Fire & Sword:
Publisher’s Preview
by Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
December 2023

The heart of the Panzer Grenadier series lies on the Eastern Front, with large, intense games like Fire in the Steppe, Broken Axis and Burning Tigers featuring huge clashes of armor and intense infantry assault. We get back to that truth with the biggest of them all, Fire & Sword.

Fire & Sword is designed by Philippe Léonard, best known for his work on the Western Front with games like 1940: The Fall of France.

Fire & Sword is based on the Soviet offensives and German counter-offensives around Budapest, Hungary between October 1944 and January 1945. It’s a Panzer Grenadier game, which means it’s a tactical-level game where the units are platoons and batteries. The title’s borrowed from Henryk Sienkiewicz’s magnificent Polish Trilogy (along with Fire in the Steppe and The Deluge). The cover painting’s by Georgi Ivanovich Marchenko, with package design as always by our Susan Robinson.

Fire & Sword uses the playing pieces from the old Road to Berlin game, plus an additional sheet of 88 new pieces, with five new maps and a totally new scenario set. The pieces include the German regular army, the Waffen SS party militia, the Red Army of Works and Peasants, Soviet Guards, and the Royal Hungarian Honvédség.

The new pieces include Hungarian Nimrods (yes, they’re called Nimrods - it’s a self-propelled anti-aircraft gun), German panzerschrek bazooka platoons and Möbelwagen self-propelled anti-aircraft guns, Hungarian gunboats, Italian tanks in SS service, Hungarian 44M Szalasi rockets, Soviet penal troops, Hungarian paratroopers, Hungarian Zrinyi assault guns, Hungarian Toldi tanks and Csaba armored cars and a Hungarian armored train. And a German “Jaguar” platoon – T34/85 tanks manned by German infiltrators, sort of like the efforts made in the contemporaneous Battle of the Bulge, if they’d been done competently.

It’s a glorious collection of Panzer Grenadier weirdness, way beyond simple gonzo levels. I don’t think we’ve ever put anything quite like this in any of our games. And you get to use all of them in the scenarios at least once.

The scenario set is completely new; we did a dozen scenarios set in Hungary in the old Road to Berlin but I designed those. Every Fire & Sword scenario was designed by Philippe, and all from scratch. There are 52 of them, organized into eight chapters, each with its own battle game to tie them together.

The campaign is perfectly suited to our story arc structure. Following their successful offensive in Romania (seen in Grossdeutschland 1944), Soviet armies overran much of Hungary in the autumn of 1944. In October, the Soviet Second Ukrainian Front began an offensive aimed at capturing Budapest; it failed, and so they tried again in November, and failed again.

Then Third Ukrainian Front arrived in December, and the Soviets this time avoided the head-on assault and surrounded Budapest, closing the ring on 26 December, St. Stephen’s Day (St. Stephen the patron saint of Hungary is a different Stephen, celebrated on 20 August).

Fire &Sword concludes after the first German attempt to break the encirclement; we continue the story in Ramparts of Vienna, with another 39 scenarios in six more chapters, covering the further failed German attempts to relieve Budapest, the Soviet offensive toward Vienna that followed the fall of the Hungarian capital, and the March 1945 German offensive, when the the panzer reserves withdrawn from the Ardennes were flung into a doomed effort to shield the oil fields at Nagykanisza. Once the Soviets had chewed up those divisions, Germany was finished.

You fight those battles on five brand-new map boards, showing more urban terrain than our other games set on the Eastern Front usually sport; we are now fighting just outside one of Europe’s great capitals, after all. While we remain on the Eastern Front in terms fo military history, Hungary in 1944 and 1945 is more similr to Western Europe in terms of urban development and intense cultivation, compared to the steppe country of Ukraine and central Russia.

The maps include a river (the Danube), large towns and forests and orchards, and a road net more in keeping with Western Europe than parts East. It’s a new set of terrain, one we’ll of course re-visit again and again in future expansions. Those include a new type of Panzer Grenadier expansion, based on a proposal from that we’ll probably call City Fighting, which is based on city fighting. It takes Panzer Grenadier into the realm of Military Operations in Urban Terrain, and in this case it lets us track the fighting within Budapest as well as without. That will be a separate expansion, since it has its own urban maps with large hexes and I need to keep Fire & Sword within its budget.

In our more recent games, we’ve been using a much tighter focus to craft chapters in which the scenarios follow one series of actions over a number of days. Fire & Sword is another historical study in game format, much like Fire in the Steppe, and it’s very much the sort of game I want to publish. Fire & Sword is totally new. Yes, most of the pieces appeared in an older game, but at this point just about every Panzer Grenadier piece in an Eastern Front game - the T34, the Panther, that German GREN or Soviet INF - has shown up in another game.

Fire & Sword is another extraordinary game from the workshop of Philippe Léonard, with the intense game-play and deep history you’ve seen in 1940: The Fall of France or Road to Dunkirk. It’s an absolute necessity for the hard core Panzer Grenadier player.

You can order Fire and Sword right here.
Please allow an extra four weeks for delivery.

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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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