Let’s start with a view on stands around.

Here my friend Narciso frozen among comics. There were a lot of old and new comics. Too many for a life.

I wonder if a human being can have the space to store all this stuff inside his house. And I wonder as mini-skirt change the way we perceive the world.

Manga ARE the comics. They are read by boys and girls, when other type of comics are read only by males. It was a great thing when girls started to read comics. It will be a great day when females start to play historical wargames.

A smart and funny comic about boys, girls and sex. Great drawings too.

A comic about William the Bastard. Well done. Here the author while was signing my book with a sketch.

Personalised prints by Frezzato, a great comic author.

Gay Zombies in Vatican City! This diy comic went sold out.

Ashley Wood paintings for sale!!! I’m a fan, I like his robots very much but I cannot afford a painting for 3000 euros. I have them printed in a book. I will continue to see them on a book and not on a wall.

Ashley Wood, Jamie Hernandez, Jack Kirby, Crumb… where is my bank account?

Linings for long pillows to hug. A sexy help from Japan to lone male geeks. Exists the same thing for females.

Mouse pads with tits. I bought that one down on the right. I have problems with my wrist so this can help.

Tanto Cuore (a lot of heart) is a card game about Japanese maids. Yes, it is weird as it seems.

T-shirts that hailing to bisexuality. However in the fair there were a lot of manga about homosexuality. I don’t know why.

Diabolik is the Fantomas or Arnesio Lupin of Italy, the king of thieves. Only that he is more dark. Since some years they lunched a line of gadgets. The note says:”Steal from Diabolik stand cause misfortune”.

You have waited enough! Here we go! I have got more than 150 photos to show you on this great convention about comics, games and a lot of amazing other stuff for us, so you can aspect more than 15 thematic posts in the following days. This year there was a beautiful sun in the sky and absolutely no rain. 155000 people were in the fair, one of the biggest fair in the world. A printed programme composed of 64 pages. Five days of madness in the medieval city of Lucca.

This time I was part of the staff as demonstrator in the Lucca Games area, so I had got the benefit of a full pass with the red ribbon. I could enter in spaces without doing queues, a great thing if you are with 155000 people around who want to do the same thing… In the photo under here, that I found on the web, you can see all the bracelets for the audience, one by day. And there is love too between a boy and a girl during the fair. Dirty boy and girl indeed, because the bracelets are made of paper so they hadn’t take a shower in 5 days…

Lucca Comics and Games (October 28th to November 1st, Lucca, Italy) is one of the major geek-cons in the world, covering anything from comics, manga, action figures, anime, undressed girls (cosplay), RPGs, miniature wargaming, gothic lolitas, modelling, junk food, medieval arts, videogames, cardgames, aikido, boardgames, and so on.

I will be with the Ganesha Games crew (Andrea Sfiligoi and Sergio Laliscia) in the Historical Island wargaming area. There will be demo tables of Flashing Steel (pirates and privateers fighting over treasure on a beach), Mighty Monsters (monsters fighting on Monster Island as a volcano erupts), and Drums and Shakos – Large Battles (an army-level Napoleonic scenario played in 15mm scale). I will demo Zen Garden, the world’s smallest wargame (a small, handmade, play-right-out-of the box, super-condensed version of Ganesha’s core rules, played with 10mm samurai which I will sell only at conventions).

If I find a wi-fi point there will be some twit. See you here after the show with a full report and ton of photos!!! I hope I survive!!!!!

Zen Garden production is running fast. In the past days, as those who speak Italian can read on the new twitter box on the right, me and dad made some pieces for the game, as the measurer for the weapons at range and that one for the troops movement, in the form of a rake. I’m thinking about two versions of the game, one with glued sand the other one with sand that you can put by yourself, with the rake to design grooves. So the black rakes have got spikes.

In the meantime some dices arrived by post. Now I must only to custom them. And from Narciso I’m waiting for the first pagodas made in resin. I saw the prototypes in green stuff form. For Lucca I will have got the old game but with some new materials.

In the past months I playtested some new games from Ganesha Games as you can see in these pages in older posts. Now it is time of some releases as Mighty Monsters, but now only in Italian language because Andrea wanted to have a version to present in Lucca at the end of the month. In Italian it is called “Mega Mostri”. Another released game is Flashing Steel, but I didn’t test it. Swatters, aliens against terrestrial colonials, is almost edited. Playtests are ongoing for a new game in a post-apocalypse set bounded to a miniature factory. And Sergio is at work with Drums and Shakos Large Battles for the final version, but I suppose it will be ready only in another month. And more rulesets are in the works, as Song of Spear and Shield! In the meantime the new website of Ganesha Games is on line, but its narrow band caused some problems for the downloading of the rules in some peak moments. There is a lot of work for the society of seated elephant. More on arrival, like my limited edition Zen Garden.

Do you remember my magic card for the fair of Rome? Even this time I went to a convention with free entry just for me. I was waiting for this event since last year because I never saw it and it is about bricolage, so I hope there were some interesting things for modelling and our little world of 3d wargame.

I made a mistake indeed. This is not a fair about “hobbies” but a fair about “women hobbies”. So you could find all about DIY necklaces, blankets, bags, decorations and all these sort of things. Last time I controlled I was a man, so all were a little boring. I looked for something for miniatures, but I couldn’t find something to buy. There were some things to watch, interesting techniques for decoration, paints with special properties, but I didn’t find them useful for me. The weird thing were decorations with a food appearance and food with a decoration appearance, so you didn’t know if some stuff were edible or not. There were even edible colours in a form of pen you can utilise to write on cakes.

The only thing that really struck me was a sculpt demonstration for fairies statuettes. She made its with the same production process of a miniature, adding a sort of green stuff (more like clay I think) on a skeleton made of soft iron wire. Great artistic work but for a wrong cause: fairies are for puffs, we want warriors instead!

I travelled with my sister to the fair, after two hours I left while she remained for other four hours. I took the train alone, but four ladies from other cities in the south of Italy were frightened by how to travel toward home so I escorted them for an hour. In the meantime, in another part of the city, someone was thanking our government for its work…

Another day in Arezzo, this time for the last DBA tournament of the year for the Italian championship. There will be another one but it is in Milan, too far away. Maybe there will be a special tournament in Rome in December, but now we are thinking about other things. The first time I was in Arezzo, I went for an holiday to do something new, the day before a DBA tournament somewhere more north. Now we go to Arezzo more than two times every year. And we pass our time inside a comic shop with a large room on the back for games, like GW ones and card games. On Sundays we always found a kindly lady, the mother of the owner of the shop. Among matches we can walk around comics and some boxes of costly GW products. Every time I buy some ancient Confrontation colours at sale prices. I like the tone of that flesh colours, and now you cannot find them. And just on the opposite side of the street there is a restaurant for our convivial lunches, because our tournaments are an opportunity to meet people from other cities that, tournament after tournament, are become friends. The only sad part is the menu, because I dislike meat but our men in Arezzo organise always a lunch based on meat…

I want to be short here, because I’m very busy. So I would say only that this time I risked to reach the podium during the last turn (my opponent reach the third position). The choice of the army list was almost forced because there was an army stronger than others. So it was a civil war, and if you were the defender you could, after the double switch, have a big advantage, positioning your stronger pieces against weaker pieces of the enemy. When I could make this I had great results. I broke my dice in the fight! It was a dice with runes around the edges and weird Roman numerals. Black with yellow engravings. It was like a demoniac dice who fears the enemy. It was wounded in the fight at an angle. Too much hard launches. It is dead while serving and now it is in Valhalla.