Sport is probably one of the more contentious issues amongst gamers. We all know the stereotype of jocks and nerds and whether we've been on the jock or nerd side of it, we've all been subject to it. There are games made for both kinds of groups, after a fashion. Call me out for generalising, but games like Madden are probably going to appeal to one crowd more than, say, Professor Layton and vice versa. Then, along comes Blood Bowl to mix it all up.
For those of you who don't know, Blood Bowl is the game of fantasy football created by Games Workshop, the company famous for making toy soldiers that grown adults can justify playing with and having a customer base with more disposable income than God. Not to be confused with Dungeon Bowl, which is slightly different, Blood Bowl combines a version of football loosely based off Gridiron with the violence of sports like Battle Royale or Deathrace.
The PC version contains two different game modes, one which is turn based play taken almost word for word from the current "Living Rule Book" of the tabletop version of Blood Bowl, and a real-time "Blitz" mode that makes the game feel a little more like Madden. The majority of the player base (at least online) are players who have played the tabletop version of Blood Bowl before, or at least have some inkling of how it is played, meaning that the turn-based version is the dominant game type played. Cyanide Studios (developers of Blood Bowl for PC) have tapped into this by making the online Public League turn-based only, but more on that a bit later. First, a general run down of how well the game plays.
As a true representation of the tabletop version, the game plays quite well. The rules are implimented with a fine tooth comb, but the problem of transferring such a complex game into computer terms rears its ugly head with certain aspects of the rules missing, or bugs evident that cause some issues. However, to Cyanide's credit, the bugs and rule mishaps are never game-breaking, and they're working hard with the community to identify and solve these issues. It's probably one of the few situations where I'm happy to let the current industry habit of "leave bugs in, patch them out after release" slide, because it's a large project they're trying to convert. So the game functions very well, and with this core pre-requisite fulfilled, we get right into the meat of what makes Blood Bowl so much fun.
Right from the outset, a player can just jump right in and play a quick match against the computer with pre-generated teams of varying Team Value (The higher the Team Value the better the team is a good rule-of-thumb). Those new to the game have the option of taking part in a series of tutorials that explain the basics and a few of the advanced concepts, but like any game with a learning curve, there are some things you're only going to pick up from playing the game, or having them done to you by other players online. A tip for all you new players: Pushing a player off the pitch guarantees they'll at least be off until the next Touchdown or Half-time and may cause injuries as well. This is commonly referred to as "Crowd-Surfing", because well... The Crowd Surfs them into the injury box with their fists and feet.
These quick games can be a lot of fun, particularly if you feel like simply playing a "Hotseat" game with a friend. Those of you who remember might reminisce of times playing Heroes of Might and Magic 2 with your friend sitting next to you, waiting for you to finish your turn and trying to steal a peak at the piece of jigsaw puzzle you just uncovered when you touched that Obelisk. The real fun of Blood Bowl, though, is in creating a team that you will coach through many seasons and watch as they rise to glory or fall flat on their face, based on your skill as a player (and a little bit of luck, of course).
Team generation is exciting in and of itself. You have a range of teams to choose from including Dwarves, Wood Elves, Skaven (Ratmen), Humans, Chaos, Goblins, Orcs and Lizardmen all with their own strengths and weaknesses (or in the case of humans, a lack of either, which is both their strength and weakness). Each team has their own playstyle which is characteristic of them, such as Dwarves playing a running game (Don't try and pass the ball as a dwarf team!) and Wood Elves playing the Long Pass game (Don't stand toe-to-toe with your enemies as elves). The general playstyle of teams might seem like it pigeonholes and brings the game down to rock-paper-scissors on a grander scale, but you don't have to worry about that occurring because teams are customisable for how you want to play them. So if you want to play an outside of the box team, you have every opportunity to do that by buying the right players for your style and choosing the correct skills as your players gain Star Player Points (Blood Bowl's version of Experience Points). You can also customise your team aesthetically, giving them a motto, background/description, logo and team colour, as well as customising each individual player. Mostly your customising of players will come down to what you decide to call them as there is a fairly limited range of models to choose from, but it at least gives interesting variation between players instead of having one model for each position.
So by this point you should have a team of the race of your choice, with (assuming you've read the rules or done the tutorials) at least 11 players so you can field a full team. You might even have backstory and customised players for your team, depending on your level of dedication, such as my own Sons o' James Squire, a dwarf team named (Creatively) after the ale I was drinking at the time I brought them into existence. Now you get to watch them grow as they progress through the seasons, the stars of your team rising from obscurity to the point where even other players in your league can tell them apart simply by appearance or player number.
You see, player development is one of the more important facets of Blood Bowl. Since the majority of the game is based around a progressive seasonal sport (you know, like in real life) players who excel get better at the game and teams that excel get more supporters and better revenue (useful for replacing lost players). Performing certain actions in game such as injuring or killing an opponent, successfully completing a pass, intercepting an opposing pass or making a touchdown earn a player Star Player Points (SPP). As players reach certain thresholds of SPP, they go up in level and get to choose from a set of skills or stat increases. Here's where luck can play a big role in the development of your team, as the choice of what skills or stat increases you can choose from at each level up depends on your dice roll. There are four skill lists available to every race (General, Strength, Passing, Agility) and one skill list available only to certain races (Mutation). Depending on the position they play, a player can choose from certain skill lists only if he rolls a double so, for example, one of my runners Duroril can choose from the General and Passing skills on any roll or from General, Passing, Strength and Agility if I were to roll a double when he levels up. For stat increases, rolling specific doubles allows you to choose to increase a specific stat by one, I.e. rolling double 6 (on 2d6) allows you to increase strength by one point. Stat increases are extremely powerful, which is why they're rare, but there are very few situations in which you'd choose a skill over a stat increase. However, the higher the level of a player, the bigger threat he is and the more he'll likely be targeted by enemy players, not to mention the increase in team value associated with high level players. And nothing hurts quite so much as watching your star player get killed.
With all these increases and having outlined how players level up, some of you might have noticed the possibility of teams that play more games simply far outstripping opposing teams, making the ?competition? in a league a moot point. Well thankfully, there are systems in place to help balance out this problem. Every player on a team is assigned a Value based on their position, skills/stat increases and permanent injuries. The total value of all players on your team plus any extra perks you have (Fan Factor, Rerolls, Cheerleaders, Apothecaries etc.) make up your Team Value. Each team has a static team value and a variable team value, the static being their total overall team value if every player on their team is fighting fit, and the variable team value being the TV used in the next match. Team Value can drop temporarily if a player is injured in a match and can't take part in the next game, meaning they are not counted toward your teams total value. This is important because the way Blood Bowl helps weak teams or teams who have had a run of bad luck with injuries is through a system known as inducements. Essentially, to make the match more interesting for the fans, the Blood Bowl league gives your team a sum of money that can be used ONLY in your next game to purchase perks such as Star Players, extra re-rolls, bribes of the referee, potions to dope your players, wandering apothecaries to help prevent injuries and the like. The greater the difference between team values, the greater the sum of money given to the underdogs and this can be supplemented with your own money, if you feel you want to buy some extra inducements. Inducements won't level the playing field but they do a great job of closing the gap, especially if used wisely, meaning a more entertaining game for all, even the underdog who gets to use sneaky tactics to try and beat their opponent.
Sounding like fun? It certainly is. But the game does have some flaws and unfortunately the more annoying ones don't actually affect in game play, but the creation and management of online private leagues. This is arguably the most fun you'll have playing Blood Bowl, getting together with some online friends or real life friends and creating your own private league where you can duke it out on the astrogranite is extraordinarily fun. Simply organising the league can be an exercise in frustration, however. There is no system in place to allow "bys" each match day, meaning that you have to have an even number of players to start your league. Your league has to be full before you can start it, so you can't create a 16 player league with only 8 players in the hopes that you can fill the extra slots later which leads to further frustration because you can't increase the amount of teams allowed in your league, even between seasons. So if you want to add more players (and remember, needs to be an EVEN number of players) then you have to completely disband the league and get every player to re-apply. This could have been eased through the use of in game communication tools or even message boards, but the in-game mail system is poor at best and horribly ungainly at worst, leaving your best chance to be creating an out of game forum and getting players to sign up there. But hey, at least the game can be run in windowed mode so you can toggle between the two and to its credit there is very little loss of performance when playing in windowed mode (In fact, I noticed an increase in performance, but my case may not be representative).
Even with these flaws though, if you're willing to tough it out this is where the real meat and enjoyment of Blood Bowl appears. It really is a multiplayer game, much in the same way that you CAN play Left 4 Dead with the AI, but why would you? And if you don't want to organise a private league, you can always play a progressive team in the public league and watch them grow there. That of course, leaves your team open to the habits of online players, some of which can be very dirty (Yes, there's even griefing in fantasy football) but if you're an online gamer, you're probably used to that. And after the first couple of times, you'll be able to pick out those people who genuinely want to play and those who are just there to wreak havoc.
One final point of interest that I'm divided over would be the reliability rating that players receive online. Once you play ten matches, you receive a reliability rating based on your match completion rate. So, if you've played 10 matches and followed them all through to the end then you will have a reliability of 100% which is a statistic viewable by other players that allows you to make a judgement of whether they're going to complete a match with you. This leaves a lot up to assumption, however, since if your game crashes, you lose reliability rating, meaning that not all forfeitures are actually people abandoning a match when it goes poorly. Still, it's a useful feature but should be taken with one or more grains of salt.
Blood Bowl is definitely a worthwhile game but it may not be everyones cup of tea. It is, in essence, a sports game which may put some of you off right at the outset, but it's worth a look into even if it's just a hot seat game with a friend. I found online play to be the most enjoyable way to play Blood Bowl, but your mileage may vary depending on your penchant for internet gaming. The learning curve can be steep at times, particularly if you're playing experienced players, but the basics are easy to learn and there are plenty of new tactics to keep you interested as you continue playing. Plus, once you tire of the tactics of one team, there are many other teams to try, with more on their way. Overall, I highly recommend at least trying Blood Bowl to see if it's a game you'd enjoy. Good graphics, excellent gameplay and a minimum of flaws combine to make this a truly excellent port of tabletop to PC and with patches constantly being worked on by Cyanide staff, this just recently released game can only get better from here.
For those of you who don't know, Blood Bowl is the game of fantasy football created by Games Workshop, the company famous for making toy soldiers that grown adults can justify playing with and having a customer base with more disposable income than God. Not to be confused with Dungeon Bowl, which is slightly different, Blood Bowl combines a version of football loosely based off Gridiron with the violence of sports like Battle Royale or Deathrace.
The PC version contains two different game modes, one which is turn based play taken almost word for word from the current "Living Rule Book" of the tabletop version of Blood Bowl, and a real-time "Blitz" mode that makes the game feel a little more like Madden. The majority of the player base (at least online) are players who have played the tabletop version of Blood Bowl before, or at least have some inkling of how it is played, meaning that the turn-based version is the dominant game type played. Cyanide Studios (developers of Blood Bowl for PC) have tapped into this by making the online Public League turn-based only, but more on that a bit later. First, a general run down of how well the game plays.
As a true representation of the tabletop version, the game plays quite well. The rules are implimented with a fine tooth comb, but the problem of transferring such a complex game into computer terms rears its ugly head with certain aspects of the rules missing, or bugs evident that cause some issues. However, to Cyanide's credit, the bugs and rule mishaps are never game-breaking, and they're working hard with the community to identify and solve these issues. It's probably one of the few situations where I'm happy to let the current industry habit of "leave bugs in, patch them out after release" slide, because it's a large project they're trying to convert. So the game functions very well, and with this core pre-requisite fulfilled, we get right into the meat of what makes Blood Bowl so much fun.
Right from the outset, a player can just jump right in and play a quick match against the computer with pre-generated teams of varying Team Value (The higher the Team Value the better the team is a good rule-of-thumb). Those new to the game have the option of taking part in a series of tutorials that explain the basics and a few of the advanced concepts, but like any game with a learning curve, there are some things you're only going to pick up from playing the game, or having them done to you by other players online. A tip for all you new players: Pushing a player off the pitch guarantees they'll at least be off until the next Touchdown or Half-time and may cause injuries as well. This is commonly referred to as "Crowd-Surfing", because well... The Crowd Surfs them into the injury box with their fists and feet.
These quick games can be a lot of fun, particularly if you feel like simply playing a "Hotseat" game with a friend. Those of you who remember might reminisce of times playing Heroes of Might and Magic 2 with your friend sitting next to you, waiting for you to finish your turn and trying to steal a peak at the piece of jigsaw puzzle you just uncovered when you touched that Obelisk. The real fun of Blood Bowl, though, is in creating a team that you will coach through many seasons and watch as they rise to glory or fall flat on their face, based on your skill as a player (and a little bit of luck, of course).
Team generation is exciting in and of itself. You have a range of teams to choose from including Dwarves, Wood Elves, Skaven (Ratmen), Humans, Chaos, Goblins, Orcs and Lizardmen all with their own strengths and weaknesses (or in the case of humans, a lack of either, which is both their strength and weakness). Each team has their own playstyle which is characteristic of them, such as Dwarves playing a running game (Don't try and pass the ball as a dwarf team!) and Wood Elves playing the Long Pass game (Don't stand toe-to-toe with your enemies as elves). The general playstyle of teams might seem like it pigeonholes and brings the game down to rock-paper-scissors on a grander scale, but you don't have to worry about that occurring because teams are customisable for how you want to play them. So if you want to play an outside of the box team, you have every opportunity to do that by buying the right players for your style and choosing the correct skills as your players gain Star Player Points (Blood Bowl's version of Experience Points). You can also customise your team aesthetically, giving them a motto, background/description, logo and team colour, as well as customising each individual player. Mostly your customising of players will come down to what you decide to call them as there is a fairly limited range of models to choose from, but it at least gives interesting variation between players instead of having one model for each position.
So by this point you should have a team of the race of your choice, with (assuming you've read the rules or done the tutorials) at least 11 players so you can field a full team. You might even have backstory and customised players for your team, depending on your level of dedication, such as my own Sons o' James Squire, a dwarf team named (Creatively) after the ale I was drinking at the time I brought them into existence. Now you get to watch them grow as they progress through the seasons, the stars of your team rising from obscurity to the point where even other players in your league can tell them apart simply by appearance or player number.
You see, player development is one of the more important facets of Blood Bowl. Since the majority of the game is based around a progressive seasonal sport (you know, like in real life) players who excel get better at the game and teams that excel get more supporters and better revenue (useful for replacing lost players). Performing certain actions in game such as injuring or killing an opponent, successfully completing a pass, intercepting an opposing pass or making a touchdown earn a player Star Player Points (SPP). As players reach certain thresholds of SPP, they go up in level and get to choose from a set of skills or stat increases. Here's where luck can play a big role in the development of your team, as the choice of what skills or stat increases you can choose from at each level up depends on your dice roll. There are four skill lists available to every race (General, Strength, Passing, Agility) and one skill list available only to certain races (Mutation). Depending on the position they play, a player can choose from certain skill lists only if he rolls a double so, for example, one of my runners Duroril can choose from the General and Passing skills on any roll or from General, Passing, Strength and Agility if I were to roll a double when he levels up. For stat increases, rolling specific doubles allows you to choose to increase a specific stat by one, I.e. rolling double 6 (on 2d6) allows you to increase strength by one point. Stat increases are extremely powerful, which is why they're rare, but there are very few situations in which you'd choose a skill over a stat increase. However, the higher the level of a player, the bigger threat he is and the more he'll likely be targeted by enemy players, not to mention the increase in team value associated with high level players. And nothing hurts quite so much as watching your star player get killed.
With all these increases and having outlined how players level up, some of you might have noticed the possibility of teams that play more games simply far outstripping opposing teams, making the ?competition? in a league a moot point. Well thankfully, there are systems in place to help balance out this problem. Every player on a team is assigned a Value based on their position, skills/stat increases and permanent injuries. The total value of all players on your team plus any extra perks you have (Fan Factor, Rerolls, Cheerleaders, Apothecaries etc.) make up your Team Value. Each team has a static team value and a variable team value, the static being their total overall team value if every player on their team is fighting fit, and the variable team value being the TV used in the next match. Team Value can drop temporarily if a player is injured in a match and can't take part in the next game, meaning they are not counted toward your teams total value. This is important because the way Blood Bowl helps weak teams or teams who have had a run of bad luck with injuries is through a system known as inducements. Essentially, to make the match more interesting for the fans, the Blood Bowl league gives your team a sum of money that can be used ONLY in your next game to purchase perks such as Star Players, extra re-rolls, bribes of the referee, potions to dope your players, wandering apothecaries to help prevent injuries and the like. The greater the difference between team values, the greater the sum of money given to the underdogs and this can be supplemented with your own money, if you feel you want to buy some extra inducements. Inducements won't level the playing field but they do a great job of closing the gap, especially if used wisely, meaning a more entertaining game for all, even the underdog who gets to use sneaky tactics to try and beat their opponent.
Sounding like fun? It certainly is. But the game does have some flaws and unfortunately the more annoying ones don't actually affect in game play, but the creation and management of online private leagues. This is arguably the most fun you'll have playing Blood Bowl, getting together with some online friends or real life friends and creating your own private league where you can duke it out on the astrogranite is extraordinarily fun. Simply organising the league can be an exercise in frustration, however. There is no system in place to allow "bys" each match day, meaning that you have to have an even number of players to start your league. Your league has to be full before you can start it, so you can't create a 16 player league with only 8 players in the hopes that you can fill the extra slots later which leads to further frustration because you can't increase the amount of teams allowed in your league, even between seasons. So if you want to add more players (and remember, needs to be an EVEN number of players) then you have to completely disband the league and get every player to re-apply. This could have been eased through the use of in game communication tools or even message boards, but the in-game mail system is poor at best and horribly ungainly at worst, leaving your best chance to be creating an out of game forum and getting players to sign up there. But hey, at least the game can be run in windowed mode so you can toggle between the two and to its credit there is very little loss of performance when playing in windowed mode (In fact, I noticed an increase in performance, but my case may not be representative).
Even with these flaws though, if you're willing to tough it out this is where the real meat and enjoyment of Blood Bowl appears. It really is a multiplayer game, much in the same way that you CAN play Left 4 Dead with the AI, but why would you? And if you don't want to organise a private league, you can always play a progressive team in the public league and watch them grow there. That of course, leaves your team open to the habits of online players, some of which can be very dirty (Yes, there's even griefing in fantasy football) but if you're an online gamer, you're probably used to that. And after the first couple of times, you'll be able to pick out those people who genuinely want to play and those who are just there to wreak havoc.
One final point of interest that I'm divided over would be the reliability rating that players receive online. Once you play ten matches, you receive a reliability rating based on your match completion rate. So, if you've played 10 matches and followed them all through to the end then you will have a reliability of 100% which is a statistic viewable by other players that allows you to make a judgement of whether they're going to complete a match with you. This leaves a lot up to assumption, however, since if your game crashes, you lose reliability rating, meaning that not all forfeitures are actually people abandoning a match when it goes poorly. Still, it's a useful feature but should be taken with one or more grains of salt.
Blood Bowl is definitely a worthwhile game but it may not be everyones cup of tea. It is, in essence, a sports game which may put some of you off right at the outset, but it's worth a look into even if it's just a hot seat game with a friend. I found online play to be the most enjoyable way to play Blood Bowl, but your mileage may vary depending on your penchant for internet gaming. The learning curve can be steep at times, particularly if you're playing experienced players, but the basics are easy to learn and there are plenty of new tactics to keep you interested as you continue playing. Plus, once you tire of the tactics of one team, there are many other teams to try, with more on their way. Overall, I highly recommend at least trying Blood Bowl to see if it's a game you'd enjoy. Good graphics, excellent gameplay and a minimum of flaws combine to make this a truly excellent port of tabletop to PC and with patches constantly being worked on by Cyanide staff, this just recently released game can only get better from here.
