For the last 18 months my local club has been working on an expansive video project, dedicated to the hobby of historical miniature wargaming. I'm quite proud of what we've been able to film and edit, and hopefully the wider gaming community will enjoy it. The introductory videos for the series launch this week and the official premiere of the first game episode is July 12, when Historicon 2018 kicks off. The season "trailer" appears right here, and you can click over to our YouTube channel for more. After the break, I'll explain what this whole thing has to do with Altar of Freedom. 

It's been over a year since the last "news" update here at the Altar of Freedom homepage and some announcements are probably overdue. For more than a year I have been working on a number of new wargaming projects not directly related to AoF, and I'm pleased to report that a couple of them will be wrapping up this summer. Also wrapping up within the next month will be a long, long overdue follow up to Gibraltar of the West, our campaign supplement that has been downloaded for free on this website by nearly 5,000 of you. Read on after the break for all the summer announcements!        

A single 6'x4' tabletop covers the entire Petersburg front and gives players a great feel for how thinly manned the trenches could be and how desperate each side became to find the open flank of the other. In addition to the free scenario, you can also check out a photo-filled AAR of Globe Tavern being played at our local club. Next week, I'll post a new terrain tutorial showing the step-by-step process used to make the 6mm Petersburg forts and trenches seen in the AAR. Globe Tavern now brings our total available scenario count to 40! More free stuff will continue to flow here at 6mmACW.com as a way of thanking all the players who have bought the rules and supplements since 2013.   ​

Early this May, we opened voting on a poll to see what great Civil War campaign players would most like to fight. There are so many excellent choices, but we initially narrowed the finalists to six--three from the east, and three from the west. The democratic process is an inherently messy one, which means our players wrote in three more vote-earning candidates. In another great American tradition, quite a few voters attempted to cast multiple ballots, sometimes all during the same day, and sometimes cleverly spacing out their votes over the course of weeks. Although we are not fortunate enough to have sensible voter ID laws here at 6mmACW, we do have IP address screening technology, allowing us to weed out about 50 of the 250+ votes cast in this poll. 

After the break, we'll reveal the results in detail!

It's been about a month since Gibraltar of the West was released and well over 500 downloads have occurred since that time (edit: closer to 700 by the time I got around to publishing this post). There's been lots of positive feedback from players, including several who have already run multiplayer campaigns of their own. Tony Hawkins of the "Wednesday Warriors" and "Wargame Developments" created an indexed version of the campaign map, so that grid spaces can be individually referenced. You can download his revised map in the links below! And if you haven't downloaded the rules quite yet, get started on your own Vicksburg operation! It's completely free to play. 

Before selecting Vicksburg as the first campaign for our system, I spent time gathering resources and information for about half a dozen possible contenders. Given the enthusiasm for Gibraltar of the West, it's safe to say that another campaign offering will eventually be released. Several are in various stages of design right now, but which campaign most interests you? We want to hear from our players around the world to find out which ACW campaign we should focus on next. Below the break, you can cast your ballot for one of six possible campaigns--three from the eastern theater, and three from the west.

Survey results will be released on July 4th, the day Pemberton surrendered Vicksburg to Grant!