Land Cruisers:
The Triumphant Return
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
April 2022

I designed and published Panzer Grenadier: Land Cruisers for one sole reason: to amuse my late friend, Larry Marak. The first Land Cruiser appeared in an April Fool’s fake-news game release announcement (back before “fake news” came to mean “embarrassing stuff some politico wants you to pretend isn’t true”). Larry liked that so much that I made it into an actual product, as an expansion book for 1940: The Fall of France. This is the best possible reason to create a new game: to amuse your friends.

I had great hopes for Land Cruisers. It had this dieselpunk vibe that I thought was cool, and I hoped that the story of huge tank-crushing machines would find traction outside our usual audience. But even at the time I knew that to reach a broader audience, it would have to be a stand-alone game, not an expansion requiring you to own another game already. But I didn’t want to derail our production scale for a new, weird full-sized game, or invest the necessary cash in something that could fail spectacularly. I went with the safe bet, a small expansion, and thereby limited the audience for Land Cruisers to the universe of existing Panzer Grenadier players.

Within that universe, its sales were acceptable but not spectacular. But those lightweight sales weighed against us in the retail system, where the entire line is measured rather than individual titles. It’s also where the hard-core Panzer Grenadier players who liked Land Cruisers and appreciated its weirdness just don’t shop. In hopes of boosting our presence in retail stores, we allowed a number of slower-selling titles to drop out of print (like Defiant Russia).

That didn’t help – we published Black Panthers some months later, a book about African-American soldiers fighting in World War II, and were immediately after soliciting the book Avalanche Press was cast out by the distributor who holds an effective monopoly on the supply of games to game stores in the United States. Coincidence? Perhaps. But we had sacrificed Land Cruisers in vain.

Whatever the reason, that ejection frees us from having to maintain high sales levels for each of our products. Land Cruisers can return to print because it’s fun. I like this little expansion set a lot, because it’s weird. Developers Matt Ward and Daniel Rouleau turned those weird notions into a very fine little set of rules, and fine-tuned the story while they were at it.

So what is this strange little game expansion?

Land Cruisers is set in the world of our Second Great War alternative history, where Imperial Germany (among others) is at war with France and Russia (among others) in a new world conflict that breaks out in 1940. That setting isn’t really integral to the Land Cruiser story, but there was no way in hell I was making a game about gigantic swastika-emblazoned phallic symbols pulping the untermenschen under their massive treads. Yet I still wanted to draw on that mad-German-scientist stereotype, so the Land Cruisers serve the Kaiser.

The Land Cruisers themselves are huge fighting machines crawling about on treads, armed with naval cannon and carrying their own accompanying troops. They have thick armor and lots of smaller automatic weapons to drive off enemy airplanes and would-be Luke Skywalkers, but they’re painfully slow and hard to maneuver.

In the story, and the game scenarios that help tell it, they’re ultra-top-secret weapons deployed by the Imperial Army in a last-ditch effort to stop the unstoppable French offensive. The French fling whole battalions of tanks and infantry at them, but not many airplanes (the fixed-wing airplane is not as big a deal in the world of the Second Great War as it was in our own history). And often the Land Cruisers just grind them up, but they’re not invincible. They can fall to a Lilliputian attack, if the German player isn’t careful or if the French set up their attacks.

That makes for a very different sort of Panzer Grenadier game, a weird and very fun experience. The Land Cruisers take up two hexes, and it’s just fun moving their huge, double-sized playing pieces and making screaming sounds when they overrun French infantry and crunch those R35’s like they were escargots.

We built a whole story around the Land Cruisers, with a background and a dramatic climax and all that good stuff. The developers whined at first that they weren’t getting some Eastern Front tank extravaganza that actually happened, but I think they actually had fun. They did turn in a really solid set of rules for the massive steel beasts, without breaking the basic rules structure of Panzer Grenadier. Land Cruisers are very special units, taking up two hexes with their enormity. You also get a whole set of Imperial German Army pieces to go along with them: infantry, cavalry, artillery and some pretty crappy panzers.

It’s okay to play wargames for the fun. Trust me, I really do have a Ph.D. You don’t have to be all extra-serious all the time about armor penetration and orders of battle and rate of fire. This stuff isn’t real; the tanks are little drawings on colored bits of cardboard. You pretend they’re Panthers and T-34’s, so you can pretend they’re ginormous Land Cruisers, too. Go ahead; I absolve you. I have that power, granted me when I was hooded as a doctor of philosophy.

Bringing Land Cruisers back into print means that I can write about them whenever the mood strikes. We’ll likely use them again in a Gold Club exclusive download, and maybe in a Golden Journal at some point.

I had a lot of fun designing Land Cruisers. I know game designers are supposed to say that about every game we make; I’ve finally become cynical enough to suppress my gag reflex at the traditional “I hope you have as much fun playing this game as I did designing it.” Designing games is hard work, and it’s not often fun. Land Cruisers actually was fun. You deserve some fun, too.

Click right here to order Land Cruisers right now.
Please allow an extra three weeks for delivery.

Sign up for our newsletter right here. Your info will never be sold or transferred; we'll just use it to update you on new games and new offers.

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, three children, and his Iron Dog, Leopold.

Want to keep Daily Content free of third-party ads? You can send us some love (and cash) through this link right here.