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| City: | Mahomet, Il.  | | Personal Data: | Male, born: August 15 1948 | | Membership | 21years 362days ago. | | Last Login | 6years 231days ago. | | Last Move | 11years 225days ago. | Phil Hall is currently  | Send a mail to Phil Hall |
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The Grenadier wasn't their House magazine?
In the few copies I have it deals with a lot of different games. In its Premier Issue talks of an UNOFFICIAL column with "new ideas on how to play GWD games". If it's not an house magazine, what it is?</q>
I had forgotten about The Grenadier. Do you have a publication date on any of them? I'm going to email Frank and ask about publication dates and why no BM followup. I know that after the game went to publication and was released GDW lost interest in it as a continued publication. They did a second run of the first edition in 1989 and sold about 2600 in the first 6 months. After that it took 4 years to get rid of the next 2000. ( I just found the sales record they sent when they realized they still owed me money. The common wisdom said that air games didn't sell, and WWI air games didn't sell at all. Air wargamers were a very small niche in the market. GDW was composed of wargaming friends who played ground games. (There is a story from the Cold War that has two Russian Generals sitting at a Paris cafe after a successful Warsaw Pact invasion of Western Europe. One says to the other "So, who won the air war?" ) That pretty much sums up the interest GDW had in doing anything more with BM. When it was republished it was mostly to have something on the market to keep the GDW name out there as a boardgame company. I was told that when they looked at the sales figures for games they wanted to republish to do that, that BM was among the top 10 in speed of sales. So they republished, and licensed it to France (Oriflame, and renamed Les Ailes de la Gloire) Italy (Stratelibre) and Spain (Desenos Orientales). So the truth of the matter is, there wasn't any interest in doing more planes by the company. That said, many of the players designed planes for the game. Alan Wright contacted me and got the parameters for designing the planes and did some new a/c plus he did the early war a/c for the miniatures version. Eric Hotz did Canvas Eagles and added the 3rd dimension with mandatory loss of altitude that I had thought about putting in.
Probably another reason for nothing in The Grenadier was BM was done out of house. I think it was the first time they published a game that wasn't done by a GDW employee. As such, while I got graphics help on the counters and map, everything else was up to me. I had to write, edit, and layout the rules, and make them fit the number of pages alloted to them. Since I didn't work at GDW it was also a case of out of sight, out of mind. I suspect no one considered an article or upgrade to the system. I wasn't even consulted when they did a second edition and screwed up the editing of the rules, creating a totally different game. (They referenced the Front Arc diagram as the Front Firing Arc. Suddenly you could hit any plane in front of you, not just down the three hexes in front of the nose. I only found out about that when I read a review in one of the English wargames pubs.)
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