Here we have a Steve Barber’s arena. Very beautiful, very Roman! I saw it even in my local lead pusher here in Rome, situated near the Colosseum. It is made in resin (a little heavy I suppose…), a circular arena compounded by 4 parts. Three parts are the same, one have a place for the imperator instead. The price of this thing is imperial too: 150 quid… Well, the space to play is too little so I cannot buy it, it is useless for my game. Beautiful but not cheap and without a interesting size for the playground. But I like it.

Steve Barber has a even a range of gladiators and spectators. And a chariot! 25mm and old sculpts, I presume. I have got more big pieces, 28mm, those by Steve Barber are small pieces, and they can seem their children…
You can find the range and the arena here:
https://www.sbarber-models.clara.net

This is what everyone wants if he has got space and a ton of polystyrene. Well, it is too much white, maybe you can prefer a more masonry touch like actual Colosseum, but in the ancient times it was all covered by coloured marbles. So its aspect was almost white, after all. But not so white.

You can know more on this Colosseum in white here. A bit rough but great. And it is 20 years old!

Another guy is under a spell: to make an arena for his gladiators! Here his blog: https://adventuresinlead.blogspot.com/search/label/gladiators

Hexagonal terrain and detailed construction. He has chose the Morituri Te Salutant rule system and an hexagonal grid for its movements. I have my system in development with Ganesha engine inside. More on it in the future…

Another approach for building an arena. I think it is a beautiful modelling work, especially if you see the construction phases you can understand it, but I cannot say it is really an arena. It seems more as a ranch, how those in farwest age…
If you want know more: https://thehistoricalminiaturist.blogspot.com

Other results from my search through the web. I found somewhere (I cannot remember now where) these two amphitheatres.

The former is the simpler. Well, the ground is the real thing for it, all seems a little too essential for my taste, it is not what I can fell like a real Roman amphitheatre. Easy to storage, indeed.

Here we have another attempt, more sophisticated. It is taken from an overview of Crisis, I suppose. Hexagonal terrain, a classic for gladiator games, and an attempt to give the Roman flavour with a half ring. Beautiful but there is something wrong, I cannot say what, but there is. Maybe the colours.

I have got more playgrounds to show you. Next time…

Another holiday in Terni! Me and Diego again. Our train left the station at 7.43. You get up early in the morning for these little pieces of lead. I could say that my summer holidays this year are in Terni…

As you can see, there is another improvement in the Large Battle SDS playtest rules: the cover is in full colour. Well, there are even other modifications, the morale rules are better focused and very simple, some little developments are on the ground, some personalisations of the armies are tested. This time was tested a scenario for the book, a strange fight between minor nations.
These rules are a long time investment for Sergio, and Diego is very involved in their definition. I think that they are better every time that I see them, but more things are to be tested. They have to be perfect…

While musketeers was echoing in the room where Diego and Sergio played, me and Andrea were involved in some small fights for Song of Spear and Shield. We wanted to test some situations as hoplites warfare, light chariots and heavy chariots. Some ideas were tested, something was good, something was not so good. Chariots are a hard challenge to put them in a game. More work have to be done, but the core rules are fixed. Next time we want some pachyderms and more chariots.

In spare time after this session, me and Andrea playtested his alpha versions of a sci-fi game with voracious aliens. And I showed my new iPad2 to Andrea to have some indications on its functions. A frozen train left me at the station around the 22.30.

Another full day of intense playtesting and chatting about this new game! In these times we are only playing with games in form of prototypes, thanks to Ganesha’s pillars, Sergio and Andrea (indeed, Andrea is the Ganesha man, but Sergio give a great contribution and wrote the great title SDS). It is more fun to play with a game in development because you can say something on it, how you feel the playing, making suggestions on the rules and the mechanics. Obviously not all what we can say is accepted but it is good so, because who create the game has a better control on what want to simulate the rules and on their full spirit. Testing is a great thing because you can prove on the ground your thoughts with real people. And we are old DBA animals, used to tournaments tricks to receive more advantages from our actions. Moreover Diego plays every week with a different set of rules in the ARSM club, so he has an experience built on a lot of games. He is falling in love with this Large Battle that we are viewing in its development since a couple of years.

This time we tested a new type of moral test and we found some interesting and some wrong things in it. Sergio annotated all and the next time he had the solution. It was a lot of time that I didn’t see the game because in these meetings I tried other games as Song of Spear and Shield, so I found some new developments in it. I can say that it is a great game. If you think that Napoleonic games are complicated and boring you can have a big surprise. You understand immediately the play and what to do with your troops. And all maintains the right period feeling. I’m not a fan of Napoleonic times, but this game is so interesting that I would quickly buy a bunch of miniatures to play with it, but I have so many projects (the newer a huge army to play with Song of Spear and Shield) that I cannot do it.

What to say more? Well, I win the day, a week after Diego took the train to Terni to play another playtest, tomorrow there will be another playtest. If you want a better report than mine on the game that we played, read the Sergio’s blog.

What can you see in this blurred photo? This is an absolutely world premiere on the new Sergio Laliscia’s game called Steel Juggernauts. I cannot say more, it is only an old idea that now take new life after years of playtesting on Ganesha games. It involves a new use of your Flames of War tanks for a fast and interesting game. I don’t want to say more, because it is still in a initial beta testing form and because I want to leave this honour to Sergio, but if you observe with attention the photo you could understand a lot of things. I could tell you that this photo is blurred by will, to keep secret the development, but it is not true, I moved too much the camera…