As of this writing A Dark and Bloody Ground is being finished up, with the final proofs of the counters being reviewed. The rules and charts have long been finished up, and only the map and 3 battle boards await a final proofread. By the time you are reading this article everything should be off to the printers. This game saw extensive playtesting even before it was turned into ATO, and there was much additional playtest work by others once I turned it in to the publisher. Some of the "fine tuning" related to the numbers of settlers that could be placed in an area, as well as how they would be deployed by the US player. Much discussion also focused on the role of raids and pillaging. Moving from DTP to large-scale printing of this game was also reason for pause by me. Many, many hours of proofreading and many, many emails were spent to iron all of the details. Particularly stressful was proofing the double-sided counters. Making sure my eyes didn't cross, and not getting distracted by Craig's really beautiful artwork, was an enjoyable but new challenge! Many of the playtesters called for a "quick and easy" battle resolution system, to be used in lieu of the battle boards. This was a call made by me only after a lot of consideration and thought, probably the toughest during the entire design and development process. The war in Ohio from 1790 to 1795 was essentially a bitterly contested guerilla war, one that grew out of a generation's worth of escalating tensions and hostilities/misunderstandings. There were only three "big" battles, with much of the war being decided by innumerable skirmishes, raids, the seemingly inexorable push of settlers coming out of the east, as well as Britain's ultimate failure to support their Native American "allies." To make battles too easy to initiate/resort to would skew the play balance too much, and present a warped interpretation of the history portrayed in the game. This simple decision shows how the focus of a designer's presentation is crucial to the development of the game that ends up on your table. By the way, lest anyone think I am cold-hearted uncompromising SOB developer, there will be an optional quicker (not necessarily really quick though) battle resolution system posted by me on Web Grognards. i Dark and Bloody Ground, as with all of the games appearing in Against The Odds, will be the result of mud time and effort by many people. I look forward to hearing from you with your game sessions. Back to Table of Contents -- Against the Odds vol. 2 no. 2 Back to Against the Odds List of Issues Back to MagWeb Magazine List © Copyright 2003 by LPS. This article appears in MagWeb.com (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other articles from military history and related magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com * Buy this back issue or subscribe to Against the Odds direct from LPS.