In Colosseum you and your opponents each run one of these titular arenas, putting on events to entertain the Roman populace. Your goal is to draw in the biggest crowds, from the gladiator-loving plebeians and aristocrats to the emperor himself.

Colosseum is published by Days of Wonder, better known for its Ticket to Ride franchise. Like Ticket to Ride, it tries to be a Euro-style game while still being accessible and appealing to the casual gamer. This is a tough balance to strike--I found Ticket to Ride lost its glamour quickly--but the gameplay in Colosseum has some real meat to it. Couple that with beautiful pieces and a handsome board, and it's a game I can easily recommend to my gamer and non-gamer friends. It has just a few weaknesses that keep me from really loving it.

Gameplay

The sequence of gameplay does take some digesting the first time through, but rules are clear and have plenty of visual examples. The game is played over five turns, during each of which you will produce an event in your colosseum. The attendance to your event determines your income--which you will spend to produce bigger and better events in the future--and whoever has the highest attendance in any single event is the winner. (Technically this can be in any of the turns, but in practice everyone's last event will be the biggest.)

Event attendance is determined by some simple arithmetic. The base value depends on what program you're producing; for instance, "Circus Maximus" can be worth up to 32 attendees. This assumes you have all of the performers and props (represented by asset tiles) necessary to produce that event--for each asset that you are missing the value of the event goes down by a marginal amount. Each turn there are sets of action tiles available for auction, and you can trade with or buy from other players. Then there are a bunch of ways to increase your attendance: previous events you have produced cause more people to come, apparently because of your growing reputation; star performers will draw more people; senators, consuls, and the emperor (figurines that move around the board based on dice rolls) will boost your attendance if they end up in your colosseum during a show; and there are various other improvements that pack the stands and therefore increase your earnings and your end-game score.

The Good

So where does the fun come from? Like its big brother, Princes of Florence, Colosseum is largely an auction game, which means you have to weigh what particular tiles are worth to you against what you think others are willing to play for them. Following the auction you have an opportunity to trade with your opponents. This works out well since tiles come in batches of three; likely you got at least one you didn't really need. It doesn't really reduce the tension of the auction that much, since the competition there tends to be over the rarer, more valuable tiles, but it does add a negotiation aspect to the game.

For the strategic thinker, there are a wide variety of choices as you try to optimize your score. Should I give up this tile that I need in order to get the star performer of that other type? Do I buy a new event program now, even though I might not be able to afford the tiles I want this turn? It's not the brain burner that some games are, but there are always more things you want to do than time or money allow, so you will have to make tough choices.

Most satisfying to me is simply the sense of growing and accomplishing something. You start out with a small colosseum, nearly empty, but every turn you'll have a chance to grow it, maybe add a section for season ticketholders or an emperor's loge, and you'll acquire more performers and assets. The result is that each performance is greater than the last, so that by the end of the game (hopefully!) you'll be able to put on the most spectacular show of all.

The Bad

Unfortunately there are a few things that blemish the experience for me. Auctions, according to the standard rules, don't work very well. What tends to happen is that some lots will go uncontested, selling for the minimum bid, while others will have the price driven up far more than they're really worth. This is a result of only being able to win one bid; it's too dangerous to bid against someone for something you don't really want, and when you know you're only going to be paying for one auction this turn, when it's something you need you might as well bid as high as you can afford. Days of Wonder has more or less fixed that with their "Intense Auctions" variant (available in the online version of the rules, though not my in-game copy; see http://www.daysofwonder.com). I highly recommend playing with this variant. It allows you to win multiple auctions per turn, but, interestingly enough I haven't found that people frequently do so. It causes tile batches to go for more consistent, reasonable prices, and once the cheap lots are being bid up some there isn't usually so much money floating around to spend on a second auction.

This may be a petty nitpick, but I feel like the mechanism for rolling dice and moving the nobles around the board feels sort of juvenile. You can do all sorts of shrewd bidding and clever trades, but if a poor dice roll means you can't get the emperor into your arena when you're counting on it, then you'll still end up in the hole. If I wanted to rely on that sort of luck I'd play Monopoly, thanks.

Which brings up another point: despite the wide variety of choices available, there are some that are just too obvious. Buying an emperor's loge allows you to roll two dice instead of one, and move two different nobles or one for the sum of the rolls. This kind of flexibility is so valuable that there is little choice but to buy it first turn. Chances are your other four investment actions--you only get one per turn--will be to buy two event programs and expand your arena twice. (I'd much prefer to get rid of the dice rolling and instead have some other interesting, balanced investments that you could make in your arena.) Finally, the emperor medals that you acquire over the course of the game have several possible uses, but it is almost always the right choice to spend them to increase the attendance of your last event--nothing else will boost your score by as much.

There's a catch up mechanism build into the game that is a bit contrived: during each turn, the player that put on the smallest show gets to steal a tile from the player with the largest. I usually dislike rules like this, which directly harm the leader just because they are the leader, but in this case it isn't too harsh; also, the leader gets to add a podium to their colosseum which grants extra attendance to all future events. So, even if the rule feels contrived, it doesn't really hurt gameplay that much. (In fact, it does add another tactical choice: if I know I can't take the lead, should I sandbag myself for the chance to grab a tile I need?)

Conclusion

Colosseum has a lot of things going for it. The game itself is gorgeous, the theme is interesting, and the gameplay is suitably deep while still being accessible. I think most of the flaws I've pointed out are really concessions to the more casual gamer, and I'm sure they'd be considered features by some. They're certainly not enough to make me shy away from the game; just enough to make me say I only almost love it.