If you checked the white mailing cover on your last issue before diving in, you may have noticed that, starting with #23, we are shipping Ops 1st class. We had a very large number of subscribers who never got their issue #22 and the changes in the Bulk Mail system have made the cost difference between 1st Class and Bulk Mail not as great as it had been.

Also, Bulk Mail has become something of a nightmare to pull off: even the most minimal sorting requirements are a real pain, enforcing the sort of tedious hand- sorting and list checking that could drive even a trained professional insane. On top of all of that, a good 15% of the magazines never arrived at the customers' addresses, causing us to resend the mag and you to go without a mag you should have already had in your hands. To preserve our sanity and yours, we switched to 1st Class even though it costs more.

In the tangentially related category of "the last shall be first," yes, I should have listed my loss to Jan Wels as game 2 of Champion Hill in last issue's HomerCon report. And looking again at last issue, let me confirm that you have permission to photocopy the Zombie and Mob counter images so you can play "Island of the Lost Nazis!" in style. My wife and I came up with the counter idea long after the counter sheet with Hitler's brain had gone to press.

Alas, UPS has implemented a major rate hike, requiring us to reinstitute the separate shipping fee. It is not feasible for The Gamers to absorb the entire cost of this increase.

In This Issue

In this issue: You met our authors' cardboard avatars on the Repls & Variants sheet, now read their article. From what I see both at conventions and through the mail, TATC, like the battle it simulates, remains popular with gainers. And as I remarked in Ops 21, Thunder will continue to enjoy coverage in these pages, at least as long as it commands the attention of players and writers like Steve and Deac. This issue also includes the last installment of Al Sandrick's reports on "The Weapons of Yom Kippur," which I bumped from the "news window" a couple of times.

In future issues, expect to see plenty of material on games as "old" as Yom Kippur, especially on OCS topics. The time it takes to play, analyze, and write about these games, plus the time it takes me to find space for submissions, adds up. So you have not yet read the last of what Operations will give you regarding EatG... or even Guderian's Blitzkrieg.

One correspondent wrote that Ops overemphasizes CWB and TCS material at the expense of the OCS. Don't worry: I have enough OCS material on hand--from various authors--to provide at least one feature-length article per issue; also, don't discount the possibility of another special section (like the one on EatG and the OCS in Ops 20). Your comments about the magazine's content mix (or whatever else) are always welcome.