Day of the Long Shadows an Arena Rex Adventure

 If your looking for a post full of nicely painted miniatures you can stop here.....

But if your looking for a good (hopefully) story of two gentlemen starved of having not been able to get together to do their hobby thing, then please by all means continue reading.

For a quick run up to todays game let's start back in March of 2019. A good friend of mine and I decided to try going to Adepticon out in Chicago. Normally we frequent historically conventions, but we both dabble in the scifi and fantasy world. We heard good things about Adepticon and so we thought we'd try it out. 

Boy did we have a riot! I am so happy to have experienced it. Like 6,000 people were there. I've never been to a convention of this size. We got to do our Infinity thing (Scifi), meet some of my Youtube hero's (yes I am a groupie), and participate in all kinds of Demo's. This is where Arena Rex comes into our story. We played in a Demo, and the next thing you know we dropped at least a 100 bucks each before we left the booth. 

So when we get home we (probably like the majority of gamers) took our booty and stuffed it neatly on our shelves with the intent of painting up our purchased models very soon.

Well that didn't happen, of course. We did assemble our miniatures at one point during 2019, and my friend did paint one figure, I on the other hand started a couple and just ran out of gas. 

Then March of 2020 happens. The World stopped spinning, and I desperately held onto my coffee table to keep from floating away.....

Okay seriously that's not exactly what happened, but it sure did feel like it. 

Being in the age danger zone, and having underlying health issues, I had to hunker down. I learned like any other hobbyist that Skype, Zoom, Discord, and all those other ways to connect gave us all a chance to at least game online and be able to see the other person and communicate to another human being.

Some of my bloggers I follow are in Countries where they have covid under control and can game in person, others have gotten together outside and worn masks to get their fix. 

With these ideas and enough time having gone by and the numbers low in my State, I finally (gently suggested by my friend) decided to get together and play a game outside face to face this past weekend, well today in fact. 

No my figures still are not painted, and my friend only has one painted. But at this point it was damn the torpedoes and full gaming ahead! It being more important to get together and share the gaming experience, then to create a beautiful spectacle. 

This brings you to today, and the game (Arena Rex). This would be our first game, so we went for the 3 vs 3 for novice level. We will work our way up to the 5 on 5's or 8 on 8's later. Now it was more important to learn the game and get a feel for the tactics. My friend brought his Cleopatra themed Ludus, and I my Roman themed Ludus. 

We scrambled around the board and around the middle of the game we started to get a feel for it. We forgot a few of our gladiators special abilities, but we learned alot about how to move our gladiators around for the next match. I very much felt that I was in control after taking done two of his gladiators only to find out that the last man standing rule is pretty awesome, combined with the fact that his last man standing was a beast. 

The game ended up very close. I had only one gladiator left, Hermes, when the battle ended but his figure had a special rule that before he bites the dust he gets a free attack. He came within two wounds of taking down the mighty (and bloodied) Hermes.

It was an intense, fun, and glorious time. Flexing our biceps, shouting out gladiator quips like, are you not entertained! Etc. If the weather holds out this Fall, I do so much look forward to our next battle in the Arena!

Here is a photo run down in the order that things happened....

[Below I present the owner of Ludus Magnus on the left (me), and owner of Ludus Morituri on the right (my friend)

[ Ludus Morituri setup below]

[Ludus Magnus setup below]

[Gladiators feeling out the Arena]

[Below the engagement begins in earnest]

[Ludus Magnus regroups after taking down an opponent]

[Ludus Magnus has a man go down, but a fierce counter attack takes another opponent with him, advantage Ludus Magnus or so I thought until we discovered the Last man Standing rule bit]

[My opponent having struck down another of my Gladiators, it was now up to Hermes to bring home the glory for Rome! He is successful but finds to his dismay not to turn his back on a what he thought was a fallen opponent as he takes a last swing before his last breath, nearly taking down Hermes as well]

[Hermes, VICTOR, waves his sword above his head to the cheering crowd, wounds everywhere, it takes all his strength to stand, but the crowd chants his name as it echoes off the arena walls]

Cheers and as always thanks for stopping by and having a look

Kevin