Dave Reviews: Gladiatorial Trumpiness

Gorus Maximus

It's basically Hearts. With... hearts.

Gorus Maximus is a trick-taking game, not about being a gladiator, but about being one of those patriots who run gladiator battles for the pleasure of the populace. (The money is just a bonus.) There are up to five schools of gladiators, each with fighters ranked from 0 to 15. Each player gets a hand of ten cards; this is the whole deck being dealt, and what the deck consists of depends on the number of players in the game.

Each round, one player starts by playing a card. The color of the card becomes both the preferred school and the initiating school. This is where the game gets a little more complicated, and frankly fun, than your average game of Hearts or Spades.

• The preferred school set at the start of the first round remains the preferred school for the whole hand (in theory). The preferred school is the trump school.
• The initiating school is only the initiating school for that round. Once each player puts down a card and the trick is taken, the person who takes the trick starts the next round, and their card sets the new initiating school.
• Players must play a card from the initiating school if they have one.
• The exception to all of the above is that a player may play a card of the same rank as the one played immediately before them in that round. This is a challenge. (For example, if I play the blue 4, the next player can play a green 4, regardless of the initiating school.) A challenge not only lets a player use a different color, it also sets the preferred school for the hand to that color—until another challenge comes, of course.

In theory, players can count how many cards of each suit, and which ones, have been played, just like a good Hearts player would. However, unless it's a full eight-player game, the deck doesn't consist of all the cards of each color, and it doesn't use all of them in order up to a point. In most games, the 0 card and the 4-12 cards are put into the deck. Can those be counted? Sure. But it takes a little getting used to in order to do so proficiently.

In addition, points are scored by the points listed on each gladiator card, and most cards don't score anything. Simple enough, right? Set it up so you catch the point cards. Well... just don't get stuck with one of the cards that take away points. Most games only have one such card—the 8 of each color—but that's a huge hit at -4 when nothing else scores more than two. Expanding the game to six players adds a -2 card, and going to seven adds another -1, so more caution is warranted than simply "don't get the spades".

I've criticized games in the past for allowing too large a player count, and at first I was going to at least partially do so again. Whereas some other games have no business trying to accompany a large group, it makes sense to at least try with something that plays as fast as this, with such a fun (if bloody) theme. It has that drunken party game feel. My critique was going to be that, as with many trick-taking games, catching up is hard if you fall behind, and because it takes three crowd support (three round wins) to end the game, big games can become a slog for someone who's losing. 

But, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that's unfair. It does have the potential to suck for that person, yes. But the only way it becomes a major problem is if lots of other people are picking up round wins, which means overall the game is competitive, and that's good. I suppose the warning to offer is that if you're going to want to quit if it looks like you're stuck in a game that you're very unlikely to win, you might want to avoid six-plus player games of this, but that's not enough to really knock the game itself.

In short, this is surprisingly fun, even if you're very neutral about trick-taking games. If you think you can get your Spades-playing grandpa to throw back a shot of whiskey and try something with actual pictures, this could even be a hell of a family bonding experience.

Score: Fourteen blood puddles out of sixteen.