Naturally, after the lack of letters last time, a flood occurred for this issue. I will attempt to put in as many as I can this time and will save the remainder for the expected drought next issue...

The Gamers Stink!
by Okmed d'Ivad

First of all, let me point out that the Gamers are full of themselves. "We're very proud of our on-time record," they say. But if you think about it, this remark is not just a dig at the other game companies but is an insult to us game buyers too. It's as if The Gamers think they need to be competitive in the wargame market. The implication is that those of us who aren't picky enough to demand quality wargames on time are willing to buy any old thing. How elitist!

The Gamers's games are too colorful. Back in the good old days, when SPI games came in generic white boxes, a little touch of color made a big difference. Remember when Redmond Simonsen started using green for woods hexes? Wow! But nowadays we get so much color that it's getting boring. Nine different terrain levels? Full-color aircraft? Gee, that's nice (yawn). And look what happened to SPI shortly after they went to full color maps: they turned belly-up and became dragon-food!

Besides, the color coding on units reflects their historical organization, and because of those stinking, complicated command rules, you just can't send your units every which way. In the good old days, if you needed an extra '2-4' Infantry Division to make your 3:1 odds, you just moved one in. You didn't need color coding because you were in command, not history.

As the Blues Brothers said, "I hate Illinois Nazis!" Have you noticed that the Boys from Homer are into swastikas? There are Krauts on three game box tops, and the Germans usually have the best units. Look at the Panzer Lehr recon platoons for example. Or consider this: in Guderian's Blitzkrieg a German panzer battalion overrunning a Soviet tank division in clear terrain stands a good chance of winning -- Flampanzers overrunning a Penal Battalion gives an even more lopsided result. But we'll probably never see an OCS game with the Red Army killing Hitler Youth in 1945. I bet Dean and Dave don't even laugh at Hogan's Heroes re-runs.

Finally, The Gamers are enemies of variety. The hobby has two magazines cranking out games at a combined rate of over one a month. Boxed games are booming, too. The Gamers call this boom a glut. And what have they been doing? Sure, they gave us two new series in '92, but they also pumped out four CWBs between April '92 and today. When a gamer has to choose between playing a proven and revised system or learning a novelty in a magazine, he'll make the fun choice. As a result more players are getting into new battles with the CWB instead of exploring the new, avant-garde, serious systems coming out. And if no one plays these avant-garde games, who's going to generate all the errata and do all the "post-publication development" that these games usually require. The Gainers are holding back the state of the art, dang it all!

[Ed. Note: The above arrived on 1 April 93 (strangely enough). Sara was the first to figure out that Okmed Okmed was David Demko spelled backwards ... April Fools!]

In Operations #8 you complained that you'd received no "letters to the editor" for that issue. I have no axes to grind or points to make (sort of .. ), but perhaps you'll have room to print some (non) biased praise. So, in a lighter vein, I humbly present your readers with...

A Guide to Homer, Illinois and Tips for the Trip
by Don Nesbitt, Arlington Heights, IL

I've now made the trip "To Homer and Back" three times, and I'll begin by recommending the trip to anyone within a four hour drive of this idyllic locale.

TIP #1: Call ahead and find out what's going on, as Dean will happily put any extra hands to work. For example, I've helped collate Perryville and EAW (1st trip) and prepare the Enemy at the Gates maps (2nd trip). While both experiences were fun and enlightening, we did work!

Another reason to call ahead is to get directions. While Homer is certainly NOT a metropolis, The Gamers's warehouse (office/design studio/ library/playtest center) is not on the main street. If you still manage to get lost, stop at the Public Library (1st floor of City Hall), which is on the main street, and ask the librarian where Dean lives. She'll give you directions to the Essig house where Sara or the baby-sitter will give you directions to the warehouse.

TIP #2: Don't travel with Jerry Axel. The baby-sitter still has not forgiven us for Jerry's comment "Don't worry ma'am, we're not revenuers." There's also an irate farmer who wants to shoot the city-slicker who drove by singing "Green Acres."

For those of you who've been amused by the OCS GB credits to the "Burrito as Big as Your Head," I can only warn you that this is no laughing matter. The lunch break generally consists of a half-hour drive to Champaign, IL and a "small" single-course feast.

TIP #3: Go to Homer HUNGRY! The "Super-Burrito" at La Bamba does weigh three pounds, and as your "Right of Passage" (Or initiation) you've got to eat the whole dam thing. I must come out of the closet and admit to the world that on my first two trips, I failed the test.

[Ed. Note: 'choked' would be more like it.].

On the third trip, I gave up and just ate a regular burrito (about 1 1/2 pounds). Will you and Owen stop laughing at me now, Dean?

On the serious side, if you're at all interested in the process of how scattered information from widely varying sources is transformed into a successful wargame, visiting Homer can be a fantastic experience. I briefly met Dean & Co. at Origins/Gen-Con 92, and I know Dean doesn't remember the moment. Now he can't get rid of me, and has even had to include my name in the credits of three upcoming releases. If you've ever wanted to see you name in print, one of the easiest ways to do so is to assist The Gainers, in some way, with design / development / production of a game (collating doesn't count, but there are other benefits to that). Dean was serious when he asked for assistance in Operations 6 and he gives credit for such assistance. As he said, waiting to bitch about what's wrong with a finished product doesn't help any of us enjoy the quality of the game we wanL

A few comments regarding your Opinion and Editorial from the Spring 93 issue of your magazine.
By Ed Wimble

1992 was not only a year of the Great Game Glut (3G), it was also one of recession. I agree with you that a great game will sell regardless of both of these, but "Great Game" and "Great Sales" are two very relative terms than mean different things to different people.

For us to invest 30 to 50 thousand dollars in a game (roughly what it costs us to produce one, as you know) that game is expected to do certain things aside from providing an equitable return on the investment. It is expected to pay royalties and commissions, as well as contribute to the fixed costs of running a business. A very small game company such as ours, with a single full-time employee, needs about a thousand dollars a week just to do nothing. And everything we do adds its corresponding share to that amount. Therefore, if we published one game a year, that gaine would have to generate between 80 and 100 thousand dollars (covering the cost of the game and the cost of our doing nothing). Of course, this assumes various printers, etc., will wait till the end of the year for their money ... which they won't, and that brings up the problem of cash flow. Cash flow can be solved by one of two methods: good sales or good financing, both of which add to the cost of doing nothing (good sales means lots of advertising, shipping, and various selling expenses, good financing brings lots of interest). Also, the longer a game stays in our warehouse, the longer it has to contribute to our fixed expenses (the cost of doing nothing). Each dollar this game ties up sitting in our warehouse prevents us from putting that dollar to some other use, subsequently.

A "Great Game" means something entirely different to me than it does to the game aficionado, since it is the reason why I am cold in the winter and blasted hot in the summer, as well as sleepless in my bed and late for dinner. (I admit that playing a great game has also caused me to experience these things, but the level of distraction made them more bearable.) A "Great Game" (in the second sense) should also produce great sales, but doesn't always ... as we both know, the reasons of which are too numerous to state in this letter, aside for the ones already mentioned: Glut and Recession.

Having a finger in the lead industry makes me somewhat knowledgeable in that aspect of our hobby, one in which there is also a glut. Since it is a little easier to perceive there, let me use it for an analogy.

In general, most figures are sold and marketed on blistercards. Each game store has a finite number of pegs on which these blistercards can be displayed for sale. Slow selling figures hang on the pegs longer than faster selling figures, and therefore, tie up that peg for a longer period of time. At least once a month (more often, once a week) a store will place its order for restock and new merchandise with its preferred distributor. The buyer for the store can tell at a glance by counting the number of empty pegs if his selection of figures needs to be restocked, or if he wants to buy newly released figures. Having been a distributor, I have experienced the buyer's response generally stated as either "no, figures aren't selling this week," or the reverse, "yeah, lead is really moving." Note that individual products are not mentioned, everything is lumped together as either selling or not selling, reflecting an entire sub-industry in one perception. If the number of available pegs are for the most part occupied by slow selling merchandise, or outright garbage, lead sales in that store will eventually grind to a halt.

If the number of lead figures released each week increases beyond the number figures sold each week, the pegs will look as if nothing is selling, even though there may be steady activity in that part of the store, since the buyer's glance only reveals what it sees ... full pegs. Therefore, too many releases and too much garbage have the same effect by filling up the pegs, and good sellers are not restocked. Good sellers that are not restocked are never allowed to develop into great sellers. So, in this sense, the quality of the figure has nothing to do with the repeat sales of that figure, only the perception of the store buyer. Believe me, boardgames are not treated differently than lead figures in most stores. In fact, they are treated worse since they take up more room.

The only counter to this is the customer lobby who go into the store looking for a particular game that is not currently in stock. If the customer, however, only asks for the game, the manager or buyer will merely state that it is out of stock, and that is as far as it goes. If the customer actively lobbies for the game, or if everyone and his brother asks for the game, or games by a particular company, the manager or buyer will take notice and give it a tentative try.

Now how does recession affect this? Sales drop across the board. The customer lobby loses its steam since they too are in a financial foxhole, whether real or perceived, and solve part of their temptation to buy by frequenting the store less often. Goods pThe up in the store making the manager/buyer less likely to try anything out of the ordinary. And worst of all, nothing is restocked since only new items are going to have a good chance of selling, albeit in smaller quantities. Now you can debate the real nature of this recession until you're blue in the face with me [Ed. Note: I'll say many things, but denying the recession isn't one of them] and you won't change the fact that last week. Chessex Distributors had 91 people respond to an ad in the local paper for a single, unskilled warehouse position (arid those were the people who stuck around in the crowd long enough to fill out the application!)

So, 1992 was a year of recession and glut, meaning more products were released at the same time as sales in the stores diminished. AH in all, CoAG increased its overall sales by around 30%. Part of this was due to a higher profThe we presented (bringing about a slightly larger distribution) and part of this was due to releasing twice as many boardgames as in the previous year. But wait a minute, twice as many boardgames should have meant double the sales. Oh, astute reader, there lies the conundrum.

If we limit our print runs in the future, it is to get a quicker return on our investment, so that we can afford all those costs for doing nothing. It has nothing to do with our giving up on finely crafted games. The reason we can do between four and six games a year has to do with the number of partners in the company, who each designs or develops two games a year (or tries to) and has nothing to do with decreased attention paid to each game. The bigger a company gets the more it is subject to normal market pressures. The older a person gets, the more kids he has. The older the kids get, the more expensive they become, in the mean time UPS keeps raising its rates, phone bills get larger even though you're only making a few more calls than you used to, rents increase, you need more space...etc., etc. Nothing's cheap except the value other people put on your own time. So we could print games and store them for future generations, or hope that these will prove to be the ones that everyone is waiting for. Or we can downsize the print run, make a profit and invest the profit into the next project. If a game happens to capture the interest of people unlike ourselves and sells really well, we can always reprint it.

So even though our sales volume increased last year, the perception of the store buyer is that they didn't, lumping them together with all the other stuff that's piled up in his comer, And while some games pulled ahead of the pack (Speed of Heat, Stalingrad Pocket and SPQR to name a few) the available shelf space is still packed with some pretty slow moving stuff that win remain there to reinforce the impression, and affect future buying. If things sell great in 1993, and the stuff we do demands a reprinting, and we can reprint without losing our shirt, fine, we'll reprint. But as the Button Moulder pointed out to Peer Gynt, the only sin in this world is not knowing oneself.

Maneuver Warfare
by Boyd Schorzman, Seattle, WA

In addition to the correspondence you have received from me over the last couple of weeks, I wanted to formally respond to an article you wrote in the last issue of Operations. I have found your ongoing series of articles on maneuver warfare both interesting and informative. Your comments on the nature of blitzkrieg and hyperblitzkrieg (the air-land battle doctrine we both know and love ... ) were incisive.

However, I feel that in installment #4 "Bulldozerkrieg" you might have missed a small but important point. I agree that many traditional wargame designs have failed to address the fundamentals of blitzkrieg/maneuver warfare. However, I believe you somewhat gloss over two very significant reasons why this was the case. First, that WWII (and later wars also--if truth be told) was a war of attrition. Secondly that maneuver warfare, if practiced correctly, is fundamentally one-sided.

I know that my first point has been somewhat challenged recently by revisionists but only in terms of specific campaigns and situations. The truth is that attritional warfare still governed virtually all aspects of each side's national leadership. This dominance was not merely confined to Hitler and Stalin. Attritional warfare continued to control the doctrine, strategy, and operations for virtually every nation in that conflict-including Germany. That there were pioneers "pushing the envelope" only serves to validate this point. Witness the intense institutional resistance to those pioneers even after many should have seen the hand-writing on the wall. The best that can be said is that WWII was a conflict dominated by attritional warfare while maneuver warfare innovation occurred in an intermittent fashion.

Given the true nature of the war, it is no surprise that many game designers have taken the "easy" way out. It is far simpler to design a game that reflects a single system of warfare than to take on the dauntingly complex task of designing systems to accurately reflect warfare in transition. Traditional wargame design (ZOCs et al) does a reasonably good job of generically simulating most conflicts during the 20th Century. Organizational and economic pressures dictated a cookie-cutter approach to game design which are yet other reasons for a lack of design innovation. That these games provided little insight wasn't really the point. They "felt" right.

The other main reason for the paucity of game designs on maneuver warfare is that when innovators successfully implemented maneuver warfare on a large scale, the results were inevitably lopsided. Who wants to play the French in 1940? Army Group Center in 1944? Carnes that have inherently unbalanced situations require innovative, interesting, or thought-provoking designs to attract customers. As discussed earlier, there wasn't much impetus to produce games that possessed sufficient innovation or provoked enough thought to overcome this perceived play balance problem.

The real challenge is in not going too far. By that I mean assigning inappropriate maneuver warfare capabilities to forces. For example, the majority of forces in the German Army depended on the horse throughout WWII. The lack of wide-spread motorization prevented the Germans from practicing maneuver warfare on an armywide basis (I still wouldn't have wanted to be on the receiving end of the Bryansk Pocket, though!). The WWII German Army (as represented in GB) was a contrasting collection of WWI-style infantry spearheaded by modern combined arms Panzer Divisions. It would seem that the "blitzkrieg" was a transitional phase from attritional warfare to modern maneuver warfare.

I enjoyed Guderian's Blitzkrieg and look forward to the upcoming Enemy at the Gates. I will continue to watch with interest as you attempt to simulate WWII operational warfare and its transitional nature. Clearly your design does a superior job at simulating maneuver warfare. My question is whether or not it can handle the inevitable attritional nature of most WWII battles--including many of the operations in Russia during 1942-43 soon to be covered by Enemy at the Gates?