This winter has really been flying by. With several projects going on at the same time, it seems there is little time to do any gaming, the main reason [or being in the hobby in the first place]. Well, it's not that bad, Bruce and I have been giving Ancient Warfare quite a workout. We took the game to the club and had a great time. This weekend we're having a group of old wargaming friends (been playing together for over twenty years) over to run a 25mm Roman vrs. Early Carthaginian game. This scale looks magnificent, as always, and it's a thrill to get the old Romans out for the first time in ten years.

I've been re-reading Polybius and Livy recently for some background on the Punic Wars. The prose and quality of writing are a vast improvement over much of what passes for revisionist historical work in our present time. Though the numbers of combatatants are impossibly skewed, the books give invaluable insight into the workings of the ancient commanders' minds. If you keep in mind the innate prejudices each 'historian' brought along with him (Roman writers were on the side of the winners, after all), you can glean much in the way of strategy, tactics, cunning, and armaments, armor, quality and types of troops used by the two sides.

It seems like everything related to putting out newsletters is going up in price. My printer informed me that I will now be paying 20% more per print run of SAGA. I refuse to raise the subscription price, but I do need to keep you as subscribers! I have lost more than a few of you to the internet. Please resubscribe so that I can keeping SAGA coming.

Things are proceeding well with Medieval Warfare. I have been busy with writing descriptions of all of the army lists, ninety-three of them! Besides that, the editing of Ancient Warfare is proceeding apace with each playtest. We are toying with the idea of using one scale of range for both 15mm as well as 25mm. Currently, 25mm figures use a ruler photocopied at 150%. We will see how it goes this weekend. Another innovation, brought to our attention by Jeff Ball, who, by the way, will be putting on demo games of Medieval Warfare at Cold Wars next month, is to allow Roman legionnaires to charge through other legionnaires, simulating manipular tactics. We'll try it and see!