John Hill (6) (1945–2015)

This is a scenario book for the “Across a Deadly Field” rules. After a few pages of optional rules and some guidelines for laying out Eastern Theater battlefields, the book presents the scenarios. Oddly enough, there are no scenarios for 1861 or 1862. Instead, the presentation begins with a “First Day of Gettysburg scenario set” which, together with two scenarios for Meade’s Pipe Creek alternative, take up more than half the book. Some of these are fairly historical, some not. For example, “a very long day,” 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. of July 1, presents no enforced “lull from 12 noon to 2 p.m. when the only Confederate activity was artillery shelling. In ADF, that would be four turns of no Confederate attacks, which would drive most wargamers crazy.” Following the Gettysburg scenarios, there are two scenarios from the Shenandoah Valley in 1864 (New Market and Piedmont), and finally Ben Butler’s attack near New Market Heights.

One minor glitch in the book is the identification of all regiments from Pennsylvania as being “Philadelphia” regiments.… (mehr)

This miniatures rules set is by the late John Hill, who also wrote Johnny Reb. The latest version of the latter, Johnny Reb III, was published in 1993. These rules might be considered as Johnny Reb IV, although there are considerably more differences between Across a Deadly Field and Johnny Reb III than there were between Johnny Reb III and the two previous editions. The most obvious are two-fold. First, the ground scale is doubled, and the number of stands per unit is halved (varies slightly depending on the scale of figures used). The second is that units of opposite sides move in alternate segments of the turn instead of simultaneously. As the designer notes, this is because the publisher, Osprey, insisted that “the rules had to be contained within the pages of a hardbound book. That meant that the core game ‘engine’ would have to depart from the Johnny Reb system that used ‘order cubes’ or ‘order chits’ to give a secret order to each unit, which would then be simultaneously revealed and resolved.” Without having playtested the system to be certain, it appears that the system adopted has resolved this issue satisfactorily.… (mehr)