Only last issue we provided the follow-up from HomerCon 2000, and already I can start banging the drum for the 2001 retreat. Mark your calendars for 27-30 September for the retreat on Dean's home turf. In the meanwhile, I hope many of you have been able to fit HomerCon West, Origins, or some other gaming gatherings into your plans. Origins is 5-8 July this year, in Columbus once again. Contact Wizards of the Coast or check the web site at http://www.wizards.com/origins/2001/ for details.

Yep, we have plenty of conventions to look forward to, and I'm promoting them this time around, in part perhaps because of my own recent gaming experiences. For well over a year now, I've been playing face-to-face pretty regularly, and I haven't played any solitaire in 2000. Like many of you, I have a tall stack of games that I want to get around to playing, but I've been sitting down to first playings of new (and not so new) games more often than I've been acquiring them, in a reversal of my pattern from a few years ago. The point is that real, live wargaming is fun, well worth whatever logistical efforts you have to make to bring time, place, and opponent together. In this spirit, Operations 40 has something like a theme, with features covering conventions and play techniques. Another article on the continuing campaign of This Hallowed Ground is coming in a future issue. In the words of the old Mousetrap commercial, "Roll your dice and move your mice!"

Every so often I've asked for your opinions about the magazine, either in person or in these pages. Last issue Dean published a survey (Out Brief 39), and we received enough responses to give us something to work with. You can see some of our conclusions reflected in this issue, as we heed the general call for reduced repetitive content. Of course, we have to keep the catalog, upcoming games, and errata up to date, but I've trimmed a good deal of the "same old same-old." I bet no one feels less regret than I that the Game Ratings Chart will no longer be a fixture every issue. The way we have handled the ratings, especially the way I prepared them for print, was both timeconsuming and error-prone.

That said, let me remind you to keep on sending in your ratings. We continue to compile them and will publish them in some convenient and interesting way. I'm considering different formats, including something like the categorization by era that the SPI Strategy & Tactics used. You may also like seeing the ratings subdivided by publisher, by scale, or by "medium" (land, sea, or air). It might also be interesting to group the rated games by year of publication.

Per the opinions in the recent survey, I'm compressing the space used for Consortium material. That means the Consortium companies' news contains nothing but important items. Read them all on page 3.

Speaking of changes to the magazine, I'm not sure that everything we've been publishing works best in quarterly installments. The game release schedule is fine as magazine content, since it's locked in many months in advance. But maybe the lag time on errata seems too long. And it's a bit awkward trying to do news items with this much lag time. The Dean-o-Grams and the list are ways to get out announcements more rapidly to those of you with Internet access, and that looks like just about all of you according to the survey results. I'm studying what works best in the magazine, and I'm happy to hear your opinions on the question.

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