So if you’ve watched the Starz Spartacus series, well, this is basically the video game adaptation. Sure it isn’t officially licensed, its scope is limited to the arena so no rebellion for you and it only has pixel graphics, but everything about it is clearly inspired by the show. I heard about it on Broken Forum where it was quite a hit. It is a rather short however once you understand its mechanics and it’s possible to win a full game in only a few hours.

The game is called Domina because you’re technically an unnamed Roman woman who has just inherited a ludus and must overcome male skepticism to create champion gladiators for the arena. The storyline doesn’t matter however and all characters except for the gladiators themselves are unnamed. The point is just to train and equip gladiators and have them fight. A full game covers exactly one year as the game ends with the grand championship. Regularly scheduled matches occur about every 7 to 15 days or so, though in between you can voluntarily fight exhibition matches or take part in the regional championships. There are lots of formats for the fights, from the old fashioned one versus one, to many versus many to the horribly unfair many versus one.

While you technically can take manual control of your gladiators once you have researched the corresponding tech with the doctore, I’ve never done so and it seems to me that almost no one else does either. That’s because the fights are frenetic and can end very, very quickly. One good hit is enough to kill a gladiator. With the pixel graphics, it also isn’t easy to see what is actually going on. This means that you’ll mostly be passively watching the fights while the real gameplay consists of managing the ludus. You can hire specialist employees to do everything from constructing new facilities, perform prayers and heal injured or sick gladiators faster. You can also decide how to train the gladiators, equip them and buy new ones. One cool aspect I liked is bribing officials. This turns out to be key as they will arrange fights that are tilted in your favor if they like you. Occasionally you also earn special cards that you can attach to gladiators that effectively give them special powers. These can make quite a difference.

Domina can feel like a daunting game at first, especially as the days automatically as you’re not quite sure what’s going on and what all of the stats do. The game never explains its mechanics and the tutorial mode is useless and best left unused. Once you do understand what is going on, you’ll quickly realize that the game is actually very forgiving and not really well balanced. For example there are resources like food, water, wine etc. which you need for your gladiators and employees but buying them is so cheap that the mechanic might as well not exist. It is trivial to just buy everything that is available on the market every few days and you will never run out of these resources. It also makes the employees that generate these resources or save them completely pointless. Similarly, training strength beats everything else as it boosts both damage and hit points and hit points are king. Meditation is important too because you want good AI for all your gladiators but it’s far better to pay more to buy slave with already maxed out Meditation than to train them from scratch.

So this is best thought of as a light game not to be taken too seriously. It’s great once you get into the spirit of things as despite its elementary graphics, it perfectly captures the atmosphere of the arena fights. I’m also constantly impressed by the attention to detail and nice touches everywhere. For example you might expect a naked slave thrown into the arena with no weapons would get slaughtered but the crowd will usually throw him a weapon for a surprise turnaround. The chariot races are totally insane and are even better when you realize that you can also win a race by killing all the other competitors. The full goriness and violence of the television show is here with decapitations and dismemberments galore. You can watch a single powerful gladiator dual-wielding swords cut through a whole throng of enemies all by himself. It’s truly glorious.

The game does end with a gotcha that will get you every time unless you planned for it. But that’s just an excuse to get through the whole game all over again and it’s short enough that it’s easy to do. I do sometimes wish for a more developed, more involved gladiator game but in the meantime we have this and it’s pretty great at what it does.