Batalla del Metauro

About

This game is an early Spanish attempt of a "wargame", based on the battle at the Metauro 207 BC, where Hasdrubal lost against Gaius Claudius Nero. The game comes with a booklet about the historical battle, and an album with glue-in images from the film Hannibal (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1959). It has very simple rules: the units can move one to three spaces and battles are resolved by simple dice rolls, modified by strength of the units (elephant!, cavalry) and area bonus. Units have something like a zone of control. The aim is to kill the opponent's leader or to capture the opponents "flag-space". What makes this game really interesting are the beautiful hand-painted miniatures. In the original version by Rojas y Malaret, the figures were made of plastic and hand painted. In the German version everything is the same (rules, board, box), but the figures are made of Elastolin, a material invented by the Hausser company a few years earlier and used for toys (they are also hand-painted). Hausser used its own miniatures (diferent and a bit smaller (=4 cm) than the Spanish ones), but the elephant comes from the Rojas y Malaret game "Carthago" (Hausser had no elephant in its catalogue). That's why the elephant miniature in the Hausser version is a bit different in scale and material from the other units (and equal to the original Spanish one). The Rojas y Malaret version was published in Spain in 1961, and the German version by Hausser in 1963 but it was republished for years.

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