Description
Enter the arena and duke it out with your friends! Welcome to Gladiators, the exciting competitive card game with a classic feel inspired by the standard 52-card deck. Focus before you plan your Attack, but watch out for Gambits, or else you won’t be able to Recover from your wounds!
Gladiators is a fast-paced 2-4 player Last-Champion-Standing card game with constantly changing strategies intended for players age 10 and older. These battles take around 15 to 30 minutes.
The box comes with 52 playing cards, 8 supplementary cards (4 wound trackers and 4 turn reminder cards), and the gameplay manual.
The Standard Gladiators card game comes in a tuck box.
The Gladiators cards will be manufactured using premium 300 GSM card stock with linen texture, also in matte finish.
To deliver deadly wounds and bring down your enemy, you must pursue and out-speed their escape. But can the paltry might of your attack penetrate their defenses? Become more powerful by changing your trait cards, and use your cunning to collect advantageous combinations—doubles, triples, and even the game-ending quadruple!
Do you think you can adapt and outwit your opponent?
Players begin with four cards in front of them which represent their traits—speed, attack, defense, and health. Think of these traits as the player’s stats: the higher the number, the stronger, unless you seek to debilitate your opponent with the lower ones using a pair.
Each player’s turn consists of a variety of actions that they can perform depending on the cards currently in front of them. Players can choose to “focus” one of their traits, changing its value (whether higher or lower), by flipping over a card from a deck in the center of the playing field. Or they can choose to “attack” an opponent if they have sufficient speed and attack over an opponent’s own speed and defense, dealing damage to them. Finally, they can choose to perform a “gambit” on an opponent, in which they sacrifice a pair in front of them to replace an opponent’s trait (perhaps with something worse).
Additionally, players have a hand of trait cards that they draw under special circumstances and keep secret from others. When performing an action, they may use the cards in their hand to directly change their traits, offering themselves a secretive edge.
In short, Gladiators players compete to have the best stat values and try to inhibit those of their opponents. They may rely on the luck of the draw, or they may use their wits and cunning: to fight to become the last Gladiator standing.
Since the original conception of Gladiators used the standard 52-card deck, you can try it out yourself with any old deck of cards you might have lying around by following the game rules here: How To Play
So why back this project if you can just play Gladiators with a standard 52-card deck? For starters, the Gladiators deck features detailed illustrations that not only feel good to look at, but add a layer of immersion to the game. We believe that it is more fun to know who you are fighting as and which equipment you have on hand, as opposed to representing them with mere spades and diamonds. Moreover, the Gladiators deck contains several key differences from the standard deck which are beneficial to having a smooth playing experience, such as distinctive card backs for each trait and a card to help keep track of your wounds.
The Gladiators deck features four different card backs to distinguish between each of the four traits. These traits correspond with the four suits—diamond, club, heart, and spade—in the standard 52-card deck, and each trait comes in cards of 13 values. This means that you can hypothetically use the Gladiators deck for card games using the standard deck, though we wouldn’t advise using them to play competitive games like poker as the distinctive designs of the backs could give your opponents a strategic edge. That said, the Gladiators deck can still be used for a variety of games to add some fun and quirky elements to their gameplay. So whether you’re playing with a group of mages, neomystics, or barbarians, our Gladiators deck is sure to provide a unique and entertaining experience.
The artwork began from the AfterGate team’s conceptualization. Starting with the lore of the world, we put together a cast of characters to represent the 13 numerical cards for each of the four traits. Each number value represents a character, so you can see which character sports what equipment by matching the same numbers for each trait. We brought together characters from several factions residing in the world of Gladiators to give each card its own feelings of fantasy, elegance, and might.
The team then brought these ideas to life in concept art, and hired only the artists we thought were the best fit for the game. We commissioned them to create detailed illustrations of characters, weapons, shields, and environments, which we then brought together to craft the completed cards you will see in your Gladiators deck.
Additionally, we conceptualized some pretty sick ideas which the card and packaging artist Lorenzo brought to life—the likes of which you won’t find on any old standard 52-card deck!
Gladiators will be manufactured with premium quality card stock with a beautiful linen texture and gloss finish. The casino-quality black core card stock means that your deck will have durable cards that feel great to shuffle and play.
