Along the Arno river, north of Firenze, among the Tuscany hills, there is a small town (Rufina) with a villa where a convention was held the 8th-9th of September weekend. It called people from the centre of Italy because of the position of the town. An opportunity to meet hardcore gamers like us.

It was the most beautiful place that we ever used for a convention. We had got so much space that we wasted it. We had got the main building and two other little edifices, and below there were a huge wine cellar with a wine museum (!) and a tavern. Those surroundings are famous for wine and a vineyard is in the garden. They served us free food the first day too. The weather was good and a little hot.

During those days three tournaments was held (Anticamente, Armati, Shako II), some demo tables was presented and almost ten vendors were in the place with their stands.

A Saga scenario was present with its Viking raiders. I never played it but I think it is a really good game. With some inspired Ganesha style rules among the others.

A very large bi-dimensional wargame was setted in the basement. It represent the WWII Russian front from Moscow to Stalingrad. You cannot do it at home. Some memorabilia was showed in the cabinets.

Stacked cardboard counters. A lot of. There were huge fights on the Russian front. Motherland versus Fatherland.

Breitenfeld 1631 mega-game! Swedish vs Imperials played with almost 1200 miniatures (I have not counted them) in the 28mm scale on floor area of 16 square meters. They used an Armati Advanced tweaked version.

It is weird to watch 28mm miniatures and found them so similar to 6mm ones. And a little crammed to manoeuvre. Too big to play?

The overall view is really impressive. The largest bases ever done I suppose.

Today we remember a day of infamy for our Country, when our king and all our govern people fled from Rome towards the Allies in the south to save themselves, leaving Italy without a head during the war. They suddenly changed side in the war without thinking about the consequences, leaving the State and the Army without orders, causing the occupation of Germans and the civil war. They started the war without adequate preparation and later they claimed to accuse Mussolini for that as they weren’t part of that system too, rebuilding a virginity fighting together with our former enemies. Perpetual shame on them, parasites of society and thieves with blood-spattered hands!

Today I am in Rufina, near Florence, for a two days convention. I will speak about it in the next posts. Among other things we will try a WWII ruleset to play a game about angry Germans versus lost Italian regular Army.

In Italy there are a lot of boardgames (at most) conventions with the suffix Gioca- (play) and then the name of the city. So we have even this GiocaPerugia on the hill next Perugia and site of Città della Domenica. I spoke some months ago about Magna Con Phersu and this amusement park on this and this post. Now this GiocaPerugia was a bigger convention and this is the dedicated website.

The other time we were in Winter so the park was close. This new trip to it was a chance to visit it. The place is really huge, a paradise for children but something else for other people. It is a park for families built too much years ago, so it shows his age, as these decorations designed as beautiful statues that must recall various places in the world. Ugliness in the middle of typically Mediterranean late spring vegetation. A matter of style aged too soon. Among other things you can find a mock castle, a mock missile, a mock Indian encampment and blue shirts fort, some buffaloes, some exotic goats, some horses and a cow. You understand, it is not so beautiful, but in some ways educational and with the morbid fascination of vintage amusement parks. Well, inside a pavilion there was enough space for GiocaPerugia too.

We had a large room and some space outside, a lot of available tables, some vendors, some games ready to play, but we hadn’t an essential element: there were not enough people. Perugia is a city full of young people, there is an international university that attracts them, so it was desirable a large participation because part of them surely know boardgames, cosplay, wargames and what is related to them. So, what’s the matter? I don’t know, maybe lack of advertisement? I don’t have the answer.

Inside GiocaPerugia a Blood Bowl tournament was organised, and some friends of mine was fighting on the green grounds with chainsaws and dirty hits. Blood Bowl is the new sensation (!) among people who plays DBA (more !!!). I tried the game when the first edition was hot off the press but maybe at that time something was a little confusing and we didn’t play it so much. Instead nowadays I’m thinking to compose a couple of teams. I like the idea of making an unique team using a few miniatures with a specific theme. I’m collecting gorgeous babes pieces to create an Amazon team, and I’m thinking to some snowmen for a more frozen set. I met some people from Rome and maybe (thanks to me) in Ludica in November we will have a tournament with 50 people.

The great thing about GiocaPerugia were two displays in the open where we talked with Cesarian Roman reenactors and with practitioners of historical fencing. They are very enthusiastic people and we learn a lot from who directly experienced weapons, armours and ancient fighting techniques. It is thrilling to touch the concrete stuff on which you only read about in books. Maybe in the future we will collaborate with these people. I leave here their websites:
Legio I Taurus
Sala d’Arme Achille Marozzo

It was snowing on Rome, and we were frozen inside the Ludica event in Rome fair. You can read more on this old post of mine. At that moment, the organisers asked to made a video of us to promote their convention. I refused to speak because you have to be concise and professional, leaving to Andrea the duty to do it. Then they filmed a long interview about Ganesha Games and wargames, with a small talk about Flashing Steel, the game that Andrea was presenting during that fair.

We were waiting the edit of the video, but after a while we forgot this thing. Last week, while I was checking the dates for the next Ludica in Rome in November (I have to program the next appointments, in Autumn I will take part to 4 tournaments and 4 conventions), I found that only few days after they edited the material. I told Andrea the news and some instants after he spread the presence of the video on You Tube via his social networks contacts. So now you can see Andrea speaking while some inserts show my hands that throwing dices and move miniatures. He is the orange guy, I am the hands from black and grey sleeve. There is even the first Zen Garden presentation of the game. Sorry, all the dialogue is in Italian, but even if you don’t understand a word you can always view the images.

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.

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.

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.

Snow in Rome. Only few centimetres and it was an apocalypse because we are unprepared to this type of meteorological events because we see real snow only every 20 years. Furthermore Rome is without a real mayor so panic spread in the city. We wanted to be in Ludica at any price. So we travelled among panic measures that stopped trains and escalators without real snow around, and at the end of a journey started at the 6.30 a.m. (and before that an aborted tentative the day before) with an arrival at 14.00 p.m., along the last part of the road, snowed on us. We thought that the night we could sleep on the floor of the fair because no train or car could travel from the fair but later we were saved by Sun. Here you can see our clothes for the snow and our luggage.

Our Ganesha Games stand was present only Saturday afternoon and Sunday. It was very cold but we were there. We could take with us only few things however, Andrea travelled on foot from Terni so he couldn’t bring with him scenery elements for pirates (two big vessels). But we had Zen Garden and all the rulesets.

Zen Garden on display, with a exhausted myself. Andrea had cards and the booklets with the rules, I had all the materials: the game was complete for the first time! People was very enthusiastic about it. We sold 6 copies. We have just a lot of fans! Thank you!!! We made it only for passion and not for profit so it is a joy that people like it.

A photo about a mother and son while Andrea showed the world of wargames to them for the first time. That child a day will be a player?

We had got attention by the press. Well, it was only a Ludica internal service to promote future conventions, if it was from a normal television they probably would showed us like freaks. Andrea explained what wargames are and showed some basic mechanics. In the future there will be a YouTube channel for Ganesha Games with this and other videos.