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Colosseum is a new game by Wolfgang Kramer, this time with co-designer Markus Lubke and published by Days of Wonder.
The Game Components
As you would generally expect from a Days of Wonder release, the components in this game are wonderful. And, there are so many of them, that there’s even a guide explaining how to put them all away.
Here’s what you get:
Game Board: A six-panel gameboard depicting the center of Rome. Since the game is actually largely about resource management, a lot of this board is just a focal point: it’s where you put items to be auctioned and where you lay out your colosseums. The only thing of real geographical note is a track which nobles circle around--possibly landing on your colosseum.
The board is painted in muted colors, but is overall attractive and does a good job of helping to hold the game together.
Nobles: There are six different noble figures: 3 senators, 2 consuls, and 1 emperor. These are large wooden pawns, but very uniquely the blue consols have painted robes, while the red emperorer has some gold jewelry which is also painted, making them some of the coolest figures I’ve seen.
Event Programs: These are the first of several carboard bits, all printed full color and linen textured. Each program depicts an event that you can put on at your colosseum. There’s a ton of info in each, including: the cost, the value, the arena size, the assets you need, and the adjusted values if you don’t have all the necessary assets. However it’s all laid out clearly with good uses of color and icons that make them entirely easy to read.
Other Cardboard Bits: There are a ton more cardboard bits, including: expandable collosseums (with two ends and two interior bits, allowing colosseums from size 2 to 4), season tickets, loges, emperor medals, roman coins, podiums, star performers, various counters and tokens, and assets.
Many of these pieces affect how good an event is. This is always marked by a value in a laurel, a nice bit of consistency that makes the iconography easy to read. Beyond that the pieces are all attractive and designed with clear utility in mind. For example the coins come in several denominations which are differentiated both by size and color.
The assets pieces are the heart of the game. Each of them depicts one of the 12 types of things you need to run events in your colosseum: gladiators, comedians, musicians, horses, torches, priests, ships, lions, scenery, decorations, chariots, and cages. There are also a few special assets that only come up later in the game. The assets are all color-coded, and thus easy to pick out when you’re selecting a lot for auction, and equally easy to match up to your event programs.
Wooden Bits: There are a few addition wooden bits too. Two wooden dice are uniquely numbered II-VI, with the sixth side labeled “I-III”. There are also score markers for each of the five players which are not quite the same colors as the colosseums, but close enough.
Event Summary Sheets: Six event summary sheets (one per player, plus one) help you keep track of everything going on in the game. The front of each lists event programs #11-30, which as we’ll see are the programs that players can buy later in the game. This is all done iconically with clear depictions of cost, value, what size arena is needed, and what assets are required, so you can quickly skim down and see what you might want.
The bottom of the card shows the count of each asset type, which the back provides a very thorough explanation of the five phases of the game, which overall makes it an excellent play aid.
Rules: An XII-page full-color rulebook with plenty of examples and illustration.
Overall you get a huge set of components in Colosseum. They’re all good to great quality, with lots of good quality art, and plenty of attention paid to the utility of the pieces. As such Colosseum earns a full “5” out of “5” for Style.
The quantity of pieces in Colosseum is so large that it makes the game pretty intimidating when you’re getting ready to learn it, but as it turns out the game isn’t that hard, and the components all generally fit into place simply and elegantly.
The Gameplay
The object of Colosseum is to put on the most successful colosseum event over five turns of play. This is done through the acquisition of event programs (which define the event) and event assets (which are used to put on the event).
Setup: Each player takes a colosseum and puts in on the board in an appropriate place. He also gets a starting supply of 30 coins.
Each player will also get two starting event programs. These are fairly distributed, with each player getting one from #1-#5 and one from #6-#10. These numbers reflect the increasing difficulty of the events. So, for example, #1 is “Tribute to Munus” which requires two gladiators and a decoration (the “Munus”, as it were). Holding the event will be worth 7 victory points if all the components are in hand, 5 if one is missing, and 3 if two are missing. Conversely #10 is the “Cavalary of Spartacus” which requires three gladiators and three horses. It’s worth 12/10/8/5/2 points for the following number of missing tiles: 0/-1/-2/-/3/-4. You can’t conduct it if you’re missing more than 4 of the tiles.
Each player also gets 5-8 random asset tokens at the start of the game, which are drawn from a starting supply.
Besides the colosseums, the 6 nobles are also placed on the board at their appropriate starting places. Finally the 5 market places are filled, each with a lot of 3 more assets. These will be the auction lots which players will soon be bidding for.
Piles of other stuff are set up surrounding the board.
One player is chosen as first player. This will rotate throughout the game.
Order of Play: The game is played out over 5 turns of play. Each turn contains the following 5 phases:
- Invest
- Acquire Event Assets
- Trade Event Assets
- Produce an Event
- Closing Ceremonies
After the fifth turn, whoever has put on the best event over five turns of play is the winner.
Invest: In the first phase each player improves his arena in one of four ways:
Buy a Season Ticket. This gives a +5 value to every event held in the arena at cost of 10 coins.
Expand the Arena. Arenas start at size 2. They must be size 3 to run events #11-20 and size 4 to run events #21-30. To increase by one size costs 10 coins.
Buy a New Event Program. The bigger the event, the more points it brings in, which translates to coins and other rewards during the game and victory in the end. Depending on the event number this costs 13-40 coins, and is thus the biggest money sink in the game.
Buy a Loge. This attracts nobles and costs 5 coins.
Acquire Event Assets: Now the first player initiates an auction by choosing one of the five lots on the board, each of which has three assets. He must bid at least 8 coins as a starting bid. The auction goes around the table until everyone but a single player has dropped out. That player then pays his money to the bank and takes the lot.
If this was the player who initiated the auction, the next player who hasn’t yet won an auction gets to start the next one. Any empty lots are refilled first.
If the player who initiated the auction did not win, he gets to start a new auction, but the lots don’t refill first.
Players can’t bid on a lot once they’ve won, thus by the end of the phase each player should have won one lot, with the last player just paying 8 coins and taking his lot.
Star Performers. Several of the categories of assets have star performers, who will improve events that they’re involved in. A star performer goes to the first player who gets 3 or more of the appropriate asset, is lost if the player drops below 3 of the asset (which can occur during “closing ceremonies”), and goes to another player if that player ends up with more of the appropriate asset.
Trade Event Assets: Now each player has the opportunity to initiate trades with other players. They may trade assets and/or coins. This is really the most important part of the game, because it’s where players can hone their assets down to what they actually need for their current event programs.
Produce an Event: Now each player gets the opportunity to put on an event. This is conducted in two stages.
First the player rolls one die--or two if he has a loge in his arena. He then moves one noble--or optionally two, if he rolled two dice--forward the appropriate number of spaces. If he lands a noble on a special colored space he gets an “emperor medal”, which is described later. If he lands a noble in his arena, that’ll offer bonus points when he puts on a show.
Immediately afterward the player puts on an event. This is from one of the programs in his collection. He must have a large enough colosseum, but he need not have all the assets listed; fewer assets just result in the event being worth less.
Now he totals up the points for the event. This is worth: the value of the program based on his assets, +5 for each event already produced, +5 for each season ticket he’s bought, +4 for each star performer when their type of asset is used in the event, +3, 5, or 7 for each noble in the colosseum, +3 for each podium, and +3 per emperor medal turned in (which is just one of their uses, as noted below).
If the total was higher that the player’s previous best event, he moves his score marker up on the track to mark his new high score. In any case he earns coins based on the value of his show.
Players can repeat past events, but when they do so they don’t get the +5 value for having put on that show previously. (My experience has been that over the course of the game most players will put on 4 different events over 5 turns, meaning there is one repeat.)
Closing Ceremonies: Now some cleanup is done to end the round.
First, whoever has put on the best event to date (and thus is highest on the score track) earns a podium, which will give +3 to all future events.
Second, each player must discard one of the asset tokens used in their event.
Third, the last place player takes one asset from the first place player.
Emperor Medals: As already noted, emperor medals can be won by landing nobles on appropriate spaces. In addition they can be won as parts of some lots thanks to special asset markers.
An emperor marker can be saved until it is expended in one of four ways:
- It may be discarded for a +3 on an event.
- It may be discarded to move a noble forward or backward 1-3 spaces.
- It may be discarded to earn 6 coins.
- Two may be discarded to take an extra action in the investment phase.
Winning the Game: The player who put on the best single event over the course of the game wins after the fifth turn.
(And though I keep saying “over the course” of the game, it’s almost definitely going to be on the last round of play, because your events tend to keep getting better from turn to turn, thanks to the accumulative +5s for putting on previous events, and a slowly improving set of assets.)
Relationships to Other Games
Colosseum is a resource management game with open auctions and trading.
Generally it feels to me like a cross between The Settlers of Catan (with the trading being, as noted, very important) and The Princes of Florence (another Kramer game working on many similar principles).
Notably Colosseum is much more strategic than probably anything else that Days of Wonder has published. In fact, this game feels to me more like an Alea game with very nice components than a Days of Wonder game.
The Game Design
Overall, Colosseum is a very nice strategy game with multiple paths to victory and lots of forward planning.
The forward planning can, in fact, be intimidated. You’re often figuring out now only how to put on your current event, but also what event you might be purchasing next. I found this a hard work to figure in my first game, but on my second game I was able to play a bit more casually, because some of the overall strategy and planning was more obvious to me.
There is some luck factor in the game, mainly related to whether you get a good combination of assets and events at start and whether rolls land nobles in your colosseum, but I found it all very controllable. In my first game I started with a terrible combination of assets and events, but through trading I was able to get them matched up. As for moving nobles: the purchase of a loge makes all the difference in the world. My general experience has been that in most games most nobles will end up in the colosseums of the players with loges by the end of the game.
Beyond that Colosseum generally seems to work well, and is pretty easy to pick up once you understand the basics. There’s some tightness to the game, especially given the limited amount of “investment” that you can do, and that makes for a tough, thoughtful game.
I also particularly like the give and take between first place and last. You can’t hold on to first place the whole game the way things are set up, and you’ll do best if you can manage an immediate transition from first place, to last, then back to first. This is yet another area of thoughtful strategy in the game.
My only particular complaint is that Colosseum is a bit on the long side. Both of my games lasted one and a half to two hours, which is a bit more than I like for a Eurogame, but was perfectly fine for the depth of gameplay. In fact in the second game I didn’t even realize how much time had gone by until I looked at a clock afterward.
Overall I rate Colosseum a high “4” out of “5”. It’s an excellent strategy game, much heavier than Days of Wonder’s other releases.
Conclusion
Start with Princes of Florence’s combination of actions and auctions and its resource manipulation that allows you to create works (or here--events) with variable values. Add on to that a crucial phase of trading straight out of The Settlers of Catan. Finally, spice it up with the excellent component design that you expect from Days of Wonder. The result is Colosseum, a new Wolfgang Kramer game that’s deep, interesting, and enjoyable.
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