Archive for the ‘ hellana ’ Category

Hellana 2017

Hellana is one of the most important wargame convention in Italy. I go there almost every year since 2004. And as Ganesha Games we have one or more tables where to present new games and to distribute our stuff. What to say more? Look at tables, games and miniatures. At the end new Mirlinton production.























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Hellana 2016

A new location, an old convention: Hellana. Here again, year after year. But this time I didn’t bring with me gladiators. Moreover I wasn’t interested in tournaments. So only chatting with people about our lives and little soldiers.

Maybe the new location is a little larger than the old one. More space among tables.

One of the tables. A pause in the war.

Another view on tables. In the crowd a lot of known faces.

Le Granadier and its Napoleonic rules.

People from Macerata. And little people from North Indian Wars.

Flames of War tournament.

DBA 3.0 tournament. Old faces from North clubs involved in DBA. The South clubs now are on L’Art de la Guerre.

Learning table to play with L’Art de la Guerre.

WA.SP. table on WWII. They won a prize for it.

Beautiful trenches for WH40K.

The South and the North at distance.

The best of show scenario. Glamorous vessels here.

Canyons made of bark for a western scenario with Redskins and U.S. forces.

Roman legion stand strongly against cataphracts. In 28mm scale.

Civil war at the end of the Empire. In 1/72 scale. Magna Acies rules by Appius.

Ganesha Games table with Andrea and Miraz.

Advanced Song of Blades and Heroes table in a dungeon scenario.

Cute scenario for Heel Creek, the Ganesha Games’ western rules. Still only in Italian language.

The prize as best participation table for Heel Creek.

Next year another Hellana. I hope I present something new for the event. However this weekend we are going to Modena Play. A longer trip than Hellana one, for an huge convention about boardgames and other kinds of games. See you there!

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Hellana 2015: part 2

And now always Hellana 2015 but with a view on Ganesha Games stuff. We had three tables. The first one with a Fightin’ Fungi preview. Miniatures aren’t the kickstarter ones, they are still in sculpting phase. Delivery is scheduled for June. Some items was sold by Andrea here.
The other table was about a new game with Old West rules. This project is based on SBH mechanics and is written in Italian language. So Andrea have to translate it in English before publication. Seeing the late about Ferrum et Gloria in English, I don’t know when we will see it.

This one is my table. Always the custom Playmobil arena. And an introductive Provocator scenario. I have to do something new for next events. On the left some Italian copies of the rules, and gladiator miniatures.

Inside the arena a preview of the two 75mm gladiator miniatures painted by Simoncini. I am trying to propose a gladiator fight with bigger pieces, using these two. A combat pair of a secutor versus a retiarius. I must build some kind of arena and measure sticks for the fight. However they are very fragile, so maybe I can’t transport them around for wargame conventions.

During the day I mastered a couple of demonstration games. It’s hard to follow two players. The game is not so easy for children, even if Simoncini play it with his child, and the child win always. In the other play, father versus son, the son was more brilliant with rules, but had very bad dice.

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Hellana 2015: part 1

The Italian wargame convention of the Spring. It is the longest running convention here in Italy. I went the first time in 2004. This year we chose to go the day before, even for the change of the legal hour. It is almost 3/4 hour far from Rome. With this choice we had the opportunity to watch convention set works too. Diego’s car is in its last days, so our travel was offered by “Sua Eccellenza”. The return instead was by Minatore’s car. I took a nap during both travels…

In the evening a dinner with the local club members and vendors. All meat based, not so great for a not-meat, and not-wine, lover like me. Too much money spent, but a common meal with other wargame people is always a good thing. Night in a budget but fine hotel.

And so the convention day. A lot of familiar faces around. Inside a primary school gym, with vendors along the walls and demonstration tables in the middle.

This is the ARSM’s club game. ARSM is the club where Diego plays. Standing you can see “Sua Eccellenza”. With white hair, the other travel companion, a ferrets breeder.

This year is 200th Waterloo anniversary, and this is Waterloo game.

Siege and assault to a Japanese castle.

A year too late for D-Day, but still an enjoyable game.

A great Old West set-up.

Among other tables, this one with a large amount of 28mm miniatures. More tables around, but here I don’t pretend to show a full report.

Other things in Hellana were a FOW tournament and this one with DBA 3.0. This year I don’t play DBA, I haven’t mental energy to do it. However I’m always near to my tournament friends that play it.

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Hellana 2013

As in previous years we are in Agliana for Hellana wargame convention. The same trip to Tuscany from the early hours of the Sunday morning to the night, with a pause for the highway stop dinner. All is done to live another wargaming experience together with our friends from every corner of Italy. Look at the categories tag for other editions.

The classic DBA tournament. I prefer to play with other games during a convention, so even this time I only supported my DBA community with photos and friendship.

A Russian view with snow. And Italian and Soviet soldiers.

A WWI naval battle with an interesting use of cotton to built clouds!

When railway modelling in HO scale meet wargame in 20mm scale: a WWII fight in Germany.

Bigger scale and bigger building. Another WWII delicatessen.

Using Comitatus rules to build a battle at the Roma’s gates.

This playable scenario displayed a view of the Porta Ostiensis near the ARSM club headquarters. This scenario recreate a specific Gothic War event.

A new presence in the convention was the Gundam Italian Club. I’m an orphan of eighties too.

Some models, even if the better one was the Zion vessel!

I did my duty with a couple of Ferrum et Gloria scenarios. This one was an opportunity to test the “duel rules” and to have a fight secutor/scissor versus retiarii. An experience to make some tweaks to something. Then some people wished to buy the rules, but I’m still writing them, pity. Now I’m a little distracted by this convention period because we will have “La storia per gioco” and “Dadi.com” in the following weeks, but I’m very involved with the rules writing.

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Hellana 2012: Ganesha stand

Again about Agliana, but this time for the Ganesha stand. As you have read before, me and Diego slept in Terni. The morning after we left at the 6 with Andrea, with a stop to say hello to other players from Terni who were leaving in another car with a table for Ganesha. Then to the motorway in Orte where Narciso was waiting for us. That night we returned to Orte for a dinner with him in a Chinese all-you-can-eat restaurant with fake Japanese and Wok credentials. A stop in Terni, and Rome at midnight.

At the convention we brought with us a pirate scenario, a quite compact one because we couldn’t take the galleons. I ran my Zen Garden game. This was the second time that I could sell it in its definitive form. I gave a free copy to some friends of mine that helped me in various things: Pippo, Bizio and Fabio. Instead “the principal playtester” of Drums and Shakos Large Battle was dedicated to a demonstration table of the game, because Sergio, the author, was busy with work in office even in Sunday. We had more attention on this Napoleonic ruleset than other games. People generally had scarce attention to tables, everyone were too much involved in his things to discover other things. Maybe in the first half of May, at Dadi.com convention in San Marino, we will have more opportunities to show our games. At that time I will organise a playtest of Ferrum et Gloria. I want to show the basic rules to my Italian friends, to start a full playtest campaign for the game.

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Hellana 2012: a report

We were here as every year since 2004. Hellana is the wargame annual appointment for Centre and South Italy. It is not so big, it is situated inside a school gym, but it is our convention, and we love it.

We are in the middle of nowhere, a village along the road from Firenze to sea, where you can find Lucca, Pisa and Viareggio: the upper side of Tuscany. It is amazing as from this bunch of houses some people organise their convention that calls people from various parts of Italy.

The main event is a interesting bring & buy space. This year I find an old magazine with crucial articles on Italian paratroopers in WWII, especially for the evolution of cartridge vests called “samurai”. I own one of them, a reproduction that I use in paratrooper reenactment. Among other things, miniatures and books, but I had just spent too much money on Vallejo colours, forex bases and miniatures for a special project for the next year to be published on Ganesha Games’s Free Hack.

Some tables were intriguing but you cannot find realisation out of normal because clubs don’t challenge each other to produce the outstanding table. They only want to show their usual games. Instead TB Line with Fabio Farneti bring home always some convention price because he is a perfectionist and he build perfect tables for 10mm miniatures with his friends.

Another event in Hellana is the DBA tournament and the Wings of War contest. In the last years I didn’t play DBA here because I want to try something new and chatting with people, free from four DBA turns that engage all the day. And the last year, me, Paolo and Andrea, re-invented Song of Spear and Shield during a experimental demonstration game.

In Hellana 2004 we found snow in Agliana. This year the weather was fantastic, so we found only this Russian scenario in snow.

I put the photos not in a strictly order bounded to the report. There were various tables and vendors, people played with their games and someone viewed the work of other people. We had fun and in a next post I will show the Ganesha stand. I close here with the more “vertical” game of the day.

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Hellana 2011: Spear and Shield

This time Sergio was at home and only Andrea came to Hellana. Hellana is a convention only for players of historical wargames so Ganesha’s fantasy rulesets were not so appreciated here. I asked about a game with Song of Spear and Shield and Andrea satisfied me. It’s time that a skirmish game for ancients see the light because there are around a lot of beautiful 28mm that you cannot use with DBX or other games where you have to simulate an entire battle. Thousands of men reduced to formations of 28mms in tens is not the right look of a battle. Sometimes you want something smaller, a fight with only a part of troops. So you can even buy not an entire army but only the pieces that you want.

We set a game but something didn’t work. I have my ideas of what a fight with ancients is so I wanted to play in another way. All is too much simple for the period but complicated for some mechanics. There is the need of counters and this is bad. The mix of concepts from “Song of Blades and Heroes” with “Song of Drums and Shakos” and “’61-’65” doesn’t work. We couldn’t think about the scale to give to the game, how you can put in battle array your historical troops. No solution.

I was a hard playtester this time because I like ancient history very much. And I want a great game and not a watered to humans version of “Song of Blades and Heroes” with spear and shields. Andrea was very dubious after my remarks. Another game was set but with other people. They have fun with what I refuse.

Me and Paolo were walking around without a game to play, Andrea was free so we tried another game. And this time we put forward a lot of ideas. We change the mechanics, the overlap modifiers, how a man can die, how fight, how calculate morale status, how to regroup, how command troops. A lot of things! Now it was entirely another game. Andrea must prove it to test it. And we want to play again with this new version but with a lot of troops involved!

Obliviously no release date yet!

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