Archive for the ‘ anticamente ’ Category

Rufina 2012: my games

More on Rufina convention. This time some photos and words on the game that I played.

Because it was the 8th of September, the day that remind us the escape of king and government during the war, leaving the State and the Army without orders, we played a game with Operation Squad WW2 rules. The setting was pretty basic and a little scratch. We wanted to reproduce a fight of Italians versus Germans. The firsts were desperately trying to save themselves and the Country while Italy was collapsed as nation, the latter were invading the territory while were only a few in a foreign place where their former comrades switched sides for the Allies but without knowing it!

We made some mistakes because it was the fist time we play with these rules. My friend Pippo of Pippo’s Blog fame, fought with a fallschrimjager squad even if he wore a t-shirt with a commie red star on the national flag and the writing “always partisans”! I had got standard Italian troops instead.

After a lot of promises, I organised a demo of my Ferrum et Gloria for Pippo. He wanted to try these rules and in the future he will run a full playtest for me, based on the written text, to understand if all is clear. I hope he will play an entire campaign to tweak the system points and the added rules. Bad lucky dices for me this time, so the test was not so valid to state the full potential of the rules. But Pippo liked it.

Here you can see my new arena, made by Pippo and painted by my father under my direction. Small, portable, elliptical.

Sunday an Anticamente tournament was held in Rufina. The first time with my 10mm Roman legion. And I wore my tourist t-shirt with a big “SPQR”, a real statement of Roman creed! Last time I played with these rules it was almost a year ago. So I had only a lot of good dice result to survive to enemy armies. However I know something about this game: I reached the forth place on eight participants. I had to leave early due to distance, and a fake photo was taken while I receive the cup for the third place because maybe I could reach that place in case a player would lost more pieces. Now I haven’t got the cup but only a photo. Yes, but together with my friend Fabio.

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I’m following the Anticamente ruleset since its initial development. I read the raw rules in Word format and I won the first Italian championship in 2010. Fabio, the man behind Anticamente, is a good mate and he borrow armies to play at tournaments. I was waiting for the realise of a Roman army, so when the pieces were ready, I bought them. They are beautiful 10mm pieces, too small for my father’s eyes (I wish to remember you that my official painter is my father). So I have them made ​​paint by a friend of mine who lives in Terni: he needs money to pay for drugs, namely more little friends made of lead.

I asked for a “wargame” painting style because I can’t claim to have fabulous miniatures: they are so small (really small indeed, in the first line of the photo the miniature seems a 28mm one, but it is smaller, it is only 1cm high!) and detailed that for large amounts that you have to lose your eyes to paint them. Best is the sense of mass that these troops can give. And the distance form the table where you play to your head is such that you can hardly see the details. We are not speaking about 54mm… Indeed, if you want to see these pieces in a perfect state you have to see the website of the producer: TBLine.

To store my miniatures I choose to adapt some Betacam SP L boxes that I found, but you can use VHS plastic boxes too. I put a steel sheet on the inner surface of the box and a magnetic base to miniatures based on forex squares. For cavalry I had a problem with lances (too high), so I had to built a magnetised frame structure to store that type of miniatures. I have a lot of empty space to put some Italic reinforcements. In the next Autumn we will have a couple of Anticamente tournaments, so I’m ready with my troops!

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TB Line exclusive 10mm preview !

Again and again on Hellana, where I could see a preview of the new 10mm miniature set from TB Line about armies for Punic Wars. This time was the turn of hoplites from Italy, useful for both the sides, the good and right one (Roma) and the bad one (Chartage). So you will have an army with Italian vests, different from the three orders army typical of Republican Romans or the Greeks.

Here you can see the general of the army. It is so good that I couldn’t keep my enthusiasm. It is part of a command with a bearer and a horn player. The army is not still complete. That day the sculptor (Cosimo Auricchio) presented to Fabio, my friend and owner of TB Line, the fresh fusions of the cavalry of this army. The hoplites are still under sculpting. Cosimo is very very slow with sculpting, but the results are great!

I wanted to emphasize the beauty of this little metal piece, putting it in comparison with other things as an attach or my fingers, because if you see it only on a screen, you can think it is a very good 28mm piece. Instead it is only 1cm high! It is a real miniature! The painting is great too. The eyes and the hands of the painter are phenomenal. These photos are take with my mobile camera (it is a Samsung GT-S8500 Wave) in free hand mode with natural light inside a gym…

The last photo is for the scenario at Hellana by TB Line, a horde of Mongols versus Rus. It think it was the best table at the convention. They were playing Anticamente rules. Obviously with 10mm miniatures.

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Punic Wars for Anticamente

A new year for Anticamente ruleset, a wargame based on hexagonal areas. Incidentally I won the first national championship in 2010. The 2011 went very bad, but now is 2012 so I have new hopes! New army list and new miniatures for the Punic Wars period. I have got a Roman army, it is obvious, isn’t it? I’m waiting for other miniatures in the works under the hand of Cosimo Auricchio, the sculptor. They are the Roman allies, the Italic ones. Later during this year, I hope.

If you want to know more about this ruleset, you can download it for free here: https://www.tridentebologna.it/regole_E.php

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Drums and Shakos Large Battle

I was almost forgetting that in the last days was out the last creation of Sergio, even in English edition. Here you can find some reviews:
Daleswargames.blogspot.com (English review)
Gioconomicon.net (Italian review)

I saw the development of the ruleset almost from the start and playtested it. You can find on my blog old posts about this. Last Saturday we met again in Terni at Sergio’s home for another playtest session. Under here there is the initial stages of development of a new game. You have to wait a couple of years to see it, so be patient!

Together with Andrea we tested the rules for Song of Spear and Shield about chariots and elephants. We made plans for next conventions and works too.

In the meantime we were visited by Bandini that painted my Roman army for Anticamente. In the next days, when I will end to doing things for Zen Garden, I put them on the bases.

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Anticamente in Rome

The Anticamente tournament in Rome at last! The date was past Sunday in the glorious Miles Glorious club, a huge space for gamers here in Rome. If you don’t know what is Anticamente (a game for ancient and medieval periods based on area movement), you can go to the link on the right column.

I passed a lot of hours (and an entire day off work) to structure a scheme to sum the rules in a easy way to remind them, but something were out as I expected. I always make schemes because I have a visual memory, and with this form of study I took my university degree. So now I have this help to play, and another time I can spend less energy on the understanding of the rules.

Fabio, the mind after Anticamente, lent us his armies because there are always new players who haven’t the pieces to play. I haven’t an army too, so I took a feudal one, a heavy army, but at the end I don’t liked its composition. So at the start I didn’t understand what I could do with some pieces and I wasted them with bad moves. Gasbarri, the evil one who wins all tournaments, instead built his army with his soldiers. So, not only he is a great gamer, he has got even a tested army. The same day I bought from Fabio the rough pieces (his TB Line produces them in 10mm) for a Roman army, so the next year I will have got my army. And I’m thinking about a medieval army too. However the pieces are too small for my father painting skills, so I will give them to a friend.

We played three games. The first one was against Gasbarri. In the beginning I almost won, but I hadn’t the forces to give the last shot. So, with my army scattered around, this devil under man appearance, kill my pieces one by one. He plagued the loo too, because he is really a demon. The second game was against Paolo “Ronin Clan” with Mongols. I waited a lot to move my heavy cavalry while his light cavalry harassed my troops. I sweared a lot because of my bad dices. At the end Paolo thrown away his cavalry against mine and there was no story: I won.

Here you can see Bizio, the other man after Anticamente. He is under the curse of the creator of a game: he write the rules but he cannot win! And this was true even this time, with the last position of the day. He played a great game but my army was too hard to scratch under clouds of arrows, so I waited until the end to strike back. My victory was little because the time was finished, but I had all my tough troops available so I could do anything.

Here you can see a human figure compared to a Zen Garden board. I showed my game to Bizio. He promised me to do some graphics for the game. Instead Fabio forgot to take me some quartz dust for the boards I’m producing. Shame on him!

Fabio and Bizio came in Rome Saturday. We made a walk in the centre and ate traditional food. Sunday we all ate other traditional food for lunch in a restaurant near Miles Glorious. I even met a Frenchman who is looking for other players. I passed two days of carefree. I like tournaments with friends, I like those moments.

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Anticamente: Arezzo 2011

At last! After my heroic first position in the Italian championship of 2010 here we have the chance to show in 2011 that I don’t know how to play Anticamente and the ruleset. Indeed, I can say in the first instance that I played with an obsolete version of the rules, but it was the same because quickly I found what was new. Subordinately this time I found competitive players that studied and tried the rules very well. We are all DBA tournament players so with Anticamente we have found some fresh air and a new way to throw dices against our faces.

This time I lost. But I have fun, I hit and received strokes, in a balanced way. Games were interesting, so this was a beautiful day.
Here you can see the development moment, with screen to hide troops. And you can even see my face with a strange red tone. The day before I take my first sun of summer on the Ostia seaside, but confident with the fact that now is May, I and my fiancée scalded ourselves on all our bodies. So during the tournament I suffered by manifest symptoms of sunstroke…

This man win always all. He is the Italian champion of wargames in 2010. And this time he had his personal dice thrower (children are dangerous) and a support from gigantic martial arts gods. I fought well against well balanced forces, I lost only at the last move.

We played Sunday in a comic shop in Arezzo, and for launch there was a restaurant on the other side of the street. With a cook from Montecatini, even if we don’t understand why he say us he was from Montecatini. Mad Tuscans, they are still get in medieval wars city against city…

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Do we remember Anticamente?

Today we awoke with a thought in mind: do we remember how to play Anticamente? We played it in the last November, so there is a little dust on our rulesets, but at the end of May there will be the tournament in Arezzo, so we have to be ready.

Therefore we met in ARSM wargame club and played three games. We chose two armies from the lists available, one Feudal and one Islamic ones. I printed the cards for the lists and Diego picked up a lot of 15mm to compose the armies. But in the first instance we had only a terrain with little hexagons, so to play we had to create some tokens with DBA coded names. To recognise the opponents the classic choice of blue vs reds. It seems like a boardgame or a bidimensional wargame played with 3D wargame rules. And the board was so little, but we had fun and I won. You can see on the photo above the two playgrounds.

Paolo arrived and the polystyrene hexagons too. So we shifted to the game with real miniatures. This game is very dramatic in results, only 4 turns and an army can be obliterated. But you can do a lot of tactical choices, so the game is very fluid and satisfying. We cleared our minds about the rules, but something is still obscure, because the ruleset is too much concise, even if very exact. It is not barkese, but I would prefer more words. And I must to say something to Fabio, the creator of Anticamente, about the Islamic list, because we think it is too soft. I’m tired now and I must to rethink about some things about the rules, but I have still two weeks to the tournament. We will find hard opponents.

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