The rules should tell us how to play the game.

Lightning's rules do, but not nearly as straightforwardly as Gamble's. This is a generalized standard, and I've made a generalized comment. However, the detailed discussions below will qualify the comment.

The rules should be organized logically.

Lightning has few, if any, faults of logical organization, although I disagree (as in Gamble) with the sequence of the headings: should Line of Sight be treated as an advanced rule, the fifteenth heading? It seems more basic than that.

Also, the organization of the advanced rules (marked throughout with an omega) causes some problem: there is a group of omega headings at the end of the rules, almost as if the designer thought of them as optional rules; but these advanced rules are also interspersed throughout the basic [?] rules. The omega makes them easy to see (and skip, if you're not playing them). But the organization seems mixed: are they really optional? (I think not; see below) or are they really required?

The rules should be presented in the order that the gamer needs to know them.

As in Gamble, Lightning presents the gamer with a sequence of rules presentation that does not reflect the Sequence of Play. For example, the first step in the Turn Structure (3.1) calls for the Confederate player to roll for rain, for which the rules are in section 13.2, with ten sections of rules and eight pages of two-column text intervening.

The rules should separate non- playing information from playing information.

Lightning shares Gamble's faults in this respect. For example, most of us expect to see an explanation of the data on a counter relatively early in the rules; in Lightning it comes at 6.0, after the instructions for handling reinforcements. The playing and non- playing rules are intermixed throughout.

The rules should contain complete "housekeeping" coverage.

Lightning does contain complete coverage here, although it is intermixed distractingly, with SOP rules, as mentioned above.

Where appropriate, the rules should cross-reference related rules.

Lightning does contain some cross - referencing, but not, to my mind, enough. For example, 6.3 Morale Check tells us that morale checks are frequent; and its second paragraph says that terrain can have an effect on the morale checks, but doesn't say how. A reference here would have been helpful. Eight rules sections later, 7.0 Terrain has four sections, none of which mention morale. (It's on the Terrain Effects Chart play-aid card.) The gamer will continually flip back and forth in the rules as he learns and plays the game, and he will have insufficient cross-references to guide him.

The rules should present examples of play.

The illustrations in Lightning seem to have been scanned from a setup using actual counters and portions of the map. The straightforward explanations have been structured so that the example includes as many circumstances and variations as possible. (Unfortunately, the typeface in these examples is a condensed sans-serif that renders them particularly difficult to read.)

The rules should adhere to the conventions of language, presentation, and typesetting.

These standards have been met acceptably by Lightning, but not, I think, as well as they were handled in Gamble. The writing, which is not generally as straightforward, does not benefit from the extensive cross- referencing in Gamble. Where the sentences are clear, the communication is immediate; but where the reader will normally ask himself a question, the writing does not satisfy.

For example, in the discussion of the SOP:

Advance the Couplet marker at the end of each couplet, and flip it to indicate the first player in that couplet. Once the couplet marker reaches the "4+" box, it remains there until the turn ends, but any number of additional couplets may be played.

How does the Turn end? Nothing in the rules tells me how to end the Turn. On the Couplet track on the map, we see that at Couplet 3, the Turn may end on a roll of 7 or 8 for Turns 3, 5, and 6: there is an 80% chance of continuing on to Couplet 4 for those turns and a 90% chance for other Turns. At Couplet 4, we see that, for all Turns, the Turn ends on a roll of 7 or 8 -- an 80% chance of going on; for Turns 3, 5, and 6, a roll of 5 through 8 will end the Turn -- a 60% chance of going on.

For all these combinations, there is at least a 60% chance of getting stuck in a never-ending loop. And what's magic about Turns 3 ("early afternoon"), 5 ("evening"), and 6 ("night")? I can see increasing the chances of ending a Turn during the evening and night, but not during early afternoon.

The page presentation and typesetting are adequate. The basic typeface is again Palatino, as in Gamble, but this time ten points with two points of leading on a twenty-pica- deep line (and, because of the extra line depth, another point of leading would have helped), two columns. The section heads are twelve-point extrabold Helvetica. These combinations are all very readable.

I will quibble, however, with the boldface Post-Antiqua used for the seetion heads and the running heads, both because three different typeface families on one page seems excessive and because (this is opinion) Herbert Post's Antiqua was the ugliest typeface of 1939. As mentioned above, the typeface in the examples is very difficult to read.

The counters will be designed and executed so that the player can immediately know whom the counters belong to, know what values the counters present, and discriminate necessary information from unnecessary information.

The same team of designers worked on the counters for both Gamble and Lightning, so you'd expect Lightning's counters to fill these requirements quite as well as Gamble's, and they do. These counters, too, are crisp and clean. Their background colors (again, light blue and tan, both a little lighter here than in Gamble) are easy to tell apart and from the map colors. The outlines also face in different ways (the Confederates face right; the Union troops face left), and the data on the counters is easy to read.

My only criticism of these counters is that the same information for one side's counters is in a different place on the other side's counters mirror-imaged: it can be confusing until you get used to it. Ligbtning has 920 counters (not 940, as the back of the package says), of which just under 800 are units in play and the rest are administrative.

The map will use color sparingly and consistently.

The map for Lightning meets this standard, but not quite as well as Gamble's. The basic color for the map is a very pale beige, tending towards cream. The other terrain features use a blackish green and a nonstandard woods symbol for forested areas, a different symbol for rough woods, a middle blue for the streams, and three progressively darker browns for the elevations. (The orchards are not shown as a terrain type, their locations merely implied with type.)

The map will avoid harsh colors.

The colors for Lightning's terrain elevations do not meet this standard: the middle and darker browns are garishly prominent. The blackish green used for the wooded areas tends to disguise the black of the typesetting when they overlap.

The map will accurately represent the battlefield.

Within the limitations of the abstraction for the hex grid, Lightning's topography seems about right. It seems to me that, at this scale, the map should have included some of the lesser roads in the area. For example, The West Point Atlas shows the Hunterstown Road intersecting the York Pike at about hex 1924 and running off to the Northeast; leaving out this road could affect the play of the game - units entering the map at areas D and E could move much more quickly across this general area with another road at hand.

In Lightning, too, the naming of things went awry: "Fairfield Road" should be "Hagerstown Road," and "Harrisburg Road" should be "Heidlersburg Road." As in Gamble, this mis-naming does not affect game play; and neither does misspelling Gettysburg as "Gettysurg."

Aside: Typos. I'd like to differentiate between "typographical errors" and other kinds of language errors. Linguists like to point out the difference between language competence and performance. For example, I may know how to pronounce a word and have the physical equipment to do it - my competence is adequate. But if I'm gutter-rolling drunk at the moment, my pronunciation may suffer my performance is inadequate. Similarly, in most typographical errors reflect mistakes of performance, not competence.

Thus the misspelling of Gettysburg on Lightning's map: I have no doubt that those who worked on this map have the competence to spell Gettysburg, they just didn't do it in this performance; and the reader, in this case, isn't much inconvenienced by the misspelling.

Some typos can, however, cause the reader some pause: for example, the rules of Lightning, at 6.5, require an action "per rule 8.6." There *is no 8.6 in the rules, as the reader will find out when he looks: the reference should be to 9.6. This example shows what could be a typo; but it could equally well be an error in the original text from the writer that the editor didn't catch.

But most typos just don't cause that much trouble. Richard Berg (I think) has commented that producing a wargame with no typos in it is simply not worth the cost. I agree. Most wargames (or wargame magazines) don't have a large enough print run to absorb such a large non-recurring cost.

But please note that I'm talking about typos, not other kinds of language error: if the writer-editor-typesetter-proofreader combination does not know, for example, that in

Its a wise dog that knows it's master.

And please note also that, though typos may be expensive and as inevitable as Murphy's Law, we should not throw up our hands in hopelessness or flunk our task of rooting them out.]

The portion of the battlefield included for the game seems well-chosen for the scale of the game. You'll soon find that the map labeled 'West Map" is actually the East Map (and vice versa) and that you must rotate it so that the roads will match up. The narrow edge of the combined maps runs North- South, and the village of Gettysburg has been located about two-thirds of the way North and Just off center to the West. The grain of the hexes runs East-West.

The map will contain as much playing information as it has room for. Lightning's map contains a handy, clear strip of terrain symbols; a day track, a turn track, and a couplet track; and, for both sides, boxes for reserves and eliminated units; and tracks for rout and extra strength.

Play-aid cards will conform to the standards for rules, counters, and maps.

Lightning has two cards, printed back- to-back. The whole pages are set in three type families: Post-Antiqua, Helvetica, and Palatino one would have been enough. Most of it is in Helvetica, either bold or extrabold faces, much of it in condensed; it's very hard to read. One of its sides manages to use four type families.

Punctuation in tables and charts presents a special case for extreme care, functioning as it does as a kind of shorthand in these instances. There are some very strange punctuation uses in Lightning's card. In the "Commander Bonus Summary' and the "Fortunes of War Summary," there is an ern dash [-] following the beginning of the lines, illustrating the tendency of some to put something in a space when they don't quite know what else to do. (A colon belongs here.) Again, the Terrain Effects Chart sometimes has an em dash and sometimes "NE" for "no effect."

Play-aid cards will contain references to pertinent rules.

There is one reference to rules in Lightning's card. It needs more, many more.

Play-aid cards will conform to professional standards for tables, charts, etc.

Most of the comments given above for Gamble's card apply to Lightning's s card, although Lightning's is marginally better.

The Armchair Gamer Gettysburg, by XTR, and Gettysburg, by XTR; An Important Retraction; and a Lengthy Aside

Introduction
Gamble and the Standards
Lightning and the Standards
How They Play