Last night at Madison Board Games & Beer, the open-to-the-public board game night I organize, my game designer pal Kane Klenko gave me a handful of these ROME: CITY OF MARBLE beer coasters be brought back from the R&R Games booth at Gen Con. They look awesome!
“I think of art, at its most significant, as a DEW line, a Distant Early Warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it,” wrote Marshall McLuhan in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. – See more at Design Envy.
Last week at Gen Con, W Eric Martin from BoardgameNews and BoardGameGeekTV had a chat with my wonderful publisher Frank DiLorenzo from R&R Games about our upcoming Essen release, ROME: CITY OF MARBLE.
He’s right, that is a glorious cover.
You can find more coverage of ROME: CITY OF MARBLE in the BoardGameGeek News Spiel 2015 Preview, here.
I got a look at the final box cover art for ROME: CITY OF MARBLE!
That pose is exactly how I feel right now: Behold! Rome in all her glory!
‘to hunt, to bath, to play, to laugh — This is to live!’
Insightful article on the what the peripheral writings on ancient game boards can tell us about the people who played with them.
What will future generations learn from the games in your collection? Do you embellish your games or will they pass into history with no trace of their owners? Will Legacy-style games prove to be the greatest future window into the lives of board gamers of today?
I’ve got a game set in Ancient Rome coming out at Essen this year. I’m going to see if we can add some fun “inscriptions” to the game board artwork as a playful call back to these historical game players.
Be sure to click through and read the full article:
☩ μὴ θεόμαχος νήων. ☩
☩ ἀσβολόθη ὁ ῥονχάζων. ☩
Let the snorter / be covered in soot!
[MAMA X, 330=PH 269278]
Games of chance are never a silent endeavor; however, Romans found it rather uncouth to snort when Fortune was not on your side. A civil person kept their nose silent. There is a strong auditory component to board and card games even today (think about your own favorite cuss words or perhaps a nicely placed ‘yo mama’ joke), just as there was in antiquity. An inscription from late antique Phrygia (4th-5th c. CE) in fact gives us some idea of the insults hurled in the late ancient world. On the edges of a game board adorned with crosses, no less, we have the insult: ‘μὴ θεόμαχος νήων’ (for ναίων), ἀσβολόθη (should be ἠσβολώθη) ὁ ῥονχάζων–essentially, let the snorter go straight to hell. Clearly the crosses were there for protection and luck, and not as a show…
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play without fear 