Sunday, January 29, 2006

The First Man in Rome

The book I've been reading for the last few weeks is "The First Man in Rome" by Colleen McCullough. She's not my kind of author, but a guy at Brisbane Independent Gamers who was playing De Bellis Multitudinus said she did a good job of the battle descriptions, so I read it to see what he meant. It turns out she's done an awesome job of everything - I can't imagine how much research she did to try to make such a detailed book as correct as our knowledge of the period would allow. However it hasn't inspired me to play DBM nor De Bellis Antiquitatis, the smaller version, as I just can't get into those tape measure games. I don't get why they're interesting. I'm still thinking about it.

However, the descriptions of the German tribes travelling all over Europe does remind me of Vinci, and I'm keen to play that. There are solo rules, but they sound like heaps of hard work.

BTW, in Latin, 'c' is pronounced as we pronounce 'k'. So the game is "Vinky" and "caesar" was pronounce "kaiser". Don't let anyone tell you any different, tell them to argue with Colleen.

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