"Rules for Gladiators ?" Topic

I'm looking for rules for playing gladiators, in two ways :
- first speed conventions games, easy to pick and follow especially for peoples who never played wargames.
- second, rules with campaign system, maybe multiplayer rules ?

any help ?

I just came into a dozen gladiators and wondered the same thing. Here's an interesting discussion:

TMP link

BTW, Habet, Hoc Habet seems to the be winner. Found a set on eBay for $35 USD and was going to grab it, but somebody here had it for less. Yay me!

Having gone through several sets of Gladiators, I can offer this comment. You have to be prepared to simply have the two figures facing each other while you role dice, not much more than that happens.

Having gone through several sets of Gladiators, I can offer this comment. You have to be prepared to simply have the two figures facing each other while you role dice, not much more than that happens.

Except for some moving to get to contact, getting past longer weapons, evading nets and blows by jumping out of the way I concur.

One of the best sets I played was Rudis by Tabletop Games, where the figures moved on hexes with a quite clever mechanism for attack defence choices – not difficult to pick up, but probably too difficult for convention gaming without a short tutorial and helpful umpiring. The combats are largely an attack defence posture on paper exercise.

One of the quickest sword play games I've found was one published in Miniature Wargames (possibly Wargames illustrated). Each player has a hand of seven cards. 1 lunge with attack value 3, a hack with attack value 2, a slash with attack value 1, 3 Parries, and a Rest. The game is played in rounds. Each player selects a card and plays it at the same time – like snap. Parry deflects all attacks. Attacks cause damage equal to difference (E.g. lunge 3 Vs slash 1 causes 2 damage to the slasher) with maximum damage Vs Rest. When you play Rest (hoping your opponent will play Rest or Parry) you get to pick up all of your played cards back to your hand to increase your choices back to maximum. 3 points of damage kills. It is a very quick and easy way to decide combats, and I suppose (with a bit of ingenuity) you could change hand size and composition for different weapons and levels of skill.

Having gone through several sets of Gladiators, I can offer this comment. You have to be prepared to simply have the two figures facing each other while you role dice, not much more than that happens.

This exactly. No need for minis, sadly.

Victus

link

Thanks Olicana, that little card game sounds really cool and just the thing to use with my kids when playing modified Dungeon Quest and similar.

Much appreciated!

Cheers,
Aaron

It is a great little card game, it was published a long time ago and I can't remember the name of the guy who came up with it but, there are some very clever and imaginative people out there – more surprisingly, some are gamers.

By far the most interesting gladiator game I've played is Jugula.
This has a number of things to make it interesting:
1. You are fighting with a team of 4 gladiators each, rather than one on one. So there is lots of manouevre.
2. The game uses a deck of special cards in an interesting way to control play. There are lots of tricky decisions; a card can do many things, but you have to choose which of the many effects you want to use. In many ways it is more like a deck-building game with added gladiators, but it makes for an interesting game.
3. There is an excellent campaign system where you get to run a gladiator school, hire helpers to enhance your gladiators and so on.

I keep remembering a very old packet game, a Steve Jackson game, Kung fu 2100, which has a very innovative combat system where each side chooses several combat tokens, like defend or attack variants. Each player then played tokens from his deck and cross referenced the result to see who got hit(if any) – and the damage caused.
Its still available as a PDF link

I suggest it would work for Gladiators too!

You have to be prepared to simply have the two figures facing each other while you role dice, not much more than that happens.

Except for some moving to get to contact, getting past longer weapons, evading nets and blows by jumping out of the way I concur.

I've run several campaigns using HHH and that isn't how it went for us. I'm guessing it was maybe the rules being used.

BTW, I think these quotes describe about any pre-gunpowder wargame in one sentence. Smash your Gauls into the Roman legion. Roll dice until you have a winner. Same could possibly be said up until the mechanized era. Smash your Russians into the French in the Napoleonic era, roll dice until you have a winner.

For that matter, you could even add any game that is edge to edge figures on the table. Is there really any meaningful movement in that case?

Or perhaps its the rule system you play. IGO/UGO systems can tend to devolve into an exercise in math as you calculate how many casualties you will do on average per turn on the opposing troops before they break.

TKindred recommends WAB Gladiator in that older thread. Are there any additional favourable opinions? I have a copy bought during the Warhammer Historical close-down sale, still shrink-wrapped in plastic. I'd like to know if it's worth setting it free.

Doctor X, you evidently don't play many pre-gunpowder games.
There's a big difference between a game with one man a side and a mass battle game where you can get on flanks, create breakthroughs, get your troops matched up with someone they have an advantage against and use terrain. There's loads of tactics.

Dexter, to quote the President Elect…

"Wrong!"

I have played quite a few games in this era. For years these were the only armies I gamed with for the most part.

Speaking in one sentence generalizations like the previous comments it doesn't matter if its one or a hundred figures against each other this era is pretty much as Nick described. Face each other and roll dice for a winner.

You can talk about flank attacks, etc. but there is nothing different in single combat or mass combat. If you can maneuver to a flank you do. The original comment was there was no maneuvering.

Troop mismatches? You mean like retiarius and secutor? Again, one or a hundred, same thing, different scope.

Terrain is probably the only difference but again, if you can't resolve combat unless you actually make contact (or very close given the mostly very short missile weapon ranges of the era) is there a difference?

Don't be offended by my comment because I disagree with you. My comment is based on actual facts, knowledge, and experience, just as most others have offered here.

I'm not offended – I just disagree that there are no tactics in pre-gunpowder battles.
There are certainly plenty of tactics in the games I play.
My comment is also based on actual facts, knowledge and experience.

Check out Gladiator: Quest for the Rudis. Victus is also very good although I am not a fan of simultaneous movement.

Check out Blue Sky and Red Sand: heroes of the arena by Two Hour Wargames.

The card game mentioned by Olicana sounds a little like Howard Whitehouse's Battle Troll. That set is made for Viking warfare, but it has a nice rock-paper-scissors card system that would actually work quite well for gladiatorial dust-ups. You would just need to make some tweaks to the system to represent some of the unique gladiator types and their fighting styles.

One final thought would be the old Metagaming Melee system back from the late 70s. It's available as a free download various places on the net. Despite its age, it is a superb set for representing small scale combat. Using teams of 3-4 gladiators is a good way to avoid the stationary dice rolling contests that can be a worry in this genre.

Lead Adventure Forum thread Blood in the Sand,unfortunately they were never published or even PDF'd despite quite a lot of people asking
link

If your looking for a gladiator rules set "Sons of Mars" is releasing in mid July, book version & Pdf. Here's a link to a preview of the entire book and if you guys have any questions feel free to ask.

YouTube link

There was a US club/group that self published a nice set that gets run at Historicon (and her sister cons) every now and then. I played in one of their games and enjoyed it so much that I sat down and wrote the rules out from memory afterwards. Simple and fun they were.

Sons of Mars looks really good.

Thanks GGouveia :)

I have a demo game pdf as well as some quick reference sheets free to download if people want to try it out and see if its the right game for them. Take a look and let me know what you guys think.

link

Joe, are you going to preview the rules at Historicon?

Unfortunately I don't think I can make it out there this year. I had to push the release date back to August because I might have a publishing / distribution deal for the book. The downside of that is I had to put the printing on the back burner for a few weeks :(

That's too bad, hoping to watch a demo or even pick up a beta version
Mark

I'll try and get some battle reports up in the next week or two to show off the combat system. There's a free demo game in the link a few posts above if you want to try it out.

Thank you, I went through the demo and really enjoyed it.

Fantastic, I'm really glad to hear that :)

Keep the updates coming

Is the arena in Sons of Mars gridded in hexes or squares or is it ungridded?
Mark

We play with no grid but there is nothing stopping you from using one if thats what you prefer. All movement is measured in inches so if the grid is in inches then it should work just fine.

Thank you. About to base some 15mm gladiators and could choose either 1" hex or square bases

Facing doesn't matter for the rule set so feel free to use whatever basing system works for you. I'd just suggest trying to be relatively consistent with whatever you choose to do.

I still love the original " Arena " rules

Any schedule update for Sons of Mars?

It looks like it will be available for purchase from northstarfigures.com on August 6th. PDF copies will be available slightly after that. Once the date is set in stone I'll surely pass along the information.

Joe, the pdf demo files and rules look great.

Will the rules cover equites and chariots?

Thanks GG!

I hope people really enjoy it once they get a chance to play the full version. I guess we'll find out in a few weeks :)

Barcah, there are character classes for Equites, Sagittarius and Cataphractarius. Each of them have an option for fighting on horseback.

I didn't add chariots into the rules but… Down the road I may put it out as a free PDF along with some other content that didn't make the initial cut.

sounds great — look forward to seeing the rules

Sons of Mars is up for sale and North Star is running an offer that when you purchase the rule book you get a free set of gladiator miniatures. Check it out:

link