Just before Christmas I decided I should spring some Christmas surprise on the NBS team. Whatever I did have in mind evaporated as soon as I realized that it would only take me a day to write the final rules for mine and Stefan Ekstrom's little game on Espinosa. The idea to make the game available for download came a few minutes later. We just had to check with Dean to make sure that a free download would not violate The Gamers' copyright policies or the master plan in general, but Dean gave us an OK and off we went.

The job of course took three days and was mostly spent on things that had no bearing on the actual game. Different paper standards (Do you know how much wider-in millimeters--an A4 is than a US legal sheet?), color-separation, and JPEG compression. Stuff like that. Sheer torture.

When these issues were solved the actual publishing was simple as the Series Rules and Tables already existed as Portable Document Format (PDF) files. On the December 17 we uploaded these and the new game: rules, map, counters and turn-track, on the web. We told a few friends and strolled off into the sunset. On New Year's Eve the page has had 1,350 visitors, one of them from India. A month later the tally had reached 3,000 and we have got a lot of useful feedback and even a favorable review (in France). Stefan's fantastic job on the 32 level map got the praise it deserved and we got some credit for doing the first scenario ever on this particular little fight. To cap the story of f, one can just add that one day Carl Fung called, out of the blue, and said that he was making an ADC2-module for the game. Look for the game files to be available again shortly at www.multimanpublishing.com.

In retrospect nothing we did caused any major disasters and we learned a lot. We did get a lot of help from the good men of the NBS Team; Jose Manuel Rodriguez Gomez and Francisco Ronco deserve extra-special thanks for digging up obscure Spanish documents for the game's COB. Thank you all, guys. You are the best.

Oh, and the game: The Battle of Espinosa de los Monteros was fought high in the Cantabrian mountains on the 10th and 11th November 1808 between Lt-Gen Blake's Army of Galicia and Marshal Victor's I Corps. The battle was fought during Napoleon's massive second invasion of Spain, and although Blake's starved troops fought the victors of Friedland to a standstill, it was all in vain as the Army of Galicia could not escape the jaws of Napoleon's grand plan.