News and Games

Regulation starting positions

My eldest son elected to save me the boredom of solo dice-throwing and joined me in a couple  (or three) games of one-on-one gladiator combat ! There was nothing special about any of the three games that we played, but there was a lot of searching through rules for the answer to many questions of  "What happens next" and "How do you do ...."
Despite my half-memories of the rules and the fact that we were trying to play some form of hybrid game using two ever-so-slightly different sets of rules we still managed to have a decent game, lasting slightly over an hour and the basicds of the game were sorted out.

Formation dancing in the second game as we couldn't hit!

 The second game was a week later and between games we must have both had a brainstorm, the game dragged on and on for about three hours without it seemingly having any end in sight.
We had both missed two things that would have brought the game to a conclusion much more quickly. Firstly,  throwing for the number of wounds inflicted (needing a score of '8' or better) is much easier with the  regulation number of  three dice rather than the two dice we had handicapped ourselves with!
Secondly on the odd times we did manage to get a wound we forgot that there is always a chance of there being a critical hit, for additional damage.

The third game was far a more satisfactory fight, though both combatants were fairly weak compared to the two muscle men that we had used in the previous fight.
Even though my gladiator had a fairly low strength for this fight, I still managed to disarm my opponent, (making it three times out of three that I'd done so), but despite this his lack of training mean't he succumbed to his wounds fairly quickly and fell unconscious to the floor. (He was shown mercy by the mob however!)
There were still a couple of hiccups during the game that we had to sort out and a couple of irritating minor misprints in my quick reference sheets and no doubt there will be othersm but at leat I'm rolling dice!

In other news I had reason to be on Boardgamegeek during this last week and had a quick look to see if there was anything happening on the Gladiator front. I was surprised to see that a file I had earlier uploaded had gone, but I was even more surpised that it hadn't really gone, but had been updated!

George Mendoza has added a whole new chunks of gladiator goodness, some I'll be using, some I won't but all is worth persuing.
He has added a few new animals to fight in the arena, an elephant being the most eye-catching  addition and also the rules for animal contests have been overhauled significantly, so much so that they have little resemblance to the originial. This latter point doesn't bother me as I'll pick and choose which bits I'll keep  - as always. There are rules for mounted gladiators that have been added and a new weapon (a lasso) for the laquiarius *a substitute retiarius type). 
The campaiogn system has been overhauled and mostly re-written too but, whilst it looks interesting, for now I'll be sticking to my own camapign rules and pinching ideas.
He has also added a new attribute to the gladiators, one of Luck, which is an easy addition to make and I'll be looking closely in doing so as I like the idea of "appealing to the gods"  - quite thematic.
There are a few other changes, typos corrected etc. but at first glance there is nothing major.

That's it then for this week, not much I know, but I did get some games in !