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After a number of delays, partially due to January cold season in the household, we had a few people over for gaming today. Namely, Mark and Patch came over, and Baron joined in with Dave and I for a five-player game of Circus Maximus.

We used the standard 8-chariot field of course, with Mark and Baron being the only ones running single teams. As usual, it’s been been long enough that none of us remembered more than the outline of the rules to start off with. We had a fairly varied field of teams, though no one went for a heavy chariot. My primary team had a good driver at the cost of a light chariot, while my second team had a fast team at the cost of driver skill (I think driver +0 was overall fairly common).

We had a fairly polite start, with no combat until well into the first corner, and even then, there wasn’t much result (a couple of movement penalties).

At the end of turn four. My secondary team (Black) has a temporary lead.

Things slowly heated up after that, but there still wasn’t lots of combat as people concentrated on maneuver. Dave had had an early lead with Green, but Patch’s Purple team came out of the second corner in good shape, while there was large choke-up with Orange (Baron), Red (Mark), Yellow (Dave), with some late moves from Blue (me) and Green (Dave) not helping matters. I had done strongly for a little bit, but was forced to take some chances with my primary team (Blue), and kept rolling poorly. On the first turn, I had rolled a 17(!) to take damage to a horse while going one over the speed rating (I forgot the driver should have applied to the roll, which would have helped, since I would have had more speed for the rest of the race), and then I got a ‘jostled’ result when trying much the same thing on the same corner on the second lap.

End of turn eight. Patch really did a good job with tight cornering on White.

The really ironic thing is that three of us had lost our whips to ‘G’ results while trying to whip the other driver. This really hurt some teams with good endurance, such as my Black.

Patch lead the charge on taking chances. With both of his teams in good chances, he started pushing Purple though tight corners at full speed. The main event was a cornering on the 8 column, where he finally rolled non-low to take damage on a horse. Which turned out to be no damage at all….

With few options left, most of us took the last corner or two hard, I managed to get out of the last corner on the 9+ column with only a point of damage to a horse, Baron managed with no more than some slipping out, but Dave’s Yellow team flipped the chariot, and was unable to cut himself free, and didn’t survive the drag down the final stretch.

End of turn twelve.

The end results: