Blood Bowl
2
12+
120+
Blood Bowl is a combination of a tactical and sports game. The basics are extremely simple: two teams, one ball. The team that carries the ball into the opponent's end zone scores a touchdown, the team with the most touchdowns at the end of the game is the winner. However, it’s how you decide to do this that makes things interesting, the ends justify the means! It’s not just the players you have at your disposal either. You can bribe the referee to look the other way as you cripple or trample annoying opponents and hire illegal wizards to give you a hand directly from the crowd… Blood Bowl severely tests the finest tacticians' strategies.
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Blood Bowl is a game of American style football set in the Warhammer Universe. The original game box only comes with the mini’s for human and orc teams, but there are many other teams that can used if you order them from Games Workshop or cobble them together from other mini’s. (I put together two teams from Heroscape minis.) One team for every race in the Warhammer world. Each team has different strengths, weaknesses, quirks and special rules.
The Teams
Orcs are strong and slightly slower with great armor, but the stronger ones aren’t as good at actually picking up the ball. Elves have high dexterity allowing them to pull off impressive plays with passes, catches, and dodges. The Skaven rat-men are lightning fast, some with agility as good as elves, but their armor is low and they break easily. Chaos has some very strong warriors with high armor, but they start with no special skills. Dwarves are slow as mud but heavily armored. Undead can regenerate even after you kill them. Humans are an average team with no particular weaknesses that can be built up into any type of team with the right skills. Other teams are Amazons, Choas Dwarfs, Dark Elves, High Elves, Wood Elves, Goblins, Halflings, Khemri, Lizardmen, Necromantic, Norse, Nurgle, Ogre, and Vampire.
Game-play
The game is broken up into two halves, with 8 turns for each team in each half. One team kicks off to the other, rolling on a table to add some random event thrown in and give some added flavor to the match. Moving each player once per turn, the receiving team tries to pick up the ball and get it across the opposing team’s goal line. Then defense tries to get the ball away from them by smacking them down and getting it for themselves. Picking up the ball, throwing it, catching it, and dodging away from an opposing player all require an agility roll. If you fail a roll, your turn is over. Which is why a high agility can be so important for scoring. Actually hitting your opponents players requires using the special blocking dice that come with the game. This is where strength becomes important. If your strength equal to the player you are hitting, you roll one. If it is higher, you roll two and choose one. More than double and you roll three. If it is lower, however, you roll two and your opponent chooses. Giving assists by placing other teammates next to the target but not adjacent to opposing players gives a bonus of plus one strength per assist. Learning how to properly give assists is critical to playing well. As is knowing what order to move each player, because if somebody goes down, your turn is over. When a player goes down you roll against his armor and if you pass it then you roll again to see how bad it was. Results range from stunned (miss a turn), to knocked out (for the half), to injured (miss next game or a stat decrease), or even death for the unfortunate player.
Replayability
This game has lots of replayability as even two coaches with the same race will probably pick different players, starting positions, and plays. If you get bored with one team, you can try another one. And it is a lot easier to put together a Blood Bowl team of 16 miniatures than an entire army for Warhammer.
Overall
This game is great fun, with lots of chaos, strategy, theme, and carnage. It may take a bit to get all the rules down, but they all make sense in the theme. It plays best in a league where you can level up your team and add skills to your players and really make the team your own.
Blood Bowl is one of the greatest products GW has have created, it allows a coach to create a team, play and level up his players. I’ve never played a game that allows people to have complete control over how they’re team plays.
The game have over 20 teams that you can coach to greatness, if you like leagues or tournaments then you’ll find Blood Bowl even more entertaining than most other miniatures games. This is one of those games that can create stories among groups of gamers.
The only down side currently is that GW has stop producing the game, making the rules a little hard to come by. However the rest of the components of this game can be found easily through small companies.
It takes roughly 2 hours to play and is a lot like chess, except you get to pound the faces of your opponents. If you like sports and board games then try Blood Bowl.
One of the many, many strengths of this game is the community. You will struggle to find such a passionate, dedicated and enthusiastic fan base in all the gaming world. It is these fans who have refined and evolved this game into the absolute classic it is today.
Get a league going, with a good spread of teams, and there really are few experiences like it. Watch as rookies pull off outrageous moves, star players are crippled with injuries, coaches lose the plot, refs get bribed, players get mutations and blood is spilled everywhere.
Oh, and sometimes you score a touchdown.
Beautifully designed, with more character than is good for it.