Colossal Arena Board Game
Written by Cearbhail on April 23rd, 2011Colossal arena is one unusual game. It’s a Reiner Knizia design, so you have the elegance and accuracy of his board games, but it’s published by Fantasy Flight, which means lush art style and fantasy (or something else similarly geeky) theme. But here’s the strange part: it makes sense! The theme feels natural to the board game, and is quite entertaining to experience. And the gameplay, it’s not an efficiency struggle for Vps, or anything like that. It’s a gut-feeling luck-fest in which players try to guess the outcome of a fight they have little control in. A friend of mine even comented, while we played “are you sure Reiner Knizia made this game?”. It sure doesn’t look like it.
In this game, player respresent magicians that influence a free-for-all battle between eight types of monsters in a Colosseum-like arena, while at the same time placing bets on the monsters they think will make it to the final podium. Any player can influence any monster, even the ones that he didn’t bet on, but if he influences a monster in which he has the strongest bet (being that monster’s “backer”), he gets to use a special power that helps him out, be it on the bets, on the fights or giving you extra cards so that you have more options to choose from.
Turn summary is dead simple, as is usual in knizia board games. You can place a bet (you only have 5 bets to make during the entire game, so choose wisely), you then play a card, you check if the round is finished, then you draw cards until your hand is filled with 8 cards(if you have more, you draw nothing, but you lose nothing). You can play a card in any monster, but if you’re that monster’s backer, you get that monster’s special ability to help you. A round ends when all the monsters have a card played to determine their strength (from 0 to 10) and there is one monster that is currently weaker than all the others. That monster is eliminated from the fight and another round begins.
The game ends when there’s only 3 monsters left or the card pile has run out. Bets on the remaining monsters are worth Vps, bets on monsters that were eliminated are worth nothing. The earlier you bet on a monster, the more that bet is worth in the end, so you have to pick your horses early. You can place several bets on a single monster on the course of many rounds (but each monster can only take one bet per round, so there’s a sort of worker-placement got-there-before-you element to it), but that can be quite risky.
This is definitely my favorite element of Colossal arena, which saves this board game from being a random luckfest to being an interesting fight between conflicting and converging interests. If you place all your bets on a single monster, or if a certain monster has bets from only one player, the game becomes significantly more difficult. You have control of only 33%, 25% or 20% of the cards that are played during the game (in a 3 player, 4 player and 5 player match), so you sometimes you have to make alliances with the other players in order to keep your investments a little safer. If you keep trying to monopolize that troll, the other players will see that if he survives to the end you’ll have an easy victory: it is best to let other players have a piece of that pie (troll pie?) as well.
The board game design seems to encourage this kind of thinking, since the monsters’ powers are far from being balanced. You could probably divide them into three different tiers: super strong, good and near-useless. So those good monsters will probably be snatched up quickly, and the one or two of the weaker ones will end up surviving due to the players trying to eliminate their opponent’s investments. This board game keeps things interesting by allowing players to place one secret bet on the first round, so there’s an element of mystery (which you can sometimes deduce by their actions) that keeps the game from being predictable.
Still, it’s undeniable that the luck factor in this game is high. You have a hand of eight playing cards, and if all of a sudden you don’t get any more cards of the creature you placed the bet in the first round, your life is going to become difficult. If other players gang up on you, there’s very little you can do to defend yourself.
Production values are nice. The art looks good and the information is presented in a very clear fashion. The game consists of a deck of cards and plastic chips to indicate the players’ bets. I’m not a big fan of plastic, but to complain here would be kind of mean of me. This game even gives you four extra monsters, for more variety in your games. Since I don’t play this board game that often, and some monsters are definitely less interesting than others, I prefer to separate these extra 4 monsters from the others for a quicker setup.
This is a nice little card game, totally unpretentious and fun. There’s some interesting thinking to be done during the match, and the special powers keeps things dynamic and quite alive. It’s clearly a better experience with 3 players, even if the box says two to five. Five is too random, and two would probably be very lame. Matches usually take around 45 minutes and the age estimate of 8+ is accurate (if you’re ok with your kids casting demons and trolls and gorgons… I know I’d be). It’s acessible (easy rules) and quick, so it’s definitely one of those quick fillers, and the new edition in a slimmer box looks even better than my large-boxed one. Overall, I give this board game a 7/10, and play it when I’m in the mood for a quick card game with some violence in it.
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