Africa Orientale Italiana,
Playbook Edition:
Designer Ramblings
by Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
December 2023

I had a vision for Panzer Grenadier: Africa Orientale Italiana. We’d use leftover pieces from long out-of-print games to craft a short-run game on a deeply obscure topic and hopefully sell them to the very hardest-core Panzer Grenadier players. And then it somehow became popular among that crowd, and we had sold out of them. So we’re going to issue a new, Playbook edition with its own set of pieces.

Africa Orientale Italiana is based on the 1940-41 British invasion of Italian East Africa. It’s an unusual campaign, fought in mountain terrain for the most part. The defenders are Italian Colonial forces of varying reliability, backed by some very good long-service Italian professionals. The British draw in forces from all over their Empire including East Africans, West Africans, Sudanese, Indians and Soamlis.

Decades ago, I designed a game on the East African campaign for a long-defunct series of operational wargames that had the insane goal of covering all of World War II at 20 kilometers per hex. Over the years that followed, I read more about the campaign and collected more and more source material, in English and Italian. I only needed an excuse to publish a Panzer Grenadier game on the topic. When the excuse came to do this Panzer Grenadier game, I grabbed it. And then I doubled down with a new edition.

The new Playbook edition retains the maps from the prior version (which are the same as those in Conquest of Ethiopia) but now has its very own set of playing pieces. That allowed us to show the wide range of units that fought in East Africa, all in their own color schemes. The Black Watch and Italian Savoia Division get their own colors, and so do the King’s African Rifles, the Somaliland Camel Corps, and the Sudanese Defense Force. If you’re going to publish a game on a weird historical topic, then embrace the weirdness in both arms.

There are, all told, 53 scenarios in Africa Orientale Italiana, split into eight chapters (the first edition had 43 scenarios in six chapters). Each chapter has a historical background piece telling us what actually happened during this segment of the campaign, followed by the scenarios, and then a “battle game” to tie those scenarios together. It’s the model all of the games in our Panzer Grenadier family (that is, including Panzer Grenadier (Modern) and Infantry Attacks) now follow.

The scenarios begin with the first skirmishes along the frontiers between Italian East Africa and the British-ruled colonies of Sudan and Kenya. There’s a full set on the Italian invasion of British Somaliland, and then we move on to the twin British invasions of Italian Somaliland and Eritrea. We wrapped up the first edition with the British (actually Indian, for the most part) driving into Eritrea before they are stopped in the First Battle of Keren.

The re-used pieces didn’t include some pieces (like Italian Alpini) needed for the next phase of the campaign, and the scenario book was already at an unwieldy size for a boxed game. I told myself we come back later with an expansion set sometime in the future, to help sell the game.

Africa Orientale Italiana’s first edition sold out without that help. So that future is now - the Playbook edition allows for a larger book, and those extra nine pages are just what’s needed for a seventh and eighth chapter, on the Second and Third Battles of Keren. You get to use the tough Italian Alpini Battalion (part of the Savoia Division), who are on the attack against the Indians who’ve gained a lodgement in the hills above Keren.

Beyond those ten new scenarios (for a stunning total of 53, which is past the maximum we like to put in a Panzer Grenadier game), the new set of pieces is crafted to match the East African campaign; the ones we used in the first edition had been used in games set in North Africa. So they had many more tanks than we could possibly use, and sometimes not the mix of other pieces that I would have preferred.

That’s no longer true; the Playbook edition not only includes all of those colorful pieces for small British Empire contingents, the set has also been adjusted to better reflect the forces involved in the original scenarios. So all of the original scenarios have been re-worked the way I would have designed them given the freedom to craft a set of pieces to match.

As a blend of history and game-play, I’m enormously pleased with Africa Orientale Italiana. It tells a narrative story though text and scenarios, and given the nature of the campaign (tense, often small-scale infantry fights in dense terrain) the story-arc format works very well here.

As a product, the sins of Africa Orientale Italiana are legion. To start with, it’s the bane of our long-ago marketing guru, “Panzer Grenadier without panzers!” There were tank battles in Italian East Africa, but there weren’t very many of them and those that happened weren’t very large. We do cover all of them in the game, but that still leaves the bulk of the scenarios as infantry fights, usually in rough terrain. Sometimes very rough terrain.

That’s exactly the sort of battle the Panzer Grenadier system was designed to simulate. As a teenager, I endlessly played a long-forgotten game called Panzerblitz. Very popular in its day, it had tanks zooming around the board and shooting at each other from a distance (something other wargames did not have back then). But the infantry plodded along at one hex per turn, if they moved at all – you set up the infantry as static garrisons of strong points (unless you moved them in a truck, but you needed the trucks up on the front lines so they could blow themselves up and block roads and bridges, instead of moving infantry around).

And so I set out to design a game in which the infantry could actually do stuff. That game eventually became Panzer Grenadier. It splits its focus between tanks (the “Panzer” part) and infantry (the “Grenadier”) part; you could argue that artillery is even more important than either one of those but I couldn’t come up with a clever way to work that into the title, too. Having already become obsessed with the campaign in East Africa at this point, I had the battles there in mind as I designed the game (along with those of the Winter War, jungle fighting, and of course the usual steppes of Ukraine and green fields of France). Africa Orientale Italiana is exactly the game for which this system was designed.

The second great sin of Africa Orientale Italiana is its subject. The East African campaign yielded 53 really good scenarios for this game, few if any of them having ever been simulated in a wargame before (I’m reasonably sure the number is actually zero, but you never know). It’s a rich background, I think the book explains the campaign and battles very well, but we still have a lot of selling to do.

As in any campaign in which one side won an overwhelming victory, the final result doesn’t tell the story of the fighting at a tactical level. The Italian colonial army, recruited chiefly for internal-security duties, fought surprisingly well on a number of occasions. Colonial apologists have often held up the “loyalty” of African soldiers to their European masters as proof that not everyone objected to foreign rule, and a military career could lead to a preferential place in the colonial order. There was little to recommend one European ruler over another, and most East African cultures held combat in high regard: the Eritrean askaris may have held no love for Mussolini, but neither did they wish to be seen as cowards.

So despite the final, and inevitable, British victory, the Italians came out ahead in many tactical actions, and had their chances to win more of them. The British could not easily bring their supply, artillery and airpower advantages to bear, and many of the battles had to be fought on even terms: infantry against infantry, among the hills and mountains.

From the standpoint of designer ego gratification, I’m very pleased with Africa Orientale Italiana. A great deal of effort went into the design, and it came out the way I wanted it to.

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Mike Bennighof is president of Avalanche Press and holds a doctorate in history from Emory University. A Fulbright Scholar and NASA Journalist in Space finalist, he has published an unknowable number of books, games and articles on historical subjects. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama with his wife and three children. He misses his dog, Leopold. Leopold knew the number.

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