Dragon’s Teeth:
Publisher’s Preview
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
March 2024

So why publish a game about the Siegfried Line campaign?

That’s easy. Because we had pieces – a great many pieces - in storage for the old Battle of the Bulge game, thanks to an ill-considered reprint that left us with far more than we needed for that game. There are no Armed SS pieces in the old Battle of the Bulge set, and there were next to no Armed SS troops involved in the Siegfried Line campaign. The pieces fit the campaign, and so we can use the old pieces to tell a new story.

That story’s called Panzer Grenadier: Dragon’s Teeth. It’s a complete, full-sized Panzer Grenadier game, with the pieces from the old Battle of the Bulge and the wintery version of the maps from Elsenborn Ridge, and 42 scenarios of American-German battles in the Rhineland. It has six chapters, tracing the course of the campaign as German resistance stiffened despite growing American strength. And in our story-arc format, that means that each chapter includes a battle game that links the scenarios together.

At this point in the war, the German Army had been thoroughly beaten. The divisions that resisted in Normandy for weeks had been turned into shadows by the time they reached the German border, hammered by Allied air, armor and artillery the entire way. They’d lost almost all of their heavy weapons and vehicles, and most of their men, with many of those who remained unfit for combat.

That’s where our story begins, in September 1944 with these weak divisions sheltering behind the well-made and well-placed fortifications of the West Wall, the line built before the war along Germany’s border with the Netherlands, Belgium, and France. In the first chapters, the Germans are indeed pretty weak, but they have the stout fortifications to help them while the Americans are at the end of a long and precarious logistical tether. That keeps them from applying the full weight of their awesome firepower, as the high command has emphasized deliveries of fuel (to keep the advance going) rather than ammunition (all those shells needed to beat down a well-fortified position). And once the Germans finally get a full-strength division capable of attacking, they fling it into repeated attempts to recover lost portions of the West Wall.

The key prize in the early stages of this campaign is the city of Aachen. Aachen didn’t have much strategic value: its factories were noted for making pins and needles, and it wasn’t a nexus for either road or railway lines. But it was Charlemagne’s ancient capital, and the site where Holy Roman Emperors were crowed for seven centuries. Nazi rhetoric obsessed over the glorious, imaginary past of the German people; they would not be the first nor the last twisted philosophy to use an invented history to bolster their present self-regard.

That’s the third chapter: the drive by the American 30th and 1st Infantry Divisions to isolate Aachen in a pincer movement, backed by the 2nd and 3rd Armored Divisions. The Germans aren’t quite so weak as they were a month earlier, and now they even have some panzer and panzer grenadier divisions they can throw into counter-attacks.

The Americans spent October isolating and then capturing Aachen, the first German city to fall into Allied hands. And they also brought up replacements for their losses, masses of artillery ammunition, and fresh divisions to join the fight. With Aachen in American hands, next the First Army and the newly-activated Ninth Army would drive to the Rhine River.

But the Germans had been busy themselves, combing out fresh manpower from both the civilian sector and their massively overstaffed rear echelons. German factories had only reached full production in 1944, despite Allied bombing, and could provided the weapons and vehicles to arm them. The “Miracle of the West” saw the German Army facing the Western Allies rebound in just a few short weeks, putting enough divisions into the line to not only full man the defenses, but collect a strategic reserve of mobile divisions.

The November campaigns would be among the bloodiest ever waged by the U.S. Army. The offensive toward the Rhine went forward despite the worsening weather, and the Germans fought to defend every meter of German soil. Despite their massive losses, the German Army had retained a hard core of deeply experienced junior officers and NCO’s, allowing them to rebuild their shattered divisions with new recruits.

The November fighting takes up the second half of Dragon’s Teeth, the final three chapters. Now the odds are even, and while the Americans are trying to drive to the Rhine, the Germans are quite ready to counter-attack to take back lost ground. It’s mechanized warfare in a dense environment; the Germans don’t have their fortifications to hide behind but now have the troops and tanks to fight the Americans in the open.

All of that adds up to a tense and deep story exactly the sort of thing I want the Panzer Grenadier series to be. This is the work that satisfies me, and since it’s my company now, I’ve re-made all of our game series toward that end: history-rich experiences that tell their story through both text and game-play. In this format, the scenarios help tell the story, and you can see the narrative unfold and play it out on your game table – you can play all of the scenarios, or just choose the ones you think are most interesting. The nature of the campaign yields scenarios of many types: small infantry fights, full-scale assaults on fortified positions, and tank battles. A lot of tank battles. Thanks to those small scenarios, I could also craft Dragon’s Teeth as an introductory game. You can start right here and enter the world of Panzer Grenadier.

The pieces have been in sealed cartons since we first received them; they’re in excellent condition. They’re at least as thick as our current die-cut and silky-smooth new pieces, but have a different matte finish. The maps were first created as an extra for Elsenborn Ridge, with the same terrain features but snow-covered, wintry artwork.

All told, I’m very happy with the result. Dragon’s Teeth is a tightly-focused game, using the game’s scenarios to let the story of the Siegfried Line campaign unfold. It’s an attractive game, and it’s got all the best elements that make Panzer Grenadier such a popular game series.

You are going to like this one.

You can order Dragon’s Teeth 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 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.

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