The Book of Armaments:
Rules Preview
by Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
December 2024

We’ve published dozens of expansion books over the years, almost all of them focused on additional scenarios to expand the story of their parent game, or use the parts of two or three games to tell a new story. With The Book of Armaments: Eastern Front Artillery I wanted to do something a little different, what the role-playing side of our industry calls a “splatbook.” A splatbook adds additional rules and features to an existing game, but usually doesn’t include an adventure (or in our case, scenarios). We did one for our long-concluded line of d20 books, Noble Steeds, that was all about horses.

In that vein, The Book of Armaments: Eastern Front Artillery is all about artillery. You get a special artillery card (five of them – German, Soviet, Slovak, Polish and Romanian) where you can keep track of your off-board artillery as you use it, and sometimes assign it to special artillery missions. You could get by without it – Panzer Grenadier has been played for just a few weeks shy of 23 years as of this writing without an artillery player card – but you’ll have more fun if you use it, since you get to play with actual artillery battery pieces instead of writing down numbers.

The Book of Armaments: Eastern Front Artillery is intended for use with any or all of Panzer Grenadier’s games and expansions set on the Eastern Front:
● Fire in the Steppe
● Fire & Sword
● Kursk: Burning Tigers
● Kursk: South Flank
● Gates of Leningrad
● Broken Axis
● The Deluge
● Armata Romana
● Slovakia’s War
● Grossdeutschland 1944

I designed Panzer Grenadier to be simple to play (relative to other wargames; it’s much more involved than your typical tabletop family game), and so artillery pretty much does just one thing: it blows stuff up. There’s a lot to be said for blowing stuff up. But with The Book of Armaments: Eastern Front Artillery, we’ve added a little more nuance with a raft of new optional rules. Let’s have a look.

Artillery Transport
Now we see why World War Two armies didn’t just load up their artillery regiments with dozens of huge howitzers and gigantic cannons. The bigger the gun, the harder it is to move around. The really big guns are even harder to move.

Panzer Grenadier treats all artillery pieces and all transport units the same. Any transport unit can move any weapon unit, at the same cost. That’s changed here; wagons can’t move the heavier pieces at all, trucks have trouble with them, and prime movers become valuable assets since they can pull anything including the huge siege guns. It’s also much harder to go off-road with a cannon on your trailer hitch.

Counter-Battery
Artillery batteries spent a lot of their time shooting at enemy artillery batteries. Now you can do that too, but it’s not easy. It’s a long-term process that’s going to remove your own off-board artillery from the board, so to speak, for a goodly chunk of the game.

In Panzer Grenadier scenarios, batteries assigned to counter-battery mission aren’t represented at all; those guns and their effect on enemy artillery are all reflected in the off-board artillery allotments (or lack of them). But now the player can have some agency in this vital behind-the-scenes game within the game.

Danger Close
It’s a dramatic moment in a war movie, when our hero calls in artillery fire on his own position. Real life ain’t this way; the Fire Direction Center is going to be really reluctant to shell their own troops on purpose.

Drumfire
Infantry Attacks includes Drumfire, a tactic where artillery fire rains down on a location rather than a unit or other target, to deny movement through that location. Now you can try it in Panzer Grenadier, too. It’s not nearly as common or as useful in the mobile warfare depicted in most Panzer Grenadier games, but there will be a few times when you might want to try it. World War Two was not a story just of slashing armored attacks; there were plenty of brutal close-quarters infantry fights just as intense as those of the Great War, and we’ve included many of them in Panzer Grenadier games.

Interdiction
Now you can shoot at enemy reinforcements before they show up on the map. You can’t actually inflict casualties on them (you probably should be able to, but the payoff in game play didn’t justify the complicated rules for doing that so I trashed them). But you can delay their entry, and sometimes that’s going to be even more valuable.

Pre-Registration
I’m pretty sure a few Panzer Grenadier scenarios have included a special rule allowing the defending player to pick out some hexes where his or her artillery is already sighted in and ready to fire. Either player can do this now; it’s limited to only a few target hexes. Thanks to their doctrine of careful preparation and intelligence-gathering, the Soviets are better at this than everyone else.

Shell Shortage
Oh shit! We ran out of ammunition! Drumfire in particular will eat up your shell stockpile. Since this book is all about the Eastern Front, the massive American advantage in this area doesn’t show up.

Terrain
In Panzer Grenadier, artillery fires from any terrain, just like any other unit. That fits the structure I wanted for the series rules, but now we add a little nuance and artillery is limited in some types of terrain.

None of the new rules are all that burdensome, but neither are they really necessary for play. Panzer Grenadier includes a lot of subtlety in the interaction of infantry, armor and artillery; the new rules expand what artillery can do but don’t delve so deeply into detail as to imperil that carefully-balanced interplay.

I suppose at some point we’ll need to do a sequel and include the heavy American, British and French guns and some player cards to go with them. But for now we have Eastern Front Artillery, now with more explosions.

You can order Eastern Front Artillery right here.

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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 a great many books, games and articles on historical subjects; people are saying that some of them are actually good. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama with his wife and three children. He misses his lizard-hunting Iron Dog, Leopold.

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