Archive for December, 2011

The best present for Christmas I have received this year! It is from Renato. At the moment I have got only these pictures as preview of the thing, but it is enough for now. It is a 1:6 custom soldier that represents an Italian paratrooper who fought in Folgore during 1944-45 years for the Allies side after the treason of the 8th of September 1943. This model is made almost of spare parts and need some other element as weapons, helmet and badges. In the following times I will find the other pieces to build the model. I have got other two models to dress in my drawer but I’m lazy and I haven’t the space to show them!

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Father Christmas

I’m for an unconventional Christmas because I don’t like fake affectedness. I pass these days with my family since I was a child so I like this moment of the year but I can’t forget reality. The world is not a Christmas advertising!

I’m used to listen to hardcore punk and this attitude is part of me. So I remembered this Christmas song from the disgraceful land of samba by Garotos Podres, a seminal Brazilian oi! band from the eighties and maybe still active in these days even if the singer belly seems big as the Father Christmas one.

Do you know that Father Christmas was created by Coca Cola as a character for Christmas advertisings? They are not the colours of Christmas, they are the colours of Coca Cola! In this song is said that Father Christmas is a son of bitch, a capitalist pig. He send gift only to rich children. If you know Portuguese you would appreciate it more.

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Zen Garden dice

Some updates about Zen Garden. The building of the materials carry on as you can see here. These are the dices. Every set has got 2 white dices and 1 red dice. On the sides there is the Japan sign for “stop”. All is handmade, so it is not perfect as an industrial product. It is better, it is made with passion!

We are making 30 sets so we have got 240 soldiers, 120 white and 120 red, 8 soldiers every set. My father painted them. Now we are thinking about sashimonos with Japanese numerals. And there are still other things to do. Next time.

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Mercatino giapponese di Natale

Every a couple of months there is a Japanese market here in Rome. And now is Christmas time so Sunday we hoped to find something as gift. This market is organised by two brothers form Japan with their little shop here in the city. It is an opportunity to find something from that far land, near to us thanks to anime and other cultural interests.

You can find a lot of things, not only from Japan. It is a little fair of nice handmade stuff too. This time Andrea from Ganesha Games was with us looking for some gashapons for Samurai Robot Battle Royale. He bought a couple of them. I bought some small gifts for my sister. As starter for the lunch we ate a Japanese sweetie with jam made with red beans. And we all watched some cosplayers and a beautiful retailer with fake reindeer horns…

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Zaku: Ganesha style

In change of a lot of visits to Ganesha Games fighting arena inside Sergio’s home, Andrea came in Rome the past Sunday to a playtest session about Samurai Robot Battle Royale. The last time we tried the rules adopting a Go Nagai perspective, using heroic robots with a lot of fantastic weapons. It was Mazinga Z (aka Mazinger Z, aka Majingā Zetto) versus evil robots. This time I wanted a more military feel, using Patlabor universe mechas. They haven’t weird weapons but only guns and rifles. It is a challenge to write rules that you can adapt to all kind of robot fighting. Maybe it was too early, because I wanted to put in the middle a giant monster (the number XIII, an experimental biologic weapon in the Patlabor anime) using Mighty Monsters rules, to test the compatibility between the two rulesets. Instead we try to adopt the military feel with Gundams and Zakus! I have a big collection of these little gashapons, so it was time to see them fighting in the name of Zeon (I dislike the Federation side…)! Some tweaks were made and all seem fine, but we are still in a initial development stage. But we are on the right way.

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Zaku: ThreeA style

If you don’t know Gundam you can stop to read here. But if you like human manned giant anthropomorphic robots made in Japan you can understand me. I think that mecha design for Zeon side in Gundam series is the best. And Zaku is the best mecha ever. Well, there are other Zeon’s mechas and less primitive designs than those used in the first seminal anime, but the essential form of all mechas is a derivation from the Zaku features.

I like the modernisation of this mecha style, especially when they made them more huge and chunky, so I thought that the new proposal of ThreeA for a Zaku toy was a great thing. I’m a big fan of this toy maker and its robots created from Ashley Wood comics and paintings, but this time I’m perplexed. Zaku is a perfect design to me, instead the ThreeA version is really another thing. A bad thing. You can see here a preview about this toy. The worse part is the head, so small and without the monocle. Zaku is a Cyclops!!! Not my cup of tea…

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Happy Model +Libri +Liberi

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 XVIth 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.

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Saturday, another day in Terni to meet Ganesha Games team. More mindstorming than playtesting this time. Here in the kitchen with Diego and a tisane for our fatigued throats after hours of speaking.

A preview from iPad about the frontispiece design of Drums & Shakos Large Battle. Full color for these rules. Three years in the working, such a great effort for Sergio. This day he woke up at 4 in the morning to end the English translation of the rules. Italian version ready for Christmas, we hope. The English one a little after.

Another project in the making from Sergio at its initial stages. Seven Years…

Reinforcements from painting service. Sergio is enlisting troops, drums of war are rolling.

Samurai Robots Battle Royale first fight! We are trying to make this new ruleset full compatible with Mighty Monsters so you can play robots against monsters, but this will be a totally new set of rules. As a matter of fact, during the first battle we changed the method to inflict wounds. Another playtest maybe in Rome the next Sunday with my Patlabor gashapons. I have to build quickly some buildings in Patlabor scale.

In the afternoon Railroad Tycoon to play together with something different than playtesting. I won. My adversaries couldn’t do anything to stop me!

Our board had weird colours for blue, violet and red, so Sergio fixed it at the end. And the last photo is about me in the main Sergio’s wargame room…

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