Historical miniature gaming has been a hobby of mine since college or earlier. A few years ago, I became interesting in Roman gladiator conflicts and other arena events as a focus for wargaming. I soon painted up some figures, created a model arena, and found a set of rules and ran a few games. One of these was at a local convention called The Council of the Five Nations. These are photos of that game.
I used a set of rules called Red Sand, Blue Sky from a company called Two Hour Wargames. Although I have since moved on to a different set of rules for the period, Hoc, Habet, Hoc from Flagship Games, I had several interesting games with this set of rules although ultimately I found them a bit too mechanical and limited for my tastes. In these rules each turn requires that the players determine initiative and then each gladiator engages in a sequence of actions. To mark which player moved his figure when, a sequence that shifted each turn and depended on the characters' abilities as well as a random dice roll, poker chips with numbers were used.
The players conduct their moves.
Here you can see part of the game, four gladiators, two heavily armored Myrmillo and two lightly armored Retarii armed with a net and trident pair off for battle. This was a historically authentic match.
You can see here that the order of play is determined and marked with the numbered Poker Chips.
A Myrmillo manuevers to attack a retarius from the flank.
The Retarius has thrown his net and missed. It lies nex to a heavily armored Myrmillo making recovery of the net difficult. Can the lightly armored gladiator survive the match?
I've run the game again in 2017 and will be running it again this year in 2018 using a new set of rules (Hoc, Habet, Hoc) and also having upgraded and improved my arena. I look forward to showing more photos of the result.
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