Arena combat variants (CTF, King of the Hill...)

Hey all. I'm Mitchell! I've never posted here but this seems like it's worth talking about.

I'm preparing a Dark Sun-ish adventure and noticed a cool tidbit on page 5 of the "Free Adventure Day" (Dungeons & Dragons Roleplaying Game Official Home Page - Product (Bloodsand Arena)) adventure regarding arena combat:

It goes on to mention that the Sorcerer Kings can go all-out in constructing radical terrain and settings with their arcane power. My gut tells me this could work beautifully or fail miserably. Has anyone tried this before? How well did the event work? What did you do?

My players certainly enjoyed the variety of the 'coins' game from the dark sun game day kit (basically: direct damage is banned, you have to carry huge coins from a chest in the middle of the arena to your team's chest) and that was despite the fact that the opposition were pathetic (the arena had damage-dealing terrain which it was legal to shove your foes into, and all the opposition team bar 1 were minions).

Personally I like the idea of a defense of the ancients style game: zombies continuously enter the field from either side along 3 paths, and to win you have to get your zombies to destroy something at the opposite end of the pitch. Zombies will shuffle down the paths unless they have something close by to attack.

Then you put a variety of enableable/disablable traps on the paths and voila.

Oh, how about robo-rally! Each team get a golem and each 'round' they're given a handful of random commands that they have to place in it's head as a program to direct the golem across a hazard filled field and into a goal.