This is a game of the Roman arena from EM4 Games costing £11.99 GBP plus postage.
For your money you get 5 Roman Gladiators armed and armoured roughly alike, the figs prepainted but out of their bases which are not based nor textured, 5 dice with sword and shield icons and one die with thumbs up/down icons for campaigns, a colour printed arena map and some counters.
After each player randomly chooses a gladiator the next step is to chose a random position in the areana, which can be a bit of a bleep. Thereafter each turn proceeds with players playing in order according to the number chosen by a chit at the start of a turn.
The heart of the game is the dice. Three of the white dice contain one sword icon or one shield icon each, two of the dice have one face with two swords and one with two shields and the sixth has two of sword or shield on each of its face.
Gladiators are roughtly equivealent in arms and armour but they differ in how many movement points they have, hot points and the special manouvers they can perform, although all gladiators can only have one attack and one defence a turn. There are special manouvers such as all out attack, desperate defence and feint which the affect the dice you get to roll or reroll but each Gladiator has only a limited number of those manouvers available to him and each time the manouver is selected, even if it isn't used, it is gone for that game.
This is a fun Beer 'n'Pretzels/Pub game. It took longer than we thought it would as reckless hacking gave way to husbanding of hitpoints and special moves for the exact moment for maximum effect. Slower gladiators are going to have to cooperate to ensure the faster ones can be brought to a fight but still luck can spare the trapped gladiator if the dice favour them and different gladiators will have different combinations of dice open to them.
The only niggles are the dice. It would be good to have the bonus dice and the "mighty effort" dice colour coded to save time. That said this is a silly, enjoyable and simple game with figures that are adequately prepainted.
*Recommended*
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paints the prototypes for the Eureka Amazon Army.
