Sons of Mars - the Match!

 Just a brief post today because I didn't take many pictures and chronic insomnia has made my recollection of finer details fuzzy at the best of times.

Yesterday, I brought two teams of gladiators and a felt battle mat to my buddy Rick's house, and played my first in-person wargame against another player since February 2020. Between the pandemic, my wife becoming seriously ill, and my formerly-friendly local game store no longer being welcoming now that I need to mask in public to protect my immunocompromised spouse...it's been solo games only for the last four years. But Rick and the circle of friends he and I play D&D with are all taking precautions to protect immunocompromised loved ones, so while our wives went out for pedicures together, Rick and I opened up the ludi and met in the gladiatorial arena.

We played an initial 1 vs 1 match for Rick to learn the rules of the game and get a feel for it; taking the Blue team, he put a Murmillo in the arena; taking the Reds, I responded by selecting a Retiarius, armed with a trident and net, for a classic matchup. It was a close match for the first couple of rounds, with my Retiarius scoring some impressive hits against the heavily-armored Murmillo. But eventually he closed the gap and his gladius drank deeply of my gladiator's lifeblood. 

Following this, we decided to go for broke and do a 3 vs 3 match. Keeping his Murmillo, Rick selected the Unmitigated Gaul (a dual-wielding Dimachaerus) and Spartacus the Thracian for his team; I swapped out my Retiarius, and fielded a Provocatore (a heavily armored gladiator built for staying power), a Thracian, and a lightly-armored Velites.

This ended up being a brutal match; Sons of Mars matches have a time limit of eight rounds, and we went right to the bottom of the 8th. We had a long stretch where the two Thracians were clashing, while the other four gladiators were in one big knock-down brawl downfield; the Murmillo and Provocatore pressed each other, with the Velites and Dimachaerus bouncing off them.

At one point, the Provocatore had the entire blue team attacking him at once, and he not only held his own, but delivered some brutal and near-crippling blows to the Murmillo and Dimachaerus before finally succumbing to a million small cuts; my Thracian took down Spartacus, which caused the brawl to sort of begin to separate out; by the beginning of the 8th round my Thracian and Velites were both holding on with just a single point of Vitality each. It didn't take long for the Murmillo (who was himself at 1 point of Vitality) and the Unmitigated Gaul (at 3) to finish them off. 

This was no sterile chess match; Rick played the soundtrack to the Spartacus TV series, and there were a couple points where we were both on our feet cheering for our respective fighters. We'll definitely be doing another day of gladiatorial games some time soon, possibly introducing obstacles and animals into the arena.