This miniatures rules set is by the late John Hill, who also wrote Johnny Reb. The latest version of the latter, Johnny Reb III, was published in 1993. These rules might be considered as Johnny Reb IV, although there are considerably more differences between Across a Deadly Field and Johnny Reb III than there were between Johnny Reb III and the two previous editions. The most obvious are two-fold. First, the ground scale is doubled, and the number of stands per unit is halved (varies slightly depending on the scale of figures used). The second is that units of opposite sides move in alternate segments of the turn instead of simultaneously. As the designer notes, this is because the publisher, Osprey, insisted that “the rules had to be contained within the pages of a hardbound book. That meant that the core game ‘engine’ would have to depart from the Johnny Reb system that used ‘order cubes’ or ‘order chits’ to give a secret order to each unit, which would then be simultaneously revealed and resolved.” Without having playtested the system to be certain, it appears that the system adopted has resolved this issue satisfactorily. ( )