As a goodwill gesture to a certain New York outfit, I am retiring the title of Forward Observer from Richard Berg's column. Rest assured, the title may be changed, but not the ever enlightening writing of Richard Berg.

The rest of this column in given over to a letter by that vociferous letterwriter, Eric Goldberg:

Dear John,

The Grenadier is to be congratulated on the acquisition of Richard Berg's Forward Observer column. Mr. Berg has been the most consistently entertaining wargaming columnist over the past few years, aside from being an accomplished designer. His style, which consists of an overview of a game interspersed with diatribes about any and everything, often provides an informative and witty column for the reader. Furthermore, the writing is at very least irreverent, if not with tongue firmly planted in cheek.

Mr. Berg is a highly opinionated man, and is not adverse to engendering controversy with his reviews. As most of his best columns are the subject of some controversy, recent Forward Observers have delighted many and enraged a few. M r, Berg has, of late, dispensed with bothersome trivia like facts so that his column may be fresh and topical.

A case in point is the short diatribe about my Forward Observer column (it's getting so that you can't tell FOs without a scorecard) in Moves 46. Mr. Berg would have me advocate packaging bad games unattractively so that the consumer will be warned away from the product. While this is an interesting thesis, it is not what that column said, as any one who read more than a few selected paragraphs could tell. I did deplore the proliferation of bad games with above average or good artwork (which is, as Mr. Berg writes, wishful thinking), though the theme of the essay is to warn veteran gamers to be more careful in selecting their purchases. If the readers do pay heed to the column, wargame companies will spend more time working on games than on graphics, though students of mass psychology realize that this is very unlikely.

Mr. Berg's liberal interpretation of my essay does not prevent me from complimenting him on a highly readable column. I hope that he will see fit to make his column as informative as it is entertaining in the future.

Sincerely, Eric Goldberg