Blue & Gray Deluxe Edition – A Faithful Deluxe Reprint of Two SPI Quads

Aaron Danis, 28 March 2025

Blue & Gray Deluxe (B&GD) Edition from Decision Games arrived at my doorstep the other day somewhat unexpectedly. I was expecting a review copy of Battles for the East 4 (BitE), but this was in the shipping box as well. ¹

Nothing better than ripping the shrink-wrap on a massive package of Civil War goodness with the eight battles listed on the bottom of the box cover (L)! Open the box, and you get a beautiful rule booklet, baggies, and blue & gray dice, of course (R).

click images to enlarge

This reprint of both original 1975² Simulations Publications, Inc. (SPI), quad game sets (I & II) into one huge package with 4 mounted 17 x 22” boards (front and back), 912 9/16^th inch counters, and upgraded play aides and set up cards will make you forget about your original quad sets from SPI, and that is a hard thing for me to say. For you skeptical die-hard SPI grognards, it clearly says in the rule book introduction that

These rules are based the original SPI Blue & Gray rules, reformatted and including official errata and clarifications. Our intent is to provide players with the original experience of playing those first eight SPI American Civil War games. Many of the optional rules and variants come from Moves magazine, Strategy & Tactics magazine, and later editions of the game system. Enjoy!³

I had seen the DG deluxe version already at Foxcon in Plano, Texas in November 2024, but didn’t spend a lot of time with it because I was enamored and enmeshed in the BitE series and The Battles for the Ardennes, which I have already reviewed. As you can see in the series of photos below, the 8 folio maps are now nicely mounted onto 4 separate, front-and-back, hardcopy boards that laid flat right out of the box. The four sheets of counters use the same fonts as the original games, but are back printed in gold (Union) or red (Confederates) with the attack effectiveness strengths should you want to use that optional rule. The play aids consist of 4 back-printed set-up cards and 2 front-printed cards with charts and tables.

Front sides of the counters. Note all the added markers and optional leader counters on counter sheet 4 (more on those later).

Backsides with the optional combat effectiveness strengths that were not printed on the SPI originals (many gamers wrote them by hand on the white backsides…ugh!).

The Union set up cards (they are backprinted) and play aid

Confederate set up cards, also backprinted, and play aide. The additional play aide is for the two-map Grand Chancellorsville variant game (see below).

Grand Chancellorsville, combining the Hooker & Lee and Fredericksburg maps. The additional variant counters to play this are provided as in the original version.

A comparison of the Chickamauga game maps (my 1975 original on the left, if you can’t tell). Joe Youst’s revised artwork shines here, being both cleaner and more realistic.

you can click the ‘combined’ images to really enlarge

A closeup of the Chickmauga counters, Union (T) and Confederate (B) with a few original ½” counters overlaid for comparison. The 1/16th additional inch makes a big difference for increased readability and ability to handle the new counters.

Two systems play aide charts are provided, single-sided. A missed opportunity here was to put some of the variant charts located in Rules Section 22.0 on the backside, as seen here in the CONSIM Forum, thank-you to forum member Steve Oliver.

The full-color rule book has a very nice matte finish, is easy to read, and it contains all the original designers’ and players’ notes from the SPI versions. It contains all the scenario exclusive rules, and each scenario has a piece of artwork from that battle to set it off from the other scenarios.

Notably, Section 21.0 in the booklet contains two pages of optional rules that come from a variety of sources from over the years (which are each listed for transparency). Section 22.0 of the rules contains all the variant rules proposed in Moves magazine numbers 22, 24, 25, and 28, and Strategy & Tactics number 98, faithfully reprinted and labeled as such.

There is one additional “new” variant for Cemetery Ridge (Gettysburg), which consists of 75 brigade breakdown counters for the larger Union and Confederate units (usually divisions) in that game. While “new,” it is an idea that has been bouncing around wargame Internet forums for a while, according to associate game developer Keith Powell of DG.⁴ This hopefully will fix some of the original problems that bedeviled that game since SPI published it.

Also included are attractive leadership counters for the four games in the B&G I quad, as rendered in S&T 98 (see pictures below). They are much nicer than the ones I photocopied and hand colored with pencils decades ago. For the wargame completists among you, all of this is enticing, as you can layer these optional rules according to your druthers.

Start of the 6-page variant rule section (L). An optional 2-dice CRT that was proposed in S&T 98 (R).

The optional S&T 98 leadership variant counters in black and white (C), and their newly colored counterparts (Union on the right, Confederates on the left). I snuck in the original article frontpage thumbnail on the left.

I am very excited about this consolidated game collection, and can genuinely recommend it. If you are looking for a variety of beginner-level Civil War games with state of the art graphics to teach new players, or just want some easy Friday night fun, this is it. Since the complexity on these games is low and playing time only 1-2 hours, I plan on using the Antietam and Cemetary Ridge games in conjunction with battlefield staff rides my school does each year with graduate students.

For those of you who remember the special American Civil War boxed set that SPI published (in limited copies, now a rare collector’s items), with 9 copies of each of Gettysburg and Antietam included, a PDF of the Teacher’s Guide from that set is available at Russ Gifford’s SPI Games website thanks to its original author! The questions in it were written for late-1970’s high schoolers, and I am curious how well my graduate students can answer them today.

I plan on playing several of these in the coming weeks and will report back. DG associate game developer Keith Powell is beginning to compile errata for the set at the CONSIM Forum page. Keith was kind enough to take a phone call from me and answer questions for this article.

And here is a bonus: DG is now doing their own YouTube videos, and one of the first five is a short video on this new boxed set. Check it out!

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Footnotes

And just to be clear, I received this copy gratis from DG (thanks again Doc!) for review.
Yes, both quads were published in the same year, so it is fitting that these are published in a single box.
Blue & Gray Deluxe Edition Rules, page 3. To further clarify, it also states that “Later editions of Blue & Gray were published by TSR in 1984 and by Decision Games in 1995.” This is not those versions.
Phonecon with Keith Powell of Decision Games, 26 March 2025.