Infantry Attacks:
The Return
by Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
August 2020

Every so often, you get the rare opportunity for a do-over. I’ve had the opportunity to re-make Avalanche Press as a new company with new ways of doing things, and now I’ve had the chance to re-make the last series we launched at the old company, Infantry Attacks.

Infantry Attacks is our First World War sister series to Panzer Grenadier. The ground scale and time scale are the same (200 meters across each hex, 15 minutes per turn) but the units are for the most part companies instead of platoons. Like Panzer Grenadier, the series is designed to simulate combat in all of the conflict’s theaters: the plains of Poland, the rugged Ardennes, the Austrian Alps, the Arabian Desert and the jungles of Tanganyika.

The first new release is a Second Edition of August 1914, the lone game in the series that the old Avalanche Press managed to release. It’s been completely re-done in the model of our more recent Panzer Grenadier books and games, starting with new Second Edition rules.

The rules have been completely revised and re-written; if you have a set of First Edition rules, throw them away right now. The Second Edition’s concepts are closely aligned with those of Panzer Grenadier’s Fourth Edition. Like Panzer Grenadier, Infantry Attacks now has full-color player aids, but perhaps more importantly it follows the same basic concepts and logic: line of sight, for example, works the same way in 1914 as in 1940.

Infantry Attacks games follow the pattern we’ve laid down in recent Panzer Grenadier games and books, with history woven through the scenario book and the scenarios designed and presented to help tell the story. We’ve enlarged the scenario book (see below) to make it a full-sized book just like the ones we sell separately as expansions.

In the age of Covid-19, it became more difficult to re-stock our supply of boxes; we brought a number of older titles back into print in “naked” editions, identical to the boxed version except they had no box (just a big zip-lock plastic bag). We did eventually find a new supplier of boxes who could provide delivery right to our door (something the last supplier seemed unable to figure out) and had a new-model box that we liked very much. But after months of thinking over the question of boxes - like, whether we should use them at all - I’m not sure we need them. I know many customers like to have something to keep their game in, but they’re difficult for us to handle, take up a great deal of storage space, add to shipping costs (including the freight costs to bring them to us from the factory) and add to labor costs.

Again, citing Covid-19, we’ve seen a great chunk of our business shift from distribution (through stores) to direct sales to the consumer. And a great many of those stores that shuttered over the past few months are never coming back. One huge reason we put games in boxes was to cater to that retail market, but it’s one that had been declining for over two decades and now barely exists after the pandemic’s effects. Boxes are becoming a luxury.

That long-winded windup is leading to this: August 1914 and its sister game Fall of Empires are packaged without boxes. They’ll instead be an enlarged version of our popular Playbook format adding a nice book with a full-color cover and added history and other stuff within along with the scenarios, to give you something cool in exchange for losing the box. And of course all the other stuff you need to play the game: map boards, playing pieces, series rules, charts and such, but no dice.

Infantry Attacks is a game series, so we’ve set it up on what the game industry calls the core-supplement model, just like our other series. While that’s pretty rare for wargames (I think we’re the only publisher who does this), that’s how games are published in the rest of the specialty games industry (role-playing, collectible cards and so forth) so we’re actually following the herd on this and it’s the other wargame publishers who are the outliers.

August 1914 is a core game - it has everything in it you need to play, and it tells a complete story. Fall of Empires is as well, and so is Sinai-Palestine. August 1914 tells the story of the Battles of Tannenberg and the First Masurian Lakes in East Prussia, plus the actions that led up to them.

Fall of Empires moves to Galicia (present-day western Ukraine), where the Austro-Hungarians launched an offensive with four armies (later joined by a fifth) against four larger Russian armies (likewise later joined by a fifth). Sinai-Palestine is just what it sounds like, the 1915-1918 campaigns in Sinai and in Palestine.

In each case we’ll expand the action with books, starting with Edelweiss Division, an expansion for Fall of Empires. Edelweiss Division moves the story of Fall of Empires forward into the bitter first winter of the Great War, looking at the December 1914 Battle of Limanowa-Lapanow in eastern Galicia, a campaign that featured the 3rd “Edelweiss” Division, the best unit in the Imperial and Royal Austro-Hungarian Army.

Franz Josef’s Army expands the story of Fall of Empires to encompass Austria-Hungary’s other regular (not reservist) armies, the Imperial-Royal Austrian Landwehr and the Royal Hungarian Honvédség. Plus the tough Bosniaken; all three branches are presented in their own color schemes. As with Panzer Grenadier, we don’t cotton to the “pretend these pieces are actually those pieces” concept - each nationality gets its own livery. The Austrian command integrated these divisions with the Common Army; each corps contained three divisions, two from the Common Army and one from either the Landwehr or Honvédség. So unlike the other games in the series, Fall of Empires won’t have “battle games” linking each chapter’s scenarios together; those show up in Franz Josef’s Armies so the Dual Monarchy’s national armies can have their say.

Sinai-Palestine gets an expansion as well, titled The Arab Revolt which is about the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire. It’s much more than that, with all sorts of inter-Arab warfare from the years during and after the Great War as the House of Sa’ud rubs out its enemies.

Finally, we have a small complete game just for the Gold Club, Black Mountain. It’s the story of the 1914 Austrian campaign against Montenegro.

And that’s the initial plan for Infantry Attacks, the first time we’ve made a plan for a series roll-out - all of the others happened haphazardly, and while most of them were ultimately successful, we could have done much better with, well, a plan. In the future we hope to release still more games and books, but for now, the list above should be ambitious enough. It’s going to be a fun ride.

You can order August 1914 right here.
You can order Fall of Empires right here.
Gold Club members can score an extra 20 percent off.

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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 uncountable number of books, games and articles on historical subjects; a few of them were actually good. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama with his wife, three children and his dog, Leopold. Leopold enjoys gnawing his deer antler and editing Wikipedia pages.