Pics, pics, pics!

Finally, I succeded in posting the pics from the SDS BIG Battle I organised on december 9.
Above the 11 players that came to Terni from Arezzo, Rome and Florence to play the One-Day-Battle. It was set in 1813 some time before Leipzig. We had three table 120x180 cm.: Centre, West and East. One CinC was present at the battle (Filippo from Florence, commanding the Allies), the other (Massimo from Rome, commanding the French) was in Rome, connected by sms and e-mail (and occasionally, voice). Below is the "clock" I used as a Master/Referee to keep track of the time and of the flow of Orders and communication between the Generals.

 As you can see from the above pic, we were playing the 6:00 AM turn, and there are messages set to arrive at 6:30 and at 7:00. Below the felts I used to represent up to a Brigade in different formations (deployed and in march). I said "up to" because the real amount of battalions/regiments was secret. The felts are numbered and I kept track of who's who..

 Below, the West table with Federico from Roma moving his troops. He played against Andrea from Florence and Antonio with their Russians. Federico's Bavarians performed very well.

 Below, the Central table. Here Marco and his Aid-de-Camp (his son Giovanni) battled against Diego, who commanded the Russo-Prussian Guard. Felts were removed after the troops were spotted and moved out of them.

 Below the East table were Narciso's Prussians met with Alessandro's left wing of the French Army. Felts were - of course - color coded (Black for the Prussians, Blue for the French, and Green for the Russians).

 That's me, writing a message to the French CinC in Rome from one of his Generals. Note how small is the paper with the order: this also was intentional, to avoid writing too many details.

And finally, Filippo (the Allied CinC) studying the map I sent in advance (and realizing it was slightly different from the reality). The experiment was quite a success, with a French minor Victory. The game started after 10 AM and ended about 5.30 PM. There are many improvement to make to get a perfect battle, but I think that it was a good start.