Battle of the Bulge:
Publisher's Preview
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
June 2014

Over the decade in which we’ve run Daily Content, some games have seen a great deal of coverage (Gazala, Jutland) and some very little. Panzer Grenadier: Battle of the Bulge is one of the latter, chiefly because it never seemed to need it. We released the game in tandem with Second World War at Sea: Bomb Alley, and together they drove our sales to what remains the greatest single month in Avalanche Press’ two decades of existence.

Battle of the Bulge set the standard for future Panzer Grenadier games: four maps, two sheets of playing pieces, 51 scenarios. We haven’t always held to that, and have usually been sorry for breaking the pattern. It’s a large project but one that we can complete in a reasonable amount of time while keeping costs contained. That size also forces a sharp focus on the topic, enabling a campaign narrative to link the scenarios together. With too many toys in the box, it’s really tempting for the designer to jump around and lose that focus.

Designer Brian Knipple as usual keeps a tight focus on the scenarios of Battle of the Bulge. These cover only the southern side of the Bulge, with the battles around Bastogne and Clervaux and Wiltz. The Screaming Eagles are there, and German paratroopers and plenty of German and American tanks.

Battle of the Bulge was our first game with what I consider a “dense” set of scenarios: taking a larger battle and breaking it down into its constituent parts. For example, 10 of the 51 scenarios take place on the opening day of the German offensive, December 16th. In effect, Battle of the Bulge becomes a platoon-level game of the southern side of the campaign, just broken into 10 parts – pretty much the ten most exciting parts of what you’d be playing on the first “game day” of a ginormous game of the entire Ardennes campaign scaled at 200 meters per hex.

That’s not the usual take of a scenario-based tactical game; the standard for the past 40 years or so (whether on a board or a screen) has been to hit the highlights, just pulling out a few “typical actions” and genericizing them. I never liked that as a player, or as a designer, though I’ve certainly designed plenty of games with scenarios scattered hither and yon. Brian kept a very tight focus here, and the result is a scenario set that attempts to tell a story. I think he refined the approach later, and other designers have done so very well in other games like 1940 or Saipan. But Battle of the Bulge is the game that set the standard for weaving a narrative through the scenarios, and it’s a concept I’d like to take much further in upcoming new games.

The four maps cover the dense terrain of the Ardennes, with a great deal of hills and forest and a couple of rivers, too. The artwork’s by Terry Strickland, who’s led a spectacularly successful studio art career since leaving Avalanche Press to pursue that dream. They’re printed on the standard heavy cardstock we’ve used for a while now; Battle of the Bulge is the only Panzer Grenadier game still in our inventory to have had hard-mounted game boards at one point in its existence. The playing pieces are die-cut, but are from the last set of die-cut pieces we made before the switch to laser cutting and are somewhat thicker than the usual die-cut with very nice print quality.

The pieces include individual ID numbers, something we dropped a few games later. We tried to keep the numbers unique across every game release, so players could mix pieces from one game with those of another when playing the games over the internet. It didn’t take long to run out of numbers.

Despite the game’s very strong sales, it took us years to follow them up. We came back much later with Elsenborn Ridge, covering the northern side of the Battle of the Bulge, and then the Winter Soldiers scenario book to tie the two games together. For a long time we had next to no brand management; to indulge in a little retrospection I have to admit that it’s a phrase that for years I disdained as useless corporate buzzspeak. There’s pretty much no brand management anywhere else in the wargame end of the game industry either, but that doesn’t make it a good idea to ignore such a vital concept. We needed to bring out the second Bulge game within a year of the first, and the scenario book within a year of that. All three items have sold spectacularly well (by wargame standards) but we could have done this far better with some planning. We longer have the luxury to squander opportunity.

Battle of the Bulge has run through at least three complete re-printings, but I believe this will be the last one for a while. We printed and sold a lot of them (again, by wargame industry standards) and the game’s ready for retirement. There are enough parts on hand to carryt eh game at least through the end of 2014, and maybe longer. Once they're gone I'm sure we’ll return to the topic someday, but there are a lot of Panzer Grenadier items in the pipeline.

Play it for yourself! Order Battle of the Bulge right here.

Mike Bennighof is president of Avalanche Press and holds a doctorate in history from Emory University. A Fulbright Scholar and award-winning journalist, he has published over 100 books, games and articles on historical subjects. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama with his wife, three children and his dog, Leopold.