Blood Bowl: Team Manager – The Card Game
The stadium is packed with thousands of screaming fans, gathered from across the world and eager to see the bone-crushing action of today’s game. As the players take the field, a surge of excitement rushes from the bleachers; both teams boast impressive rosters full of players hand picked for their unique skills. Some offer speed, others size. Some will mercilessly injure their opponents, while others deviously cheat to score touchdowns. Are you ready to face off against stout Dwarfs, crafty Skaven, and ruthless Orcs, all to become Spike! Magazine’s Manager of the Year?
Blood Bowl: Team Manager – The Card Game is a bone-breaking, breathtaking card game of violence and outright cheating for two to four players. Chaos, Dwarf, Wood Elf, Human, Orc, and Skaven teams compete against each other over the course of a brutal season. Customize your team by drafting Star Players, hiring staff, upgrading facilities, and cheating like mad. Lead your gang of misfits and miscreants to glory over your rivals as you strive to become Spike! Magazine’s Manager of the Year!
The season is starting. What kind of team will you build?
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Cheating. Blood. Football. Fantasy. Minotaurs.
All of these and more is Blood Bowl Team Manager. Blood Bowl, an IP of Games Workshop and originally a tabletop miniatures game (now also a PC/Console game) has now ventured into the land of a card game.
No no, before you cry about another Magic, or one of those other collectable card games: Blood Bowl Team Manager is a complete box of what you need and it works very well. Surprisingly so.
I held off around 6-8 months to get this and I really wish I hadn’t and I am very glad I had the spontaneous thought of buying it so that my 12 year old step-son could play Blood Bowl without the blood of the video game. And oh man, was it one of the best purchases I had made!
The premise of Blood Bowl in general is two teams pit against each other to cheat, pass, run the ball for touchdowns, or outright decimate the opposing team, whatever it takes to be the winners of the fabled Blood Bowl Cup.
The teams that come in the box are: Humans, Dwarves, Wood Elves, Chaos, Orcs and Skaven. There are many more that the company could bring out and from what people are saying, with this year being Blood Bowl’s 25th Anniversary, that we will see expansions coming. Cross fingers 😀
Now, the card game translates this very well by not focusing on a single match at a time but the highlights of the games. Each highlight can have up to two teams compete on them and with an up to four player game, choosing which highlights you want to focus on is one of the starting challenges.
Rather than delving into the rules too deep if you want to know how it plays specifically, there is a set of video tutorials by Fantasy Flight Games showing you just that.
In the above picture , the cards in the middle are the Highlights while the cards left and right are the cards from our hand that we use to try and win the spoils on the card. If you can see it, the Highlights have two ‘touchdown zones’ that have rewards on the left and right as well as a bigger reward in the middle. As long as you have someone there, you get the reward on the side you choose to represent, and the middle if you win the match. If no one is competing against you, you get all the spoils of the match!
In the end, once you have played in the match ups you want to take part in, and the Scoreboard Phase has been done to see what victory points, star players, staff and team upgrades have been won as spoils of war: The highlights happen all over again!
I thought I better for a tidbit here that the artwork I absolutely loved. It reflected the original game nicely and even sported (how could it not?!) flavour text from the commentators, the Vampire Jim Johnson and the Ogre Bob Bifford.
All in all, the game takes us around 90 to 120 mins approximately. Sunday lunchtime was around the 120 minute mark purely since we haven’t played in a month or two.
The winner in the end is not the team with the most physical spoils of war but the roaring, raging fans that follow behind you. He who has the most fans wins the right to be the Champion of the Table!
If you wonder if a $35 USD game is worth it, you shouldn’t think a second minute on it. For that amount of money versus some of the other games we have and their price tags to get the same amount of fun (Arkham Horror for instance) then it is a no-brainer!
Once bought, you will never look back.
(Original review @ Ooh, Shiny!)
… you don’t need any sort of understanding of the sport, or indeed Blood Bowl itself, to be able to enjoy this game.
As a British based gamer, this was a concern of mine, with American Football being something of a minority sport on these shores. However, having read nothing but glowing reports about Blood Bowl: Team Manager, I took the plunge and absolutely did not regret it!
The game involves playing through a season of Blood Bowl; a standard season generally involving two tournaments and two regular weeks, before a final showdown for the Blood Bowl trophy itself. From my experience with 4 players, allow around 2 hours for play.
Each player receives a team from one of the available fantasy races and a starting squad of generally quite poor players. The six available teams are varied enough to make playing with each feel like a fresh challenge but without massively changing gameplay or giving any player an advantage; players will no doubt have their favourites after a few plays but there’s no team that will always be left in the box.
The idea is to commit your players to different matchups to attempt to win the rewards available there. These rewards range from signing better players, to upgrading your team, to gaining fans (the main aim of the game). Again, there are plenty of star players available, each with different skills and abilities to crush your opponents.
As I’ve said, you really don’t need to be a leading NFL expert to lead your team to glory. Every player in the game has varying amounts of the four available skills: Cheating, Passing, Sprinting and Tackling. The Cheating skill is the only mandatory one, requiring you to add a Cheating Token to your player that is revealed at the end of the round, and could see him grasp victory from the jaws of defeat for your team or be sent off and ****** defeat when you looked certain to win. This is an excellent feature that adds unpredictability and a whole lot of tension!
After the Blood Bowl tournament, the player with the most fans is the winner.
For me, the best thing about the game is simply that it’s great fun. There’s a nice mind game element too; you know the guy to your left has just signed Griff Oberwald, but when is he going to play him? Where is he going to play him? Should you save your best player to try and stop him, or do you need him right now?
An excellent game, highly recommended.
i just got done with my first play of this game and I could not be more happy.
This game manages to encompass everything that is great about Blood Bowl while keeping the rules simple and light. The six starting teams all play with their own unique feel. They are not just clones of each other. I chose to play Chaos which was full of brutality and cheating. My opponent picked the dwarves who play in a very guarded yet offensive way.
The box makes the game play seem longer than it will actually be, we were done in about an hour. The game is played in five rounds, each representing a week of the blood bowl season. As the Managers you play through the weekly highlights. These games will give all sorts of rewards; star players, team upgrades and manager upgrades. The upgrade cards rare represented as different types of training your team goes through which makes them better at certain skills and aspects of the game. I leaned towards the more offensive upgrades which made my team better at some skills like tackling and sprinting.
The ultimate goal of the game is to be the team with the most fans at the end of the season. Fans totals are scored on individual scoreboards that each player gets at the start of the game. The rulebook seems daunting at first, but once you actually play the game everything starts making sense very quickly.
The players will have four different skills: tackling, sprinting, passing and cheating. Tackling allows you to attack another player in a match. This is done by comparing the star power of the attacker vs the defender and rolling the tackle dice. Passing allows control of the ball. Sprinting let’s you draw more cards from your player deck which means there will be more players for you to deploy that round. Cheating allows you to cheat (shocking) which is represented in the game by cheating tokens. You take the tokens as you cheat and reveal them during the scoring portin of the game. Cheat tokens will either add to your star power, fan total or get the offending player ejected from the game.
Without going into a longer summary of the rules this game is just plain fun. I was surprised how much of the blood bowl feel was captured in such a small box. This card game will give every blood bowl fan what they want: senseless violence, blatant cheating and a chance to be the ultimate Warhammer football champion.
Blood Bowl: Team Manager is a card game for 2-4 players that takes 1-2 hours to play. The game is not a deck-builder, but does contain some light card-drafting elements. The goal of the game is to have the most fans by the end of the season. Each manager (the term the rulebook uses so as not to be confused with “player” cards) starts with one of the 6 teams starter decks (Human, Dwarf, Wood Elf, Orc, Skaven, Chaos) that contains a selection of basic players and draws six cards into their hand. A row of Highlights (games) is laid out in the center of the table. Each manager then takes turns committing one of their players to a highlight. Once all the cards have been played, the star power on each side of each highlight is totaled, and rewards such as fans, staff upgrades, team upgrades, and star players are assigned. The winner of each highlight will receive more stuff, but the loser will get rewards as well. After 5 rounds, the final fan count will determine the winner.
This game really took me by surprise. While I expected it would be fun (after all, I don’t think there is an FFG game I don’t like), I did not expect it to be this awesome. Every team plays very different from the others, with their starting decks and personal team upgrades. Each Highlight is also exciting, with the outcome of any given matchup unsure until the last minute thanks to the cheating tokens, which are not revealed until the resolution phase, and can range from extra star power to a player getting ejected. The only downside to this game is the 2 player rules. While they are not bad by any means, the interaction to be found in a 3-4 player game is so much better that I would much rather play that way than 1 on 1. That being said, this is a game that I intend to play as many times as possible in the coming weeks, even if it is 2 player.
I know what my title says, but touchdowns actually have nothing to do with this game!
That’s right.
You see, this is a team manager game, where you manage the line up and, ‘in dominion style’, try to get the best possible deck so you can handle anything your opponents throw at you. Winning the matches is not the goal here,having the most loved team is what you are after.
The most loved team doesn’t have to be the most skilled either, you are competing for fans and they can be the biggest cheaters or most violent players out there. Once you realize that this game is great, and I mean awesomely great fun!
A two to four player game, that scales perfectly well with any amount this is a short, hour-a-go game. Everybody gets a different race of players, humans, elves, dark elves, skaven (rat people), orcs, demons or dwarves. (I might be missing one, but I am writing this on my break in work!)
Every team plays differently, the skaven are fast and can get the ball onto their side for two extra fans, the humans are all rounders, the chaos/ demon team are foulers and the dwarves are tough etc.
All starting decks have the same value cards but have different bonuses for play that match the teams different abilities. As you play you get the chance to gain star players, who have crazy, extra abilities or can gain outrageous amounts of fans for you.
The game is played over 5 weeks/ rounds. At the end of each round points are tallied and the player with the most fans wins. It’s that simple!
My game group love this game as it is fast but has many tactical options.
Replay Value – Never gets old due to the extra decks you can earn and its always a close enough game that you want to go back in and see how you could play it differently.
Components – Good durable cards and thick cardboard used for the tokens! Well done again FFG.
Easy to Lean – May seem initially confusing as you read the manual but one round and everything falls into place. Special mention should go to the rulebook for being written with humour and that humour is kept throughout the game.
You’ll have a smile on your face as you play and that smile will still be there as you discuss the game a day or two later. Great Fun!
GAMEPLAY
A game is broken into five rounds of highlights. Each round lets players vie for the rewards from more star players to coaching abilities to fans. Players commit a player from their hand of six to a highlight in an attempt to pick up the ball or knock down other players. Play moves smoothly through the rounds as star players enter the match and upgrades become a big influence. Upgrades range from a mercenary wizard to blast an opponent to extra training to knock someone out to rewards of fans for hurting a player. This ia a fairly strategic game with luck involved in the player deck shuffle, cheating tokens, and the dice roles for tackling opponents. The winner is the player with the most fans at the end of the fifth round.
COMPONENTS
Cards are very well designed with bright colorful and stylized art. The art is spot on blood bowl, unhinged fantasy. The card is good quality and the tokens are all thick stock. The style is spot on Blood Bowl and if you know the world you will love it.
THEME
If you enjoy blood bowl the miniatures game you will enjoy this game. Committing players to highlights is a little abstract, it doesn’t really feel like individual games played each round. There is a good struggle for control of highlights as your more powerful players get mixed in towards the later rounds.
WHO IS IT FOR?
This game should be enjoyed over a beer. It can be learned by younger players but the raucous nature of Blood Bowl is great for a casual play through with some cursing. Playing with 3 or 4 players allows everyone to win some highlights and keep the game interesting.
Took almost two hours to play a found round game because 2 of the 4 players were new at it and had lots of questions. Had to laugh when I saw someone say this game’s rules where light and simple. Compared to what? I would recommend taking out a couple parts of this game for the first few times, and adding them in if you want more variables to worry about/remember. I ended up winning, but in part because I got the decision in a tie (the player who goes first in the round decides winners of a tie in that round).
As I said in the title, the dynamics were fun but complex (Ameritrash genre). People familiar with the world of Blood Bowl seemed to derive extra pleasure from playing, though that knowledge was completely peripheral to the game itself. I scored this game a 7, if I knew how to change it I would say 8 instead.
BLOOD BOWL TEAM MANAGER
This was the season of Foul’s. The games had large numbers of cheat tokens including one player that had six of them in one match. In addition a Chaos beastman had two that turned out to be six more star points for a total of nine.
Frank as the manager of the Orc team
John as the manager of the Chaos team
Mike as the manager of the Skaven Team
In the first week of the season the Blood Bowl League decided to have an extra match giving us four for the week. In the first match the Skaven team won a victory over the Chaos team. In the second match we had Chaos team beating the Orc team. Match three saw the Skaven team run pass the Orc team. In the additional match the Orc team muscled by the Chaos team
Week one Scores
Orc’s 6 Fan Factor
Chaos 6 Fan Factor
Skaven 5 Fan Factor
As we enter into the second week of the season the reports are that violence is at an all time high in Blood Bowl matches. The games this week saw thee players injured and two tossed out for penalties. Our recap of the matches for the week Match one the Chaos team taking it to the Skaven team who seemed to be ok with that. The second match the Skaven team made a comeback to defeat the Orc team. Our third and final match saw the Orc team defeat the Chaos team.
Week two scores
Skaven Team 14 Fan factor
Chaos Team 10 Fan Factor
Orc Team 7 Fan Factor
The Third Week of the season finds that the Referee’s have a contract dispute and were calling penalties just to call them. The first match between the Skaven team and the Chaos team ended in a tie, but only because one of the Chaos beastmen were ejected from the game. Match number two The Orc team stunned the Chaos team as the star player from the chaos team with six cheat markers had two refs’ whistle him from the game. Lastly the Chaos team defeated the Orc team to end the week’s matches.
Week Three Scores
Skaven Team 16 Fan Factor
Orc Team15 Fan Factor
Chaos Team 11 Fan Factor
We could call this the start of the Cup game week as the Teams played for the Spike Magazine Cup. Our first match finds the Orc team smashing the Skaven Team. Our second match the Skaven team runs right on by the Orc team. Our third match the Chaos team murders the Skaven team. The Spike Magazine Cup goes to the Chaos team, followed by the Orc team and coming in third (LAST) was the Skaven team.
Week four Scores
Skaven Team 25 Fan Factor
Orc Team 21 Fan Factor
Chaos Team 20 Fan Factor
The Blood Bowl Week has arrived and all three teams were for the big game. The differences in the teams were becoming more apparent as the Chaos team had five star players and six team upgrades and the others only two or three of either. Now to the action of the week. Match number one the Skaven team out scored the Chaos team. While in the second match the Skaven team out ran the Chaos team a second time. However in the third match the Chaos team crushed the Skaven Team. In the Blood Bowl the Orc team ran away with it as all of their players were at this match and did not play in any others. The Chaos team and the Skaven team tied for second. The season looked to be going to the Skaven team but so many fans came out to see the Chaos five star players and two freebooters. As well as the large coaching staff and team upgrade that the Chaos team stole the season.
Final Scores
Chaos Team 44 Fan Factor
Skaven Team 37 Fan Factor
Orc Team 28 Fan Factor
Blood bowl team manager and its a card game, how is that possible?
Well thanks to Fantasy Flight it is and a great game to boot.
Those of us of a certain age remember blood bowl when it first came out, and how long it took to set up, the squabbles over rules, the sheer fun of playing and wishing it could be quicker and easier. Well now it is. FF have taking the spirit of blood bowl and all its madness and mayhem and made it just as much fun as the board/minatures game without the hassle.
Mechanics of the game are simple, stratergy is there especially with more than 2 players and its a quick and dirty game. You will not be sitting round quietly while playing this and you wont be sitting round getting bored waiting for others to take thier turn. The longest part of the game is adding up the scores and this takes seconds.
The game plays differently if you 2,3 or 4 players and that gives it a replayabilty value that many games miss.
Artwork on the cards is good and the components are first class what more can you ask for.
I loved the original blood bowl and this gave me a way to relive some of the great moments of my childhood. While not as exciting as the board game or the recently released computer game, this is infinitely more portable and I’ve had a lot of fun playing in airport terminals, on road trips and in hotel rooms. It is also a great game for non-hardcore players to pick up and have fun trying to destroy the person next to them.