The Marak Project
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
Janaury 2023

Larry Marak loved our games.

I never met Larry in person, but I’d get e-mails and other messages from him on a regular basis. When the company was in deep trouble a little over a decade ago, he gave constant encouragement at a time when no one else believed in me expect for my dog, Leopold. I desperately needed it.

Larry loved our April Fools’ Day entry for 2015, which I thought was kind of weak (compared to Safe Spaces and River of Blood, my personal favorites among them). He wanted the fake game, which we called Imperial Grenadier, and pestered me to make anyway. Eventually, I did, at least a tiny part of it. That became Panzer Grenadier: Land Cruisers. Still, Larry wanted more of it, and realized that I could fulfill that through the Premium Content downloads we create for our Gold Club.

In September 2019, Larry sent me another e-mail. He was scheduled for catheterized heart surgery, a second round, and he wasn’t sure he would make it. If I didn’t hear from him, that meant he hadn’t. As always, it was signed “More machine than man.”

I never heard from him again.

We’re a little overdue for another installment in the Imperial Grenadier saga. I titled the second part (second after Land Cruisers) Land Cruisers: The Lithuanian Campaign. I wanted to use the pieces from another one of my odd ideas, Lithuania’s Iron Wolves, and have the Lithuanians fight alongside the Land Cruisers.

The Land Cruisers are massive fighting machines on gigantic treads, carrying guns better suited to heavy cruisers than to tanks. They’re not very fast, and the earlier models aren’t very well-armored. I don’t know why I drew one for that fake game ad, but I did, and then I created a game around it to amuse Larry Marak. But I thought it was a lot of fun.

But the fake game was a huge one, promising the entirety (or at least a significant slice) of the Second Great War on the Eastern Front. I couldn’t see anyone wanting to cut-and-paste sheet after sheet of pieces. The answer to that, in my mind, would be to produce it in small pieces, with just a half-sized sheet of pieces (one printed sheet, since the front and back are side-by-side) and ten scenarios.

Panzer Grenadier is a game series with a pretty much inexhaustible supply of historical topics, and even more that involve armies, units and weapons that existed but didn’t actually fight. I didn’t want the Second Great War stories to just re-tell some of those with different-colored pieces, so they need to be strange, and fun. And of course, they need to tell a story.

That means involving the strange dieselpunk science of the setting, which originated as an alternative-history story arc for our Second World War at Sea series of naval games. The armies of the Second Great War have helicopters, rockets and gigantic fighting machines (well, Imperial Germany does; the others don’t). The scenarios in the original Land Cruisers book, and the Land Cruisers: The Lithuanian Campaign extension, are intended to be fun, and weird. They play just like a historical scenario, in that each side has objectives that they’re going to reach through the usual means (fire and movement), but they’re much, well, stranger.

It's not for everyone.

I crafted the Second Great War setting as an excuse to add more battleship action to Second World War at Sea. That’s why we have zeppelins (so the battleships can find each other) but not a lot of effective aircraft (so the battleships are unlikely to be torpedoed by airplanes before they can get to the battle). There weren’t many actions between battleships in the real Second World War, because of the overwhelming presence of air power, so alternative history seemed a reasonable way to provide them.

And I enjoyed building out the background of this alternative world. It’s based on a very real thing, Woodrow Wilson’s November 1916 proposal to mediate a negotiated end to the Great War, with all of the great empires of Europe therefore emerging more or less intact. But there would be grievances, and these would lead to renewed war. That gave me the excuse to research and write about this fascinating little historical vignette, when world history turned on a single refusal by the Germans to list their demands for peace.

The setting’s been popular, though less so than the Second World War at Sea games based on actual history. The Panzer Grenadier alternative history stuff we’ve done hasn’t been nearly so beloved, not least because Panzer Grenadier has a much smaller base of players than our naval games. And the presence of so many potential Panzer Grenadier historical topics, against so few for the naval series (relatively speaking) no doubt is a factor, too.

But for the small cadre who want weirdness on their game table, and to honor Larry’s spirit, I’m glad we can do something strange and wonderful through Premium Content. Land Cruisers carries the same background as the Second Great War naval games, which means technology has developed somewhat differently. Fixed-wing aircraft are a generation behind those of our own 1940, thanks mostly to the early end of the First World War. Air support in these Panzer Grenadier scenarios, therefore, is limited to helicopters. Those helicopters make artillery even more deadly, and there’s usually more artillery present than you’d see in a historical scenario.

I’d like to return to this setting someday, but I suspect it will be at least another year. Interest is limited among even the hard-core Gold Club fanatics, but there’s not much production cost so I get to make them when I feel like it. But my mind is always filled with strange ideas, and after laboring as first a journalist and then an academic historian, I relish the opportunity to just make up facts. Actual fake news, not just news you wish wasn’t true.

Games are supposed to be fun. Larry understood this, and reminded me of this fact when I sometimes forgot it. Land Cruisers: The Lithuanian Campaign is in no way a fitting memorial for such a good man, but I think he would have liked it.

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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, three children, and new puppy. He misses his lizard-hunting Iron Dog, Leopold.

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