reading zero, which would mean everything has shipped out. It’s dropped to under two dozen as of last night, but those last few usually include something hard to find in our post-move chaos or hard to put together. Those should all be done pretty soon.

To get there, I’ve spent most of my time in the new warehouse area, which is separate from the office/shipping space. We moved on very short notice, so my old friend Chrys Jones and his crew stacked everything as it came in, floor to ceiling. Generally they were watchful about putting heavier items on the bottom of stacked, but not always, so game boxes need to be saved from crushing. There were no passageways, just wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling parts. And when a 33-pound carton of game counters falls from the top of a nine-foot stack, it hurts like hell if it hits you. I was really fortunate not to break any bones or lose any body parts.

But careful burrowing and the gleeful trashing of Red Russia and Austerlitz parts has unearthed the parts for the naval games we’d had to take out of the webstore: Arctic Convoy, Coral Sea and Pacific Crossroads. Now the hunt is on for August 1914 and 1940 The Fall of France counters.

Shipping also means assembling games, and while the new-style sleeved boxes look really good, they’re much harder to put together than I imagined. That slowed down initial shipments for Soldier Emperor and Bismarck, and we’re going to have to put together boxes for new game releases well before we actually start shipping them.

13 October 2011
Many publishers have blogs on their websites, and since I don’t have the time or the patience to post on message boards, it seemed like a good thing to add to our site. This will give me a chance to toss out some brief updates on what we’re up to around here.

I took over website updates myself back in late May, and I’m still not very proficient with it but have made sure there’s something in the Daily Content column every day. Sometimes I end up posting a couple of them in the same day when I fall behind a little.

Ideally, there should be fresh Content each weekday, and some re-runs on the weekends. I haven’t had the chance to put on a recruiting drive for Content writers, much less write every day myself. I really like doing it; it gives me the opportunity to explore just about anything I wish as long as I can somehow relate it to one of our games. But lately that’s an indulgence I haven’t been able to allow myself, so I’m going to have to look for some others to have that fun.