Rome vs Carthage: a wild see-saw battle with Optio

[Justin Swanton]

Hi chaps. It's been a while, I know. I've been concentrating on getting Optio ready for publication which means lots of playtesting and tweaking. Here's a battle report of the latest game with my playtester, Peter, who narrowly won after some pretty extreme see-sawing that saw him an inch from routing himself. Peter played Carthage, yours truly Rome. Enjoy!

[Imperial Dave]

hopefully dice will make it into the last version 

[Justin Swanton]

hopefully dice will make it into the last version 

Of course. Each player gets a rubber squeegee die to squeeze on, for therapy. "This is a wargame!"

[Imperial Dave]

needs more dice 

[dwkay57]

Interesting - the Carthagians always seem to sneak in a victory somehow.

Do like the pre-battle maps and movements - I must do something similar myself!

[Justin Swanton]

Interesting - the Carthagians always seem to sneak in a victory somehow.

Do like the pre-battle maps and movements - I must do something similar myself!

I find the prebattle terrain game the easiest and funnest way of generating terrain. It's done in 5 minutes without all the fussy and arbitrary throwing of dice to put a hill here and a forest there. The two players tend to choose a battlefield that doesn't decisively favour either - unless one player surprises the army of another on terrain that suits the first.

You'll need ferrite magnets to create it. Want to know more?

[Justin Swanton]

needs more dice 

OK, two squeegee dice per player. Satisfied? 

[Imperial Dave]

needs more dice 

OK, two squeegee dice per player. Satisfied? 

Suppose so....

[dwkay57]

It's more the creation / provision of the maps that I'm really interested in (being a bit lazy and not a geographer) Justin. You did explain the mechanics a while back and I'm not sure how they would work in a solo game.

[Justin Swanton]

It's more the creation / provision of the maps that I'm really interested in (being a bit lazy and not a geographer) Justin. You did explain the mechanics a while back and I'm not sure how they would work in a solo game.

Probably not very well. The idea is to have a certain amount of fog of war. Each player has 5 blocks, and one player doesn't know which block of his opponent is his army until either his scout spots it or his army bumps into it. I have another pre-battle terrain game which doesn't use fog or war. That would work for solo play.

[Imperial Dave]

I do love a pre-game game

[Justin Swanton]

I do love a pre-game game

And then there's the exciting pre-game pre-game...

[Imperial Dave]

Game?