From the same stable as the Battle of the Little Big Horn game that Anthony and I played back in June comes this Punic Wars game based on the Battle of Metaurus. Originally designed and published in Spain by Rojas y Malaret, as part of a series of games called "Great Battles of the World" then subsequently produced under licence in Germany by O.M.Hausser.
This is the box art for the German version of the game, which Anthony acquired and then had the board copied onto a 6'x4' mat so that we could play it using 54mm toy soldiers.
It's a different layout to the Little Big Horn game but you can see that the graphics are the same style. This is the Carthaginian end of the board, forces start with the river behind them and on the base line behind the river, either side of the tree, are two standards, the object of the game is to kill the enemy General or capture both standards. Possession of the elephant should have been a game winner, sadly I proved to be no Hannibal!
At the Roman end of the board the troops start off in wooded country and have two cavalry units, pitching mobility against the greater combat strength of the Carthaginian elephant unit. In the centre of the board there is an impenetrable mountain range with surrounding woods and an area of ruins.
Terrain features such as woods, ruins and the mountainous areas in orange are accessible only to infantry, but the lines of rocks are unpassable to all. These features provide cover and give a combat bonus to the infantry occupying them. The river can only be crossed at the three fords.
The figures we used were 54mm Romans and Carthaginians made by DSG of Argentina. The dark line running across the board is just where the original board was folded, it has no bearing on the game.
The ruins in the centre of the board became the focal point of the battle and changed hands several times. The trees, rocks and ruins don't come with the game, we just added them to improve the visual aspect.
The Roman cavalry were put to good use running rings around the slower moving Carthaginians. We played the game using the original rules and numbers of figures, combat and movement are similar to the LBH game so very easy to pick up quickly. With the original game you could also buy add on units to represent different troop types and there was also an additional rule for combat with elephants. The game took about an hour to play and going forward we agreed that it would give a more challenging and better looking game to increase the number of figures used.
This is the contents of the Hausser box, the infantry and cavalry are 40mm Elastolin figures, they incorporated the original elephant made by Rojas y Malaret from the Spanish version. This box has had an add on set included as the Metauro game only came with one elephant, there was another game based on the Battle of Zama, which had two elephants. The Zama game also has a different board layout, it is played across an open area with stockade encampments at either end.
These are a couple of the figures from the original Rojas y Malaret game, the infantry (which I couldn't find when photographing this) are a bit over 54mm, the riders here are 54mm but you can see that the horse and elephant are not to scale. The elephant is a solid one-piece plastic moulding.
