I hope you are making good use of the This Hallowed Ground random events tables. The extra permission is not, however, transferable. The RSS, to my mind, is cleaner and more smoothly playable than its parent system, despite the games' greater physical size compared with CWB titles. Soon, those of you still put off by the size of the first two RSS games will have no more reason to hesitate. A Fearful Slaughter (Shiloh) is coming, and its 34 x 44 inch map will fit comfortably on the same table you've been using for TATC, Bloody Roads South, and Barren Victory. Check out Dave Powell's designer's preview in this issue.

For OCS fans looking for a game of any size, from one map on up, there's Guderian's Blitzkrieg. With a big scenario selection and a broad historical scope, this is one of those desert island games: you can play it a long time before you use it up. Hope you're enjoying it. You should find much of Tony Zbaraschuk's advice about Hube's Pocket in this issue applies also to the latest OCS title.

As I write this, the collating weekend for GB II is wrapping up and The Gamers crew is preparing to hit the convention circuit, Don Con and Origins. By the time this issue reaches you, you should be about to set off for HomerCon. The 2000 Charles S. Roberts award nominees include Drive on Paris (Winner) and This Terrible Sound for best pre-WW2 game, Sicily (Winner) and A Frozen Hell for best WW2 game, This Terrible Sound for best graphics, Operations for best pro mag, and both Dean Essig and Dave Powell for Dunnigan awards. Also up for a Dunnigan are Rick Barber and Mark Simonitch, and Mark's Ukraine '43 is nominated for the graphics and WW2 awards. And hey, before we go to press, we know the winners, which include Drive on Paris for best pre-WW2 boardgame and Sicily and Ukraine '43 in a tie for best WW2 boardgame. We certainly thank you for this show of support. I'm glad to see Mark Simonitch receiving the recognition he has earned. If you've played This Terrible Sound, you're probably one of the people who nominated Dave Powell for the elegance and playability award. Find the full list of nominees and winners at http://www.consimworld.com/newsroom/story/0701/ 070201csr.html.

I'll take a moment for a personal appeal. Since Ops 41 went to press, I've received eight megabyte-plus (1800-1900 KB each) files via email from two different contributors. Guys, I love getting submissions for the magazine, but please, these files can choke a horse. The "home of Operations" still connects to the Net by dial-up. If you have to get huge files to me, please compress them with tar, gzip, MacBinary, hqx, or pkzip or put them on removable media and send them to The Gamers. Returning diskettes typically isn't worth the postage, but I will return ZIP disks. If you have questions about appropriate file and file system formats, please contact me before you send the material. Please don't send Postscript or PDF files alone as article submissions, since I need to be able to handle the text and images, and I can't do that with material submitted in a "terminal," printer-ready format. These files preserve the final format of your contribution quite well and help me understand how to lay it out, but I need the "native" files for all text and images.

This issue has a bit of something for everyone, assuming CWB fans are also interested in RSS. And there's an extra helping of NBS thanks to the indefatigable Anders Eager. The Marengo update he and the NBS team produced should have appeared last year, but we had lots of articles contending for the page space. Here it is now, along with information about the free NBS game Espinosa and a recipe. The Gainers takes absolutely no responsibility for the Chicken Marengo preparation instructions. Anders is not a trained chef. Eat at your own risk!