Society of Ancients Conference 2025

I recently attended the 2025  Society of Ancients Conference. Unlike COW it is a quite structured mixture of lectures and gaming sessions, and I greatly enjoy the variety. 

This year was a change of venue, away from Madingly near Cambridge and off to Missenden Abbey. As I missed COW this year, it was great to be back at Missenden especially as the venue is closing later this year. 

Richard welcomed most of us on Friday evening although the conference proper opens on Saturday morning. Phil and Sue Barker sent their regards to us all, but aren't really up to attending these days. 

The entire SOA membership of the Isle of Man (two) was in attendance! 

The WD contingent repaired to the bar for some light gaming on Friday evening. First up was The Never Ending Odessey. 

This involves laying a series of cards illustrated with classic Greek images on them to spin an epic yarn. Each player take it in turns to add to the tale, with dialogue based on the images on the card. It is a bit like the kids game where you write a sentence and pass it on, but more heroic.

The epic is complete when all 20 cards are laid. There is a "frustration" version where you can preview the next card and spin the yarn to make the next players life difficult. 

That was rather good fun, and suits any number of players. We played it twice. 

We also played Dionysia, well, two of us did and the others watched as it is very much a two player game. 

This game is essentially a pattern matching game with 18 cards. The idea is to construct a Greek play of three acts each with three cards. The cards are marked with two of dagger, skull and cup symbols in various combinations. 

The completed plays. They are scored by totalling up the sequences of symbols (eg dagger, dagger, cup) across cards as specified on the cards themselves, and there are bonus points for eg having the most skulls in a single Act. 

In this particular game the final scores were 19 and 15 respectively.

Saturday morning was the usual scramble to sign up for games. 

First off, Duncan Head presented a very interesting talk on the Battle of Cunaxa, which also happens to be the theme of the SOA battle day. 

I hadn't appreciated that it was an unusual battle in that some of the accounts were by people who were actually there (like Xenophon) rather than being written hundreds of years later! So we can be fairly confident about eg what colour tunics each side wore, at least some of the contingents.

After that there was a gaming session with five games running in parallel.

There was another outing for Kim Salkelds 'Aegaeon', a game of galley fleet actions. 

I played this at the conference last year, and I was interested to see how the system had evolved, both in terms of mechanics and props. 

I think unfortunately the session suffered a bit from scale. Last year we had two players and six squadrons per side but this year there three players and 12 squadrons per side, and it hadn't really reached a conclusion when time ran out. There was a good washup at the end though, which largely focused on the incremental movement system and how it meshed with the order system. 

I had a bit of a float around to look at other things going on. 

Battle of Issus with To the Strongest. This was a pretty big game. 

Saxons vs Romano-British with Dux Brittannarium. 

This seemed to be pretty standard TfL fare, and I got confused between this and Dux Bellorium because of the similarity in titles! 

Along with Aegaeon, I went to a fascinating worksop session run by Matt Bennett about how to game the march of Xenephons 10, 000 to the sea after the Battle of Cunaxa. It was really interesting looking at the terrain and considering the challenges the hoplites would have faced, and it was a very free wheeling and open discussion about how to approach gaming it. 

Meanwhile Issus ground on. Parmenion bites the dust here, but really as far as I could see not much had happened and a lot of the players were just sitting there chatting with nothing to do. It reminded me why I really don't like TtS, but perhaps it is a decent two player game? 

Battle of Kadesh with Hail Caeser in 10mm. This looked pretty good and seemed to be rattling along at a fair old pace. 

After lunch Ian Piper gave a very interesting talk about the Syracusian tyrant Agathocles, and the battle of White Tunis in 310 BC. 

An outline of Ians interpretation of the battle, which he planned on running the following day. Agathocles was certainly an interesting character who essentially mounted a successful authoritarian populist coup, and featured heavily in Machiavellis "The Prince". I'm sure stuff like that would never happen today. 

I was running Alexander the Brief in the afternoon, and got set up before lunch. I'd taken the full WD Display Team (North) kit it make it look a bit more professional, and I'm going to be running it at Partisan anyway so needed the stuff. I also had the demo copies of the rules to show to people, kindly provided by the author. 

I set up the Persians for the Battle of the Granicus with Alexander marching up to deploy. Eagle eyed readers will note that I've forgotten the custom battle board, but fortunately I did at least have the old army blanket I was going to use as a base layer. 

Martin Smith at Gaugamela. I had a reasonable turnout for this game, and although the first iteration took a while what with the explanations, three players took it in turns to play each of the three battles. After that the players did all three individually, which took fifteen to twenty minutes a time. 

Things go badly for Darius. 

Very badly in this case as the Persian left flank collapsed and Alexander overran the Immortals! 

In the end we managed five iterations (or fifteen battles), with a wide range of outcomes. Top score goes to Martin with three wins and one unit lost almost a record.  I'm afraid bottom of the pile was Paul with  two wins and seven units lost. Team John B managed three wins but achieved a staggering ten units lost! The worst ever.  I completely forgot to give out any Nuggets to the players as it was quite hard work marshalling all the players, but at least least it means there are plenty left over for Partisan. 

We also had a good chat in the session about the "Dominion" series in general, and I was very grateful to Steven for giving me some demo copies of both the Ancient and Pike and Shot sets for people to look at. I also brought along my own copy of the Marlburian set for people to look at. 

There were more parallel gaming sessions after Ians talk. Final stand of the Sassanian Empire (Sassanids and Arabs) and Introduction to Midgard (Romans and Britons). 

Battle of the River Parrett (Vikings and Saxons) and Runners and Riders (Bronze Age chariots). Apologies if I've mixed some of these up. 

Before dinner John Curry also ran a quick game of Phil Sabins 'Empire', covering the rise and fall of Carthage (and Rome, Persian etc). I'd read the game in "Simulating War", but it all seemed a bit modifier heavy. Seeing it actually played however, it rattled along very well and covered hundreds of years of warfare in an hour or so. It ended with Carthage marginally ahead on points (19) to Rome's (15) and Persia and Macedonia nowhere. 

Before dinner on Saturday, Harry Sidebottom gave a very interesting talk about Gladiators, which addressed what we actually know about them rather than the Hollywood presentation. 

He ran through the general sequence of 24 hours in a Gladitorial contest, and essentially presented highlights from his newly published book. (Available from all good booksellers). 

After dinner, John C broke out Tony Baths flats for another outing. 

It was great to see these old figures again, dated by modern standards but wargaming classics. I was fortunate enough to play with them a few years ago at COW. 

On Sunday morning Dr Matt Bennett gave a talk about the Battle of Hastings/Senlac Hill. 

It covered the now generally agreed location of the battle and a quite detailed terrain analysis as the area was in 1066.

Which in turn affected the deployment of the armies and course of the battle. This in turn is helped by interpretations of some parts of the Bayeux Tapestry (or Canterbury Embroidery as Matt called it, it being neither a tapestry nor made in Bayeux). Harold never had an arrow in the eye. Who knew? 

I spent most of Sunday morning playing John Bs "Laodika's War" which covered the Seleucid succession crisis of 246 BC. It was one of John's huge multi player operational Ancients games, similar to the Octavian/Mark Anthony games I've played a couple of times already. 

A spot of bother around Antioch! I was Prince Seleukos, rightful heir to the Seleucid Empire and successor to Alexander the Great. I'll do a separate write up for this one. 

We finished up after Sunday lunch with a conference wash up session.

There were some more games in afternoon, but I had a long drive and set off early. That was a great conference, very enjoyable and I hope to attend again next year whichever venue it ends up in.