Tuesday, October 09, 2007

A De Bellis Antiquitatis game series...


All it takes is a few interested opponents, my mini-tourney set and a few hours to remind me why I like DBA so much.

I had three players looking to 'warm-up' for my coming DBA tournament I call THE LATIVM CVP.

While they all had 'pushed lead' before and I think 2 of them had at least studied Hordes of the Things, they had not done this game.


With about 20 minutes description and a bit of discussion about the tourney format we were off to games!

My armies are centered around the 'Rise of Rome - 350 bce' game series, so there are loads of spear, auxilia and psiloi along with some blades and cavalry to make things interesting.

The 'learning-curve' for DBA is so short that I find it takes about as much time to explain the chess moves and start a game as it does to do DBA. Similar to chess, knowing the moves and getting into action are different things altogether...


All three players said that they learned much (even correcting a mistake they had been doing in Hordes of the Things) and that they will be at the 28 October tournament!

My thanks to Paul for the pictures!

3 comments:

Bluebear Jeff said...

What was the mistake from HoTT? While quite similar, not all troop types are the same -- Warband is quite different between the two, for example.


-- Jeff

Steve-the-Wargamer said...

...that's a really clver photo - the one from directly overhead looking down.. very effective! How did you do it?? Just stand over the table???

MurdocK said...

The mistake was in *not* including a 'flank' bonus from a unit that had, during the same turn, just won a combat by either pushing back or eliminating a unit. Thus making all linear combats equal unless the 'flank' was open at that start of battle.


The overhead shot was one of my favorites that I used many times during the games I played for my Waterloo Campaign. It was great for 'fixing' the orientation and relative position of all the units.

Since the table is a fairly normal banquet table height it is not hard for tall folks like Paul or I to reach our arms up and aim the camera (the bonus is that Paul's camera has a 'flip out' view-finder that lets him get the shot right the first time). Since the whole battle is taking place inside a 2'x2' area you can usually get all of the troops in one shot.