The Battle Panormous - Conquest of Italy Campaign

Last Saturday seven of us braved a small snow storm to play the third game in my friend Mike's ongoing First Punic War campaign. This was another case of the Greek player aggressively attacking the Carthaginians, this time in the town of Panormous on the island of Sicily. The armies were closely matched, both primarily composed of hoplites with a few skirmishers and soldiers tossed in.

The Greeks, shown to the left to right were Phil, Charlie the Greek commander, and Bob. For Carthage was Ralph, Rob and myself.

This game was a very dominating performance by the Greeks. Both sides played well, but the Greeks additionally had the dice Gods in their favor. By the end of the game the Carthaginian army was in shambles and the Greeks had suffered only minor losses. The loss puts Carthage in a very desperate position in the campaign. We'll have to see how things go from now on but it is quite likely that Carthage will end up beaten back to Africa before too long. Rome has turned south towards the Greek holdings in mainland Italy, but for Carthage it could be too late to save them from the Pyrrhic aggression.

With Ralph's help filling in some missing stands, I was also able to get my new Greek hoplites on the table for the first time. They performed reasonably...well as good as the rest of the army did at least. The game exercised the new phalanx mechanic in Hannibal at the Gates. The new rule seemed to work just fine and definitely kept the hoplite wings in more historic looking tabletop formations.

As an added bonus, here are two YouTube videos of MOST of the game. My camcorder battery ran out about 2/3rds of the way through the game. The last video is one my friend Mike made that contains a slide show of photos we all took at the game.