Here cometh the smackdown!! (Blood Bowl)

Member Name: clownfoot

Product:	Blood Bowl
Date:	04/07/08 (582 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: A more violent American football alternative featuring races from Warhammer! What's not to love?

Disadvantages: Real fun mostly garnered from league play, difficult learning curve at first.

BLOOD BOWL

Being a Necromancer isn't easy, especially if you're the type of Necromancer that shuns the associated lifestyle and is uninterested in taking over the old world with a reanimated undead horde. Its worse still when the living turn up at your door, or the entrance to your dungeon, wielding pitch-forks and torches to hound you out of the locality, in the mistaken belief that you're one of these nefarious evil-doers. Makes me wonder why I ever did my studies in the black arts - all I use it for is the associated merits of extending my life-force and for Wilson, my skeletal butler, to fetch my slippers of an evening. All I really want is to be left alone so I can get on with reading a good book.

Luckily, I've recently found a way to use my powers of raising the dead for the purposes of good, which has allowed me to actually become an accepted member of the community. You may laugh, but it's all to do with this new found game that those wretched Orcs have recently discovered, which seems to have supplanted their national past-time of bogey flicking. Everyone seems to be jumping on the Blood Bowl bandwagon, be they elf, dwarf, human, vampire, follower of chaos, Amazon - hell, even those disgusting vermin at Skavenblight have knocked out a team of gutter runners. Two teams of 11 trying to run a bloated pig's bladder into an end zone to score a point, with each team trying to stop the other anyway they can? It sounded like malevolent fun, and whilst grave-robbery is a murky business it was a cheap way of building a team. I don't even need to pay my players! More to the point the local villagers have been having a great time supporting the shuffling corpses of the Dastardly Deadites that the township now leave me alone to my book! Bliss! Nuffle bless Blood Bowl...

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It's strange to think that Blood Bowl is now over 25 years old. Developed in the mind of Jervis Johnson way back in the early eighties, the rules have been revised on numerous occasions (the Living Rule Book is now at version 5.0) and as one of Games Workshops specialised games (i.e. one they now only support sparingly) it still has a rather large following of players. It may seem odd that a board game should have such a large interest and support-base, but then this is no Monopoly or Cluedo. The continuing success of Blood Bowl very much rests on the well-known fantasy battle environments of Warhammer, a rule-set that is much more simple and less evasive than its table-top army cousins, the persistence of geeks that they will inherit the Earth to ensure that there's always someone to play and the fact that its just damn good fun when compared to most other board games.

As an idea, Blood Bowl is refreshingly simple. Take American Football, add Warhammer races such as dwarfs, elves, orcs and skaven for the teams, provide racial stats for each (Undead are notoriously slow, but rather powerful, compared to elves who are lightning quick, but more fragile than a Jamie Oliver soufflé) along with certain skills for positional players (those with more ability than the simple lineman), place them on a board that represents the field of play, then attempt to score more touchdowns than your opponent in two half's of eight turns by running a player into the endzone with the ball before he is tackled by some gratuitous uber-violence by the opposition. In some ways it's a more fun variation of chess, although the strategy of how to set your players up when defending and attacking and how to keep a player with the ball protected by team-mates is constantly at the whim and mercy of lady luck.

Yes, as with most table-top or role-playing games, most events in Blood Bowl are dependent on the luck of the dice. Moving is simple in that a player has a certain movement score, meaning he can move that number of squares on the game board. But pretty much all else is dependent on the roll of the dice. A player's agility confers how capable a player might be at passing and catching the ball, sprinting, and dodging out of opponents tackle zones. All of these actions are represented by a dice roll to see whether the action succeeds or not. The higher the roll on a one-sided dice (d6) the better, as too many 1's will leave your players fumbling the ball and tripping over their own feet, and such failure's in making a play result in a turnover. There's been many a time that I've had a player with the ball sprint a little extra distance than his normal movement rate would allow only to roll a one, see him trip over, spill the ball, and end up killing himself as his head collided with the ground. The fact that many random things beyond your control can happen within a match makes things invariably tense and ultimately more enjoyable.

Of course, if you're less inclined to play the fast moving passing game you can always punch your way through the opposition in an attempt to remove opponents from the field of play and to the apocathery's table or, worse still, the morgue. Again, blitzing and blocking an opposing player is done with specialised block dice. One dice blocks are more dangerous as you're opponent is just as likely to knock your player down, resulting in a turnover, so its always best to use your higher strength players to break through an opposing players line. Even then, though, the dreaded "double skull" can still appear on a two block dice and scupper all your plans. Luckily, teams also have re-rolls which ensures one bad dice roll can be re-rolled per turn.

Indeed, the luck of the dice makes playing the game a specific art. Fewer dice rolls combined with an effective strategy gives one a better chance of victory. Ask yourself, do you really need to make that one dice block against an opponent on the wing who is no where near the ball? Is fouling a player necessary before scoring the vital winning touchdown on turn 16? With such knowledge of what not to do in order to incur the wrath of Nuffle (the Blood Bowl God for all non-nerds), there the path of Blood Bowl dominance lies. But then, making an unbelievable dart through an opponent's line to score has an immense feeling - sometimes the dice will be with you!

Saying that though, newcomers to Blood Bowl will not pick up and become an immediately brilliant coach from the off. It has a steep learning curve, especially with regards to the rules on dodging and understanding tackle zones, and getting through a match can take a good couple of hours at first. It certainly requires a fair investment of time for a new coach to learn how to play the game proficiently, and with the addition of player skills, time will certainly benefit those with the patience to learn appropriately. That said the rulebook is delivered in a very readable and easy to understand fashion, so that after a few games one can begin to identify with the more difficult rule-sets of Blood Bowl.

And really, that's where all the real fun is. One off games are great, but rather limited. What Blood Bowl's longevity really depends on is in the essential stakes of team building and league play. Star Players picking up injuries and the decisions the coach has to make in whether to retire them for a fresh unskilled player are the choices that raise Blood Bowl above most other games. The number of skills available for players is vast, and the opportunities to create more varied strategies based on skill choices are virtually unlimited. Having all your elves with the dodge skill so they get out of harms way against a heavy punching Orc squad, can only lead the Orc coach to tearing out his hair as blocks become fewer and far between. Team building is where the real genius of Blood Bowl! Shedding a tear for a much loved blitzer once he is crippled by a mighty Ogre, ensures the emotional interest of the game has a hidden impact - you shouldn't really be upset by the death of a lead miniature, but sometimes you just can't help yourself.

Of course, this implies that you have lots of friends that are equally as interested in Blood Bowl to play against. The reality is this isn't always the case. At £50 for the box set from Games Workshop it really is quite an expensive purchase if you're only going to have infrequent one off matches against friends. The fact that only a plastic human and orc team come with the box-set usually drives this price up, as those players that want to play as a different team fork out another £25 for a team of lead miniatures sold separately by Games Workshop. These miniatures do have benefits. They're more finely detailed and, like all of Games Workshops miniatures, provide an additional hobby in being able to paint the squad in your own personal team colours. Ideal for geeks (i.e. me!) However, there are more gaming clubs than you'd care to think out there, and even specific ones that play Blood Bowl leagues if you're looking for more frequent play. Details of such clubs can be found on the Games Workshop website.

More importantly there are two other ways of getting a Blood Bowl fix. Cyanide Studios are currently making a computer game version which will feature both the real-time strategy version of the game found in their previous offering of Chaos League (a blatant Blood Bowl rip-off), and the table-top version. Online play will also be delivered. Alternatively, some clever sod has created a version of the game in Javascript which replicates the board game superbly. This is currently used by an online community called 'Fummbl' which hosts a database that implements team management, leagues and a ranking system as you pit your wits against other randoms online. To use the javaclient of Blood Bowl you do need to own the box-set from Games Workshop, and the joy of Fummbl is that you can get league play and easy use of the team management side of things without even having to leave your house!

Played with the right attitude and a knowingness that you will role bad dice on occasions, Blood Bowl is a supremely entertaining board-game. It does take a while to appreciate its rules and to get through a match, but after a few games of crunching Skaven underfoot you'll have an unquenching blood-lust for more. As long as you can find league play somewhere, Blood Bowl will have a lifetime of exposure as you fine tune your squad into enviable Blood Bowlers. And if you're new to the whole table-top gaming/role-paying world, Blood Bowl is perhaps one of the simplest games to get into and get something out of with some immediacy. Marvellous, marvellous stuff! Here's to the next 25 years of Blood Bowl's legacy!!


Overall - A pitch perfect board game which will have you jumping for joy and tearing your hair out in equal measure. Just make sure you can find someone that wants to play (add a star if you do find proficient league play - that's what makes Blood Bowl five starts)...

And if anyone wants a game on Fummbl, just look up the coach who goes by the name of clownfoot. See you on the field of play where my Dastardly Deadites will tear you a new one...

Summary: Blood Bowl - a genius Games Workshop boardgame