Last month, I picked up a copy of Daniel Mersey’s A Wargamer’s Guide To the Early Roman Empire (AFFILIATE LINK) via Amazon out of pure curiosity.
Daniel Mersey is well known for creating game books for Osprey Publishing: Dux Bellorum (2012), Lion Rampant (2014), Dragon Rampant (2015), The Men Who Would Be Kings (2016), and A Wargamer’s Guide to 1066 and The Norman Conquest (2017).
A Wargamer’s Guide To The Early Roman Empire was published as a simple guide to the Principate period (27 B.C. to A.D. 284). Over the past few years, the Roman Empire has been a fascination for me. It would be safe to say that I may host an Ancient Roman war game with friends as some point. As a history buff and a gamer, I was interested in seeing how Mersey’s book explains the period to gamers, and how they can incorporate that knowledge into the wargaming hobby. The book is fairly simple to thumb through, as it is not a large book, being only 136 pages, including the index. The sections that list the history, military equipment and tactics, key battles, wargaming the period, scenarios, rules, army building, and further reading are brief. In the Introduction, Mersey states:
“This book helps you to collect and field armies for wargames, and play through an enjoyable, historically plausible battle on your tabletop…It is a wargamer’s guide, rather than a linear military history of the period.”
