Extreme Sports

With MOAB on this weekend I wanted to brush up on my Munera Sine Missione, as Victor and I are returning to running gladiators again this year. Caesar was up for a try, so away we went.

I was actually late getting there, and a few of us spent a fair chunk of the evening recounting our adventures at the St Ives Medieval Fair, so we only managed two bouts. I'll admit that the games were also slowed by the fact that I'd managed to forget most of the rules, and had to look tons of stuff up. I'm sure it's not age. Oh no.

Anyway, here we are in the first game.

I took the sword-wielding Margareites whilst Caesar had the hoplite, Helena. He found the long spear a tricky weapon to handle (to be fair, it is) but put up a pretty hard fight before I was able to knock her down and force an appeal to the crowd. To be fair she almost took off Margareites' head with her shield as well. The crowd must have liked that, because they granted her mercy.

Our next fight was between two diminutive gladiators - the retiarius Titan and the murmillo Pugnax. This ranged up and down the arena, with Pugnax being trapped in the net early on, but deflecting attacks from Titan before cutting free. Titan took a nasty wound, but was proving agile and dangerous in returning hits with his trident. Eventually the referee called the match a draw.

Fired up by our trip to the medieval fair, Caesar was happy to give my 'in progress' jousting rules a go. We played two matches, each of three passes. In the first match Caesar scored an advantage in the very first pass by unseating my knight. I clawed back some points in the other two passes, but the final result was then never in doubt. The second match was closer, almost coming down to a tie-break in which the Marshal of the Field's opinion of the knights would have determined the victor, but I managed a shattered lance in the third pass to squeak a victory margin of one point and make the Marshal's opinion an irrelevance.

Surprisingly we found a couple of minor points in Munera Sine Missione that could probably do with clarification; inevitable when you tend to hold the rules in your head and assume it's obvious how they're played. The jousting game needs a few tweaks and changes but is, I think, almost ready for posting on my Free Stuff page. We certainly both enjoyed it, and found it was fast enough to reflect the nature of the sport, offering a few decisions and tactical choices offset by enough randomness to create some moments of drama.