It's a busy week here at 6mmACW...in addition to the long overdue return of the Altar of Freedom print edition, we also have a brand new battle report available. The bloodiest day in American history--September 17, 1862--played out as a fantastic, nail-biting game at our gaming club. Photos and a brief video teaser are now posted to the After Action page. Be sure to check it out!

In a few days, we'll also be posting a detailed tutorial for how to make 6mm cornfields, which happen to be especially useful at Antietam--home of a field so famous and so bloody that it continues to be known simply as "the cornfield."

[UPDATE: The tutorial is now available!] 

As I foreshadowed in late October, hard copies of Altar of Freedom are once again available in printed, book format. I needed to find an easy printing solution that also solved issues with international distribution and am pleased to say that Lulu.com answered those problems nicely. Lulu is a print-on-demand service that ships around the world. There are some other POD services out there and I communicated with several of them and ran proof copies at two. In the end, Lulu fulfilled orders faster and with a nicer product. You can now order a print copy of the rules directly from Lulu's site and have it shipped to you within a week. 

The return of the print version of the rules will no doubt lead to some questions for players who may have already purchased a copy before. To find out what's different and what's the same, read on below.

It's been a quiet end of summer and first half of Fall here at 6mmACW.com, but as they so often say in one of my favorite TV shows, "Winter is Coming." And this winter, there will be plenty of happenings with Altar of Freedom. Since I don't expect anything major to drop before mid-November, this seemed like a good time to pull back the curtain on some of the projects in the pipeline and offer a few preview of what's just around the corner.  

On July 4th 1863, General Grant formally accepted Pemberton's surrender at Vicksburg. It was a defining moment of the war, although a more complex event than celebratory newspaper headlines of the time suggested (Grant paroled all 30,000 rebel defenders under the errant assumption most would never fight again). If you haven't yet downloaded our free Vicksburg campaign, today would be a fitting day to do so!  

Three years ago our club played the Cold Harbor scenario from the All Quiet on the Potomac scenario book, and last night four of us decided to revisit the engagement at the crossroads. 

This scenario represents the opening afternoon of what would eventually become a three-day battle. During the late afternoon of June 1, both Grant and Lee are shuttling forces south, probing for the far flank of each other's line.  Check out some photos of our game after the break and see if Early and Anderson's corps could rewrite history and seize the crossroads at Cold Harbor! And at the very end of this post, you'll find a quick update on our next campaign supplement.

It's been only a day since I posted Gibraltar of the West, but an alert gamer already discovered an important error. It appears that I accidentally uploaded an old draft version of the Random Event Cards. This older version does not have a card for the arrival of French's division. 

The corrected, updated version of the cards are now available on the campaign page. If you already downloaded the old version yesterday, you can also get the new cards by clicking the photo to the right!

If other errors or misprints are found in the campaign set, revisions and updates will be highlighted here, in our News section. 

The wait has been long, it is true. But after more than a year of development and play-testing, our first campaign supplement is finally available for download!

As you may have heard for the last few months, Gibraltar of the West and all necessary game components are 100% free.  The campaign system is fast, fun, and includes some innovative concepts that will allow players to link multiple Altar of Freedom battles through free-ranging map movement. If you'd like a quick introduction to some of the mechanics in this campaign, refer to our January preview.

For a photo-filled AAR of the campaign in action, you can now see how one of our Vicksburg operations resolved in the club. And finally, if you simply can't wait to get started on your own campaign, download everything you need now.

Altar of Freedom's first campaign supplement, which I teased earlier this month, will be released as a free PDF very shortly. Before it's made available for download, enjoy this quick preview, including photos from play-testing, a sample section of the theater map, and an overview of some game mechanics.

Why did we choose Vicksburg as the first campaign instead of a flashier, more conventional option like Gettysburg? Several reasons come to mind: (1) The Vicksburg campaign is often over-looked as one of the most decisive operations of the entire war; (2) Though typically viewed as a lop-sided fight, it is anything but. The forces involved are comparable and each side enjoys unique advantages and challenges; (3) The region between Vicksburg and Jackson is large enough for theater maneuver, but small enough to serve as a limited testing ground for players to first experience an Altar of Freedom campaign.