Review:
Review - Blood Bowl

This fun but faithful adaptation of the fantasy football board game offers an abundance of team customisation options, strategic approaches and multiplayer facilities.

Blood Bowl has always held a special place in my heart, yet to this day I still cannot fathom why. I’ve always loathed team sports, particularly those involving spherical or elliptical objects, and while the Warhammer fantasy universe appealed to me, my loyalties were always with the futuristic 40K. But by cramming these colourful fantasy elements into a loose depiction of American football, all done with tongue planted firmly in cheek, Games Workshop created something truly special. That the board game has remained fundamentally unchanged since its third edition is testament to the solid mechanics behind this novel concept.

Those who have been awaiting an updated Blood Bowl since the last PC adaptation in 1995 will no doubt have followed the Chaos League fiasco that has ushered this release. To summarise: in 2004 French developer Cyanide released Chaos League, a fine fantasy football game that captured the essence of Blood Bowl a little too closely. This led to a lawsuit, which ended in an out of court settlement and the startling news that Games Workshop had granted Cyanide the licence to make a new Blood Bowl videogame, provided they adhere to the fifth edition of the game’s Living Rulebook.

Cyanide have definitely fulfilled that requirement. In an effort to remain faithful to its board game origins Blood Bowl takes a few paces back from most contemporary turn-based games, making no effort to hide its dice-based mechanics. This is a game in which luck plays a heavy part, in everything from picking up and passing the ball to gaining new abilities during level-ups. Naturally, those familiar with the board game will welcome this, but gamers tempted by the premise may not initially appreciate that every minor action is decided by the roll of a dice, with luck playing at least a thirty-percent part (at a guess) in your overall strategies. One way to counter this is by buying re-rolls; these escalate in price the more you buy, adding an interesting quandary to the game.