M is for Mare Mediterraneanus

Had a bit of a board-game photo-sesh the other day, one of them was this, mentioned before in passing, we may even have looked at one or two of the figures from time to time, but today we'll get the box ticked properly!

Seems to be clear!

The pieces; each player gets an 'army' (including naval elements) in one of four colours consisting of various numbers of four unit types; Elephants, Horsemen, Infantry and Ships. The colours are in the lower image and consist of an ivory-white or cream, black, red and blue, scale is all over the place!

The box-art is superb, mixing the naval battles of the Persian or Punic-wars with the Islamic migration/invasions and fall of Constantinople (when, although still oared, the vessels looked very different) , it's trying to cover the four great empires, who waxed and waned around the edge of the Mediterranean Sea over a few thousand years, in order to justify the game which pits them against each other!

The artwork is also similar to some of that produced by artists Don Lawrence for the Trigan Empire strip in Look & Learn, or Frank Hampson for his Dan Dare work in Eagle, but the box carries no signature or credit note, and I'm mostly basing my wild assertion on the treatment of the smoke & flames of the burning vessel!

A full 'army' in red, the single cavalry and elephant units being joined by three of infantry and two naval, in a similar way to the later Risc, there aren't enough to cover each point (towns & cities), so have to be set out with strategic goals and working with your partner, the game being designed to be played either with two pairs of allies as a four-player, or two players commanding two armies apiece.

The cavalryman in blue has warped and I think it's heat-shrinkage (technically; 'cooling' shrinkage) due to premature removal from the mould-tool, not latter deformation due to unstable-polymer ageing, as they are otherwise a stable polystyrene; the problem is common with these, and some of my lose acquisitions are similarly warped.

As I was having a session, I had the time to spend on generating a couple of .gifs, the other to follow later. It's basically unpacking the box to the Nth degree and then setting the table up for a game!

The board is generally to be treated as a diamond, evidenced by the angle of the titles and the rule-cheat boxes, with the four 'contemporaneous' City States (for the purposes of the game) being Ptolemaic Alexandria (red), Hannibal's Carthage (black), Western-Empire Rome (cream) and Eastern-Empire Constantinople (blue, Byzantines?), there are two each of the red cards (which photographed abysmally) and which are randomly-dealt 'go to jail' type things each player hangs-on to, until needed.

Play is by a pack of cards (made in Belgium, interestingly) rather than dice, and there's not much else to add - so I won't.

"What? Board Games? No, I don't do them, there's far too much space in the lid and the walls aren't high enough, they don't call them 'bored' for nothing, you know! Wake me when there's something I can make a real nest of"