Christmas is the time of the year when Luca come from London to meet his old mates here in Rome. His wife is a writer for the Roma guide by Lonely Planet so all the family is here for the copy edit of the new annual edition. So we have got Luca, while Narciso come from Canino. Hence we can organise a Legio Palatina reunion year after year, even if Maurizio is missing while Paolo is in Switzerland with his pregnant wife. Our club still lives for a day.

This time we have got two new full members: Gabriel and Jack. Their father is teaching them the wargame basis for future glory on the game boards. But they still have some confusion. Gabriel displayed some 15mm single based modern troops with flamethrowers in our mini Large Battle SDS in 28mm scale. Smaller but more deadly indeed.

Diego opened his house for the first time ever! It could be perfect headquarters for our club, but he wants to preserve it for something less important. As you can see, it is along a railway. This fascinate me in some way.

Andrea was with us from the morning. We playtested again Song of Spear and Shield with Diego. Later we did a collective visit to the local wargame store, now only few blocks from Diego’s house. And after a lunch with pasta, the afternoon with the kids, SDLB and snacks, the evening with some ugly reality shows about Yankee food while we were waiting that Luca consigned the kids to their mother in another part of the city, we ate the annual dinner based on pizza and beer.

To digest we playtested a new game from Ganesha based on western films. Four players, two sides. My dices were so bad that I did nothing at all! At least the others had fun with the game.

The classic reunion photo. So we can see photo after photo the passage of the years, but even the fact that we are always here together year after year!

In the night Narciso and Andrea slept in Diego’s house. Because they are two famous long-winded people, they fell asleep very late. In the late morning we visited IKEA to buy some stuff: assorted for Narciso, two bookshelves to put inside the miniature closet for Andrea, some Zen Garden bases for me.

Then me and Andrea made another playtest to the western game. On my Christmas red tablecloth. This time I had only good dices and Andrea the bad ones. I can say that they are some interesting concepts in the game but there are lots of things to do before it can be full playable. Something for late 2013 or 2014 because there are so many new rules that have to be published by Andrea this year, and the next.

The 2012 passed away, the begin of 2013 was still with a holidays atmosphere, Luca was almost leaving for London, so we setted another reunion, even if shorter. This time Diego and Narciso were playtesting Ferrum et Gloria with some tweaks about thraeces and andabatae.

Another club photo before of another pizza and beer dinner. Maybe I will see Luca in London for Salute. Maybe we will be here another time 12 months more later.

This was the right time! Third place in the Arezzo DBA tournament of the Italian DBA annual championship. Yeah, I’m a champion again…

After a lot of time Legio Palatina, my club, humiliated the Compagnia della Chimera club! They humiliate us every tournament indeed. However this one was held in their city and they were in full formation. So we are more happy. Gasbarri, the Italian 3D wargame champion and leader of the Arezzo club, ate humble pie, prostrating himself in front of our club.

We lined up on the field a larger team than usual, with the new entry Gabriele. I always try to intimidate our adversaries remembering them his physical presence. In lots of competitions I team up only with Diego, so we could combine only two scores to built our team score, when you can add the best three scores as team result. And this time Diego reached the first place.

Another humiliation moment for Gasbarri. He is desperate viewing Narciso deployment! Great photo! : D

We were 13 people, 5 from Roma, 2 from Canino, 1 from Firenze and 5 from Arezzo. We played in the Fumettopoli store. As every time I bought one skin colour paint bottle of the Rackham range, remains of a old supply. The owners are very kind but their loo is permanently almost out of order for something. The loo and the paint, two constants of my Arezzo tournaments. However this time we looked for something more exotic to eat instead of the restaurant in front of the shop. There was a big fair about international food along the streets of Arezzo but too many people had crowded it so we chose another restaurant. To close, a photo of my small DBA camp. Or rather the reason why I won with my army: I had got hidden troops inside the fort!

I have got my copy of a ruleset to fight battles with giant monsters in small scale. I even have got the miniatures (gashapoon), so what could I do?

On a very cold Saturday afternoon, I visited the Reeinder club, in the suburbs of Rome, relatively close to my place. I wanted to test the complete Mighty Monsters ruleset in a 4-players game. Lorenzo set up a tennis table with a urban landscape. I added some Monsterpocalypse buildings. They are a bit sparse because the play area was larger than I initially thought. One player didn’t show up, so this was a three player game and I was the umpire. I explained the rules. If I read them more before the play maybe the game could run better, especially for the victory conditions at the end… My bad…

Well, all this was a lot of time ago, it was cold, very cold, I was half frozen. You can see Lorenzo (of Zerloon blog fame) wearing only a t-shirt, while his friends are less impervious to low temperature.

There were three factions: “Mechagodzillas” (one model for the first movie incarnation and another one from a later flick), “Space Aliens from an evil planet” (Megalon, Gigan, and the little Mogera), and “The stomping forces of good” (Godzilla and Mothra).

Godzilla is the king of monsters (King Kong is only the king of Skull Island…) so all the enemies thought to stop him and take the crown for themselves. The fight was a gang up over poor Godzilla, who fought back vigorously. Mothra could help him but the player was unlucky and this over-sized butterfly did absolutely nothing! In the meantime, the huge mechanised monsters kept at a distance striking with long range missiles and energy beams. And then all the aliens were in the fight. Godzilla still stood — barely. The game emphasizes this type of fighting, just like the films. The alien player forgot about the mechanised menace at his back. So, in that cloud of destruction, the steel monsters joined the fray virtually undamaged. The end was nigh.

I have to set up a game again in this club. They are very friendly fellows. In the photo, you can see some of the games on their shelves…

Their website is: https://www.reincorp.it

For another chronicle of the play:
https://zerloon.blogspot.it/2012/01/diario-di-gioco-173-mighty-monsters.html

Again on Ludica. Friday and Saturday viewed scarce public presence but Sunday the people arrived even if many were stopped from crazy disposition by our unreal mayor. But the hall is huge like a hangar for aeroplanes that even a lot of people seems a small group. If you organise the same inside a smaller place, it could be felt like a success with an overwhelming crowd, while in this hangar all is scattered as you can understand viewing the photo above.

Ludica in Rome, a convention about games parachuted from Milan without a clear awareness of what Rome is. Add the snow. The result? Almost a disaster.
It was clear that this was a first edition so it cannot be perfect and a lot of problems were waited, but there was too much ingenuousness in the building of the convention. Beside this, goodwill and sincere people involved in the operation show promise for a better second edition in October this year (even if it will be dangerously positioned only two weeks before the bigger comics and games convention of Italy, more than 150000 people…).

Leaving organisation problems, I wish to speak about some things of the wargame area, a part that I helped to bring to life because I was the person that created the contacts with the Roman realities. Among other things there were slotcars (with beautiful girls to cure the stand), boardgames (a lot of them), Star Wars reenactors (“the fist of Vader” Legion), videogames (but with a low profile due to small care from producers like Nintendo) and bayblades (59 children in a competition the day of the snow!), an exhibition on old traditional games (do you know “lippa”?). But I haven’t got any interesting photos, so I speak only about wargame clubs that was present at the convention.

On the photos above you can find the beautiful scenario made by ARSM club, a Viking raid full playable mounted on real terrain! A great realisation for one of the scarce moments that ARSM come out from their humid cellar.

And this is a Napoleonic battle in Portugal by Le Grenadier. If you want to see more delicacies of this type go to https://www.massimomoscarelli.it/leadaddicted/?p=390

Another club from Rome is Miles Gloriosus. It was present with this large participation game about chariot racings in Roman times, but there was even a game based on samurai in Japan. In the middle of the convention there was a Shako II tournament too. Well, I hope in a better and safer Ludica in October, with a larger wargame presence.

We think of my home as the venue of our club. In the past times we were all strictly compressed in the larger room of the house, playing 3 games of DBA at the same time, and more people were watching them. Now we are separated and dispersed, so I organised for the past holidays a playing reunion. It was hard because of distances and events, so only four people were present. Some news about the core members of our circle of friends: Luca is living in London while the third child is on arrival; Maurizio is living in Rome but our city is so chaotic that is difficult to meet each other, and a second child is on arrival; Narciso is living in Canino, a small town two hours far from Rome; Paolo is living in Swiss now with a marriage waited for August and this evening was his farewell to us. Me and Diego are always the same instead.

What you can see here is an extravaganza in small format, a 15mm DBA classic fight Roma versus Carthage but with a variation: every base is composed of 4 regular DBA bases. The overall effect is great, more troops in combat, more army look for your miniatures. The effect on the rules is that when a base is destroyed only one of the 4 bases is destroyed, so the play continues. This simulate attrition better than the disappearance of an entire base and the sudden hole in the line-up. Why none thought it before???

Here Narciso and the making of the cheap big bases. As you can see we utilised a red table cloth to play, because my home was setted for the holidays! Red instead of green, a colour not so easy to tolerate, indeed.

Later in the day, after the lunch in a Muslim fast food based on fried chicken meat and before a dinner with pizza and beer, we played two games of HOTT, the new (!) sensation in our Italian DBA world. Narciso wants to organise some tournaments so he is pushing me to compose a HOTT army. I’m thinking about a simple mummies army, my friends are thinking for me about an army based on gladiators. Another project!? I have enough of them!!! Well, maybe I will do something. However a day that we will remember.

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.

I pass my last weekend in this club in Rome. A weekend with two tournaments: Fire & Glory and Anticamente, with some added in.

It is in a new location, near ARSM club. This zone is full of lead people! Miles Gloriosus changed residence from an opposite side of the city. I visited the old residence, very gracious but with a low height of the cellar. This one is better, bigger, a lot bigger (and even with two bathrooms)! You have a large amount of space for everything. It is the underground storey of a building, so you can understand the dimensions. I don’t believe a thing so organised could be in a city like Rome, because we are very individualistic and a common effort is only a dream.

Here you can see the two rooms. More space is on the right in the upper photo, and on the left in the photo below (another row of tables), where a warehouse is behind the mimetic net too.

There is even a canteen, with a fridge, stoves and microwave oven. Some people volunteered for the lunch (very cheap, only 5 euros!). A coffee machine is always available to make your own drink.

It is a old club, almost 20 years old, and now contains the remains of other split up clubs. Miles Gloriosus is the bigger club in Rome for activities and spaces. Here if you want to know more and visit it when you come in the area: https://www.milesgloriosus.it

There was a scenario about Vietnam. I took this picture. 20mm. Delicious stuff.

Well, all were very good, all people were gentle, but there is this bad factor: an evil gate! The club is accessed by the door in (1) and the place is all along that wall. If you have the key (2) of the garage is all simple, otherwise you can use the house phone (3) but it is out of order. So you must telephone with your mobile phone to someone inside. The problem is the method to open the gate. There is a keyhole to open it in the courtyard on the right of (4) but you must have a key. And where is the key? And the key seems not to be simple to use. And the rain fell in these days. There is even a remote control for the gate, but it is more difficult to find and to use than the key. Another thing. Take attention to the photocell (5) if you don’t want to close too early the gate! I hope they resolve this thing. But our passion is greater than a stupid gate!

During the day of the DBA tournment in Labaro, Diego showed the SDS rules to the other players. They set a game and this try got a good response. Maybe in the future we will have more SDS players in the area.

Le Grenadier is an old club. They play Napoleonic games at most and Di Bartolo and his wife are reneactors of this era too. Their place is big, not humid and with all the services. Two big tables are in the room and there is space for more. The only bad thing is the urban wildness of the surroundings! They have a secret address and Napoleonic minis in a specific cabinet and wine boxes. They have minis even in the bathroom. Years of years of collecting and painting minis. Highest quality here, and all historically correct.
Here I put some of their beautiful collection to raise your envy!

I pick up some souvenirs. An homage not a larceny!