The recent announcement by Amazon confirmed that John Hill has been working with Osprey on a new set of hardbound deluxe ACW miniature rules entitled, “Across A Deadly Field” (ADF) that will enable gamers to recreate large battles while still using individual regiment and batteries. Cigar Box Battle is super excited about this one!  John has loosely referred to the rules as a grand tactical version of Johnny Reb III, and the gaming scales do suggest that it is almost an exact “half sized” version of JRIII. Its15mm ground scale will be approximately one inch equals 100 yards and each figure represents about 60 men and most regiment will be two stands.  However, it will not solely be a 15mm game as the final product will have detailed fire and movement charts for both 6mm/10mm figures along with 25mm/28mm figures.  The turn time scale will be bumped up to 30 minutes per turn to accommodate longer battles.  According to John, a key design intent is that no figure remounting will be necessary – just grab half as many stands per regiment while the battery presentation will be the same – one gun figure per battery, with the number of gunners representing the number of gun sections.   Gamers will certainly see the Johnny Reb roots of the system – but, it draws as much from John’s earlier board game mechanics.  For example, since Osprey cannot pack “order cubes” or “order chits” with its “books” so John went to a move/counter move system derived from his very successful Squad Leader boardgame and the combat results table will have more morale checks than figure kills – which is very much like Squad Leader.  

With the ground scale exactly halved and the figure scale doubled, this means that a battle that would take a six foot by twelve foot table, could now be recreated in half that space.  So, with a little tweaking around the edges, almost all of the main Gettysburg battlefield from just north of Barlow’s Knoll to just south of Big Round Top would fit roughly on a 5 by 9 foot ping pong table.   I was worried that since the scale was bumped up for larger battles, the game might be simply a simplified version of JR III and that much of the detail might be “dumbed down”.   Well, John assured me that would not be the case as since JR was first published, miniature gamers have become much more sophisticated and in John’s opinion they can easily handle a lot more detail and complexity than twenty years ago when Johnny Reb was first published by Adventure Games.  That said, ADF will probably have about the same level of regimental and battery detail as does JR III.

One of the unique characteristic of all three of the Johnny Reb rules was its use of hidden order markers that when revealed gave the game a lot of suspense along with a semi-simultaneous turn resolution — and John assured me that all the mechanics of the new game will still work fine within the traditional JR “order marking” system and that all ADF scenarios will work for JR III – since the ground scale of ADF is exactly half that of JR III and the JR III uses four stand regiments, while ADF uses two stand regiments. Speaking of scenarios, John also mentioned that Osprey intends to fully support this product with hardbound, full color scenario books – two of which are already in the works. That said, John has noted that many gamers do not like their game board cluttered with order markers, so the new rules will also have a smoothly integrated action/reaction sequence that accomplishes much the same result without the order chits.  John feels that both systems will give the gamer a realistic and playable ACW game – so both options will be presented.  

While a May 2014 release date seems like a long time away, John responded that Osprey has a long standing tradition of making sure that everything they publish is presented with a very high end finish along with a penchant for getting all the details right and they fully intend to give themselves enough time to do that.  On the other hand, Osprey does have a solid reputation of getting the stuff out when they promise – unlike some other publishers. While, it would have been nice to have it out for the 150th Anniversary of Gettysburg – John felt it was better to take the time to make it really superb product.  One thing, Amazon did get wrong is that ADF will be a hardbound deluxe product, with lots of gorgeous full color graphics, much like Osprey’s very popular “Bolt Action”.   Given that, John was surprised to see that Amazon was offering it at a pre-publication rate of only $28.71.  Even though you will have to wait until May of next year to get the rules, that is a very, very good price for a hardbound edition.

Here is a link to pre-order “Across A Deadly Field” on Amazon