From Stefano Izzo
Watermarked PDF – $14.36 USD
MAGNA ACIES! is a three-dimensional wargame ruleset (i.e. played with toy soldiers and on three-dimensional terrain) that aims to reproduce, in a good balance between realism and simplicity, the great battles of the ancient world. Its goal is also to bring people who have never tried this beautiful hobby closer to the three-dimensional wargame, which allows you to really "play" with the soldiers that we admire and have always loved. MAGNA ACIES! is therefore designed to remain simple, and to immediately put you players in a position to really lead an army of the Antiquity, making you relive the situations that in those days could make the difference between victory and defeat.
You impersonate the commander of the army, who gives orders to the various corps from which the army is constituted: at the beginning of the battle, assign orders to your large units deployed in the field, depending on whether your plan provides that each of them must attack the enemy, or maneuver to reach a more favorable position, or even stand still waiting for the opposing charge or the development of events. Units that receive orders must act accordingly, until they clash with the enemy or until you deem it necessary to change the order for any reason.
In short, you are re-proposed for the problems that the leader had to face on the ground and only those; this perspective (which can be defined as "great – tactical") involves simplifying (or automatically managing) certain aspects of detail that are not considered here as they are supposedly left to the initiative of subordinate officers, but allows you to play great battles in limited spaces and in a short time.
MAGNA ACIES! can simulate the battles of Antiquity until the advent of firearms; it was designed with classic age clashes in particular in thought, but works well as long as squares of men and horses predominantly confronted with close combat weapons.
I thought MAGNA ACIES! to be practical, fast-and-playable: in 15mm, you can play even on tables less than one meter, the rules are round 25-pages including examples, illustrations and various chatter, the game tables and the "army lists" are included in a single A4 sheet, a 150 point game – army on each side can last an average of a couple of hours, once you've learn the rules.
