Colosseum: The Grand Spectacle - Gladiator Pledge

Click the image below to see the original crowdfunding campaign:

The Story

Rome, 80 AD. The greatest arena the empire has ever built is opening its gates for ninety-nine days of games, and every impresario in the city wants their name on the programme. You buy the beasts, hire the champions, pay the musicians and pray the crowd roars. In the stands, the Emperor, the Consul and the Senator drift from gate to gate, and a show is only as great as the company watching it. On the final day Titus himself takes his seat — and all eyes turn to you.

Game Mechanics

Four rounds, four chances to stage something unforgettable. Each round moves through the same tight sequence, and every phase puts you face to face with the other players.

• Invest — add your own gates to the shared Colosseum, buy bigger event programmes, season tickets and Temples of Fortuna.
• Auction — bid against everyone at the table for the market stalls holding the assets you still need.
• Trade — open negotiation, no restrictions. Everything is on the table and so is everyone's desperation.
• Perform — roll, walk the nobles through the arena and cash in your programme for spectators.

The cruel part is the scoring: your result is only your single best show, not the sum of them. A brilliant opening night is worth nothing if you cannot top it, so every round you are forced to gamble bigger while your rivals bid up exactly the tokens you were counting on.

What Makes It Special

Almost no other game scores you on your peak instead of your average, and it changes everything — the whole table can see who needs what, and needs it now. This is the 2007 Wolfgang Kramer and Markus Lübke classic rebuilt from the ground up: four rounds instead of five, a rebalanced economy, one shared Colosseum that all players build into rather than five separate arenas, and brand-new solo and two-player modes. Jonny Pac led the development, The Mico and Ian O'Toole did the art, and purists can still play the original ruleset straight out of the box.

What's in the Box

• 1 game board and 2 side boards
• 5 player boards
• 20 Colosseum gates, 5 Temples of Fortuna and 5 pillars — all silkscreened
• 34 spectacle tiles
• 172 wooden performer tokens
• 12 star performer meeples
• Promoter meeples, gift tokens and aquila tokens
• Emperor, Consul, Senator and Mercury pawns
• 80 metal coins and 18 metal aquila tokens
• 4 dice
• 24-card Aquila module
• Printed cloth bag and plastic insert
• 1 rulebook
• The Lion — a module adding a lion figure and a new twist to the arena.
• Sixth Player Expansion — everything needed to bring a sixth impresario to the table.
• Impresario Deluxe — a standalone card game set in the same arena.
• Original soundtrack — digital download.

Click the image below to see the original crowdfunding campaign: