Panzer Grenadier: Ocho
Publisher’s Preview
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
July 2024

The Second World War saw plenty of poor decisions, both political and military, but few of them rival Benito Mussolini’s decision to attack Greece in the autumn of 1940. Italy had annexed neighboring Albania a year and a half earlier, and Mussolini now hoped to extend Italian hegemony with annexation of formerly Venetian territories and Chameria, the coastal part of Epirus, the Greek province bordering Albania. The rest of Greece would become an Italian puppet state.

At 0300 on 28 October 1940, the Italian ambassador to Greece presented Greek dictator Ioannis Metaxas with a formal demand that Italian troops occupy Greece. Alors, c’est la guerre, Metaxas answered, but Greek propagandists would claim he instead gave a one-word reply: Ochi, Greek for “Hell No.” At 0530, the Italian invasion of Greece began.

The Italians undertook a tragically unprepared invasion with just under 100,000 men. The Greeks had been mobilizing since August and soon outnumbered the invaders at the front, and fought with considerably more spirit though the Italians had significant advantages in armor and aircraft. The Greeks turned back the Italian offensive and invaded Albania in turn; the war only ended in April 1941 when the Germans intervened and quickly overran Greece.

Panzer Grenadier: Ochi tells the story of the Italo-Greek War, in forty scenarios stretching from the first hours of the October 1940 invasion through the final stand against the newly-energized Italians in April 1941. They’re by Jay Townsend, designer of Saipan and many other Panzer Grenadier games and books.

Ochi is an expansion book, not a complete game. You’ll need maps and pieces from Parachutes Over Crete, and more pieces from Conquest of Ethiopia, to play all of those scenarios. It also comes with 176 new pieces, die-cut and silky-smooth.

We’re presenting Ochi as a Deluxe Golden Journal, which means it’s exclusively available to our Gold Club. It’s a full-sized book with a full-sized sheet of pieces; that’s why we’re calling it a Deluxe Golden Journal.

Previous games have introduced the Royal Greek and Royal Italian armies, but not at this level of detail. Those Italian mix of pieces from Conquest of Ethiopia has plenty of infantry, support weapons and leaders. Plus, some tanks and artillery, and elite Alpini mountain troops, and less-than-elite Blackshirt militia. All of them will see a lot of action in the Pindos Mountains. But there’s still more.

We add some more Bersaglieri, the Italians who do the heavy lifting. They come on foot, on bicycles, and on motorcycles. Alpini previously appeared in Conquest of Ethiopia, and now they add specialists including engineers, cavalry and support weapons of their own.

The Blackshirts – like their German equivalent the Armed SS, a party militia rather than a branch of the armed forces – appear in Conquest of Ethiopia in some numbers, and now they get some engineers and mortars, which they lacked before. They also lacked their Albanian lackeys, who make the Blackshirts look actually good. The Albanian Blackshirts are likely the worst formation ever to appear in Panzer Grenadier, and I’ve wanted to include them from the very beginning. So it pleases me greatly to finally get this bumbling band of bozos into print.

The Greeks appear in Parachutes Over Crete, but those are the rapidly re-armed and re-organized Greeks who fled the fall of the mainland or never left the island’s recruit depot. The Greeks on Crete fought the German invaders with immense determination and not much else. But in Ochi, these are the tough, ass-kicking Greeks who wrote a new mythology in the snows of Epirus. You get better infantry, more support weapons, horsed cavalry and even a few tanks (mostly taken from the Italians). Plus some local militia, as on Crete and a smattering of mis-matched artillery (Greece in 1940 was not a wealthy country).

But then you get the Evzones. The skirt-wearing (strictly speaking, it’s a fustanella, not a skirt) light infantry of the Greek Army. Often called mountain troops, this isn’t exactly accurate, but they had the training and fitness to operate in broken ground, and they met the Italians in the Pindos Mountains as an unexpected shock (despite, by this point, over a century as the Royal Hellenic Army’s elite).

You get a reinforced battalion’s both, and a regiment of Evzone cavalry as if that wasn’t enough. They see plenty of action in the scenarios; with their soaring morale and good firepower, they give the Greeks their own crack troops who can stand up to Italy’s elite Bersaglieri and Alpini.

And they’ll get plenty of action in Ochi. The campaign began with an Italian offensive, but slightly more than two weeks later it was the Greeks who had numerical superiority, and they began their own offensive. That means that not only do both sides get to attack and defend, they’ll also be on the operational offensive and defensive (which doesn’t have a direct effect in Panzer Grenadier, but does dictate how the scenarios are constructed).

While Panzer Grenadier’s game system (what we insiders call the “game engine”) might look like it emphasizes tanks, that’s not exactly true. It does work very well to re-create armored combat, but I designed it first and foremost as a game about infantry. That works to make Parachutes Over Crete a tight and tense game despite the presence of just one tank unit, and it does the same for Ochi (which has a handful of tanks in use, but still not many).

I like the infantry game in Panzer Grenadier: it moves quickly enough to be interesting, but not so fast that a player can wriggle out of a mistake by zipping some tanks across the board. The infantry game rewards planning and preparation, and the use of artillery and support weapons. The game engine, with just a few modifications, makes for a very good game in the Infantry Attacks series, where there are usually no tanks at all.

But even so, Panzer Grenadier without panzers isn’t for everyone, nor is a game based on the Italo-Greek War of 1940-41. If you have to tell the audience that the war actually happened, the game probably isn’t going to be a best seller. But for the hard-core Panzer Grenadier player, Ochi is going to be a must-have. Presenting it as a Deluxe Golden Journal, exclusive for the Gold Club, lets us print Ochi as a limited-run item so the devoted fans of Panzer Grenadier can have it (complete with the same wonderful pieces as the other games).

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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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