I had got for the 2010 Christmas these playing cards based on gladiators. Well illustrated (even if retiarii didn’t fight against thraeces, and other inaccuracies), they are part of a series of publications by Lo Scarabeo. They are specialised in thematic playing cards for collectors and tarots. You can find their products here. So while I’m playing with traditional games with cards, I can say I’m playing with gladiators… Well, I don’t know poker, so it is better to play with miniatures instead. And with my Ferrum et Gloria indeed!
Under here you can recognise Charon, the Etruscan god of the underworld with his peculiar hammer (on the header of this blog there is my Charon miniature!), and the “game” with Phersu that I showed in another post.

As I said before, there are some things that are almost the same year after year, some periodic appointments that you can find on this blog year after year. So we have another Happy Model, the big edition before Christmas. I was there the last year, as you can read on this post. It is a national market for railway modelling and even for other related stuff. Here you can see a scene that recreate the railway near my house.

This year I found a large quantity of soldiers for collectors. I’m amazed from the quality of this delicacies. They are still little soldiers but you can show a lot of details. It would be a great thing to play with these soldiers but they cost a lot and you need bigger tables.

In the following photos you can see materials for thousands of euros…

…and a joy for the eyes!

The madness is always the same: I could buy only a bunch of them for a little skirmish, they are so beautiful,…

…but after rationality come back so you are free of absurd thoughts.

The real danger: play my Ferrum et Gloria with 54mm!

These times are even those ones for +Libri +Liberi, the national market for small publishers. Last year I was there. You can find pile of interesting books but you cannot find enough space at home to store just a couple of them. I found various titles but I restricted myself to only two book. The first one is an edition of Opera Nova by Achille Marozzo, a guide written in the XVI^th century about sword fighting. A great document about techniques that you can find in those years but even for all that regards fight with hand weapons. I hope I find some ideas for Ferrum et Gloria.

The latter is a book about the months from the landing of Anzio and Nettunia to the invasion of Rome. This time watched from an Italian perspective! I’m tired of reports written by winners, history is another thing. The fairy tale told to us is about US soldiers (and the other people didn’t exist at all!) who wanted to give us liberty and only bad Nazis slowed them. So this one is another view, with Italians in it! I reenact every year the landing from the bad guys side, as an Italian paratrooper. You can read it on the last year post.

Who is Phersu? He is this nice dancing man from the Etruscan times. But he is even the man who hold the rope in this funeral game where another man is bounded to a ferocious dog. From “phersu” (mask) we have the word “person”, so he is more important than you thought.

These little dioramas are inspired by real painted scenes from graves. Perugia is at the edge between Umbrian and Etruscan cultures, on the side of the latter. And there is a local miniature maker who call himself “Phersu Miniatures” because of this influence.

His production is based on resin pieces about rare subjects, as you can see here, almost entirely in 1:72 scale. But he has got Phersu in 1:72, 28mm and 54mm. In the next months he wants to expand his ranges with metal miniatures because resin casting is a slow process: faster in the casting means more time to sculpt. His work is targeted to modellers and not wargamers but I hope he is changing his mind because he could find a peculiar space in the miniature producer world.
In the following photos some delicacies in 1:72 scale. If you want to know more about it, you can visit:
https://sites.google.com/site/phersuminiatures

The new issue is out. This is the Italian magazine about wargame with miniatures. It is bilingual, so you can read it even if you don’t know Italian but only English.

In this issue you can find an interesting article about Crusader and Foundry gladiators and how they are historically adequate or not, with notes about the real typologies of gladiators.

This issue is one of the best in the last times. You can find more here.

My secutors and a scissor. Beautiful minis from Crusader! I changed the shields with a typology without upper angles, so the net cannot stick itself on them. A historical fact…

All starts here. A day I was surfing the web and I found these little things from Crusade Miniatures. What superb sculptures! I liked the poses, the historically accurateness, the mass of the pieces. The style of Mark Sims is superb, his soldiers are stocky, heavy, with a gravity. You can think: hey mate, these are too plump. But I dislike slim soldiers or those with real human proportions: I don’t want little men, I want something who fit well on the table. Real humans are too dry, legs are long and without a real interest. I want to see armours, helms, shields and not male photo models. In the 1/72 format you have more slim pieces. It is the technique of the manufacturing of the pieces. Lead for me is better!
Well, the story is simple: I liked the pieces, I bought the pieces. But I had to obtain a cause for my impulsive purchase. What could I do with them? I have heard about rules for gladiators. Could I buy them? Oh, no, I wanted something very historical, I’m Roman and I have a degree in History, I had to do something by myself, for my new gladiator pieces. So I started to think about a rule system for gladiators. I’ll speak about this in a new post.
At the moment I want to suggest these pieces. You have a lot of good fighters, some historical and some fantasy from the (in)famous film “Gladiator”. Sims made the historical pieces first, and various months after he sculpted the others. You can found some pieces for the arena feeling: two referees, Charon, Mercurius, wounded and some spectators. The address is this: https://www.crusaderminiatures.com/list.php?cat=1&sub=27&page=1