Grand Tactical Battles in the American Civil War
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Winter is Coming

10/22/2016

16 Comments

 
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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.  

Campaign Supplement

You may recall that we ran a big poll this summer to see what level of interest players have in a new campaign supplement. Our first supplement covered the 1863 Vicksburg campaign and has since been downloaded by almost 1,000 players. What comes next? There are two Eastern Theater campaigns in various stages of design--one more advanced than the other--and I don't yet know which supplement will be released first. There is no firm release date for this campaign, except to say that it will be sometime this winter, early 2017. The new supplement will cover a much larger area and longer period of time than Vicksburg, and just to encourage you to keep painting more troops, here's a tiny preview of one little piece of the map, along with two photos from one of the major pitched battles that was fought in our play-test. Teaser: Our double blind play-test has yielded 5 tabletop battles (so far...). 

A Big Terrain Tutorial

It's probably best to clarify that the new terrain tutorial I'm finishing is actually not "big" in scope or difficulty. It's a fairly easy craft project anyone should be able to complete on a budget, but it addresses a problem that's bedeviled me for years, ever since I began gaming in 6mm scale. How do you make tiny cornfields? Seriously. I haven't found a satisfactory solution to this terrain question for years. ​There are some excellent products and tutorials for 28mm and even 15mm cornfields, but nothing that works well for the micro-scale we use with Altar of Freedom. I've finally produced something very sharp, perfecting a method I once tried in 2013 but failed to finish. I am excited to share it with the wider gaming community, since no one else seems to be offering any suitable ideas to date.  The 6mm cornfield tutorial should be ready to go before the holidays.

Print Edition is Back!

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Speaking of problems that have bedeviled me--the original print edition of Altar of Freedom has officially been sold out for...well...about 18 months. We originally ran 500 copies of the rules and those disappeared within the first year of distribution, with the only sales since then being done via PDF download on Wargames Vault. While I still think downloading and printing your own PDF is a great, affordable solution for rules (and we've sold even more PDFs than print copies) there have been many people emailing me about getting their hands on a hard copy. ​​Why has a second print run been so difficult? For starters, my first printer (a small local outfit) has since gone out of business. More pressing, my exclusive distributor for the print rules has since been sold and folded into another company. Thirdly, I am often busy with non-wargaming matters and setting up new printing and distribution takes a lot of time.
In any case, this is all a round-about way of saying that I finally buckled down and explored print options that would allow gamers to buy hard copies once again--especially all the players overseas. A stunning number of sales for Altar of Freedom come from outside the US, and finding an international solution has been a focus of my latest efforts.  Expect to hear news on this front within a matter of weeks, as the first proof copies arrived this week and should require only minor tweaking.

More Free Stuff

To celebrate the return of the print copy of the rules, we'll have some new free stuff posted to the website, in addition to the terrain tutorial. You should also see a couple new historical AARs and an entirely new free scenario, not published anywhere in the rules or scenario supplement books. As long time followers of this site will know, I like offering free content for players as a way of thanking them for trying the rules. This latest scenario will bring the total number of available historical scenarios to the nice, round number of 40! It will be a small engagement (35,000+ men is small by AoF standards, anyway) from a well-known campaign that receives little attention from most ACW wargamers. Look for this free stuff to start appearing on the site before the end of 2016.

Until then, happy gaming!

--GRW
16 Comments
Mitch
10/29/2016 04:52:06 pm

Greg - this is great news! Thanks for the updates. I have something to look forward to...yay.

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Andy Fuller
10/31/2016 04:19:16 am

Well this is terrific news on all fronts. Great deal to look forward to for both my brother and me. Unfortunately we can't visit each other with just one army. He's a 10mm man and I'm 6mm.

Reply
Steve T
11/5/2016 02:41:40 am

I love everything you guys do. I'm a 6mm scale fan myself (ACW & 7 Years War) living in the UK and have only just come across your site. I've just finished a short article for the Solo Wargamer's Association and mentioned the videos you made for YOUTUBE. I hope that you don't mind? You can contact me at the above e-mail address at anytime.
Steve.
PS I have a question for you concerning how you get the individual trees on your table to stand virtical without using bases? Am I correct in assuming you employ pins at the base to achieve this?

Reply
GrW
11/7/2016 05:38:15 am

Happy for the article mention, Steve! That's cool. I'd love to see the article sometime. I think we will be doing a lot more with YouTube in the future, and not just with 6mmACW.

The tiny individual trees are pins, wrapped in masking tape for some size and texture, painted brown/gray. Then a single piece of clump foliage is hot glued to the top of the pin. We use foam tiles underneath our ground mats and pin the trees into the mats. This is sometimes useful for pinning other terrain in place, as well. All the hills are foam, which means we can pin into them, too.

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Steve T
11/22/2016 12:44:29 am

The article should appear in the SWA's magazine ("Lone Warrior") soon, and on the website as well (or so I've been told by the editor Rich Barbuto).

Here's a link to the website: http://lonewarriorswa.com/

The article isn't much, but it does contain a number of links to other websites that might be of interest to wargamers, especially those who would like to construct their own terrain features.
Thanks also for the details concerning the trees - most useful.
I look forward to more of your videos on YouTube soon.

will corlett
11/10/2016 12:20:14 pm

Looking forward to the new supplements, we have replayed the Vicksburg one several times and it still throws out a surprise or two.

I do not know if anyone else wants to try this, but we wanted something more substantial than card counters. What we came up with was using plastic scrabble tiles.

Huh? These are relatively inexpensive (in the UK a set of 100 is around £3.00) come in various cours and measure 1.8 cm by 1.8 cm. Add a flag to the lettered side and away you go. A set of 100 will not only allow you to cover the divisional /army commands but allow enough over to to be used as brigade tokens for blind play
- a maximum of 78 and change for Fredericksburg.

Mapwise the original GOW map needed a slight increase in size to accomodate the tiles, making the print size of squares 2cm by 2cm

As for battles we scale up to a 12x12 grid for 4 square fight (18x12 for larger games) this equates to 4 inch squares on the battlefield. This allows for the individual brigades to be deployed ( one per square).

Bit of work to get the tiles ready, but hey so does terrain

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Mitch
2/9/2017 11:39:08 am

Any update on the free stuff mentioned above, like the new scenario, etc?

Thanks

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GRW
3/2/2017 08:53:47 am

My non-wargaming intervened to slow down these releases, but I expect the scenario to be available this month. It's a great little scenario that's an unusual action.

Reply
Mitch
3/12/2017 07:52:01 am

Thanks Greg. The non-wargaming world can be bothersome.. lol.

Mitch

Konstantinos Travlos link
3/15/2017 08:09:57 am

You guys are doing great work!

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Thom O
7/19/2017 08:00:03 am

Just picked up the rules and the Eastern Scenarios, these are really great. I am actually going to the Billy Bones Workshop ACW figures scaled down to 6mm. Looking forward to the new campaign, since with your teaser picture it looks like it is going to be for the Eastern theater.
Thom

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Chris
9/23/2017 02:31:46 pm

Are there any updates on the new campaign supplement?

Reply
GrW
9/26/2017 01:36:33 pm

Chris--while the supplement is essentially finished, I've been absorbed in a couple of major new gaming projects. I've made a vow to myself that I will finally get this thing over the finish line sooner rather than later. Hope to have some good news in this front before too long.

Reply
Thom Osborn
10/19/2017 07:54:10 am

Any more news on the Eastern Campaign?

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Chris
11/15/2017 02:36:21 pm

Will the next campaign supplement be the one that was shown on www.armygroupyork.com or something different? Either way looking forward to it's release.

Reply
Thom Osborn
12/18/2017 10:19:02 am

Yes, any word on the Eastern Campaign?

Reply



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