![]() ![]() ![]() Armour determines how easy it is to injure you. Agility is for dodging out of tackle zones, making and intercepting passes, and picking up the ball. The dicec have custom symbols that either knock them over, knock you over, knock you both over, or push them back. Strength determines how many block dice you roll and is modified by how many friendly and unfriendly dudes are in your tackle zone-the ring of squares around each player. The first determines how far you can go the more movement you have, the less likely you are to be able to biff the other lot. Every team member has stats: movement, strength, agility, and armour. Each team has limits on the numbers of specialised players they can field, so you’ll never line up against 11 trolls. You start with 11 dudes a side (because that number is for whatever reason sacred to Nuffle), whether they’re ogres or halflings. It rewards careful play, but sometimes you need the dice to go your way to pull off the move you want to make-and it gets the balance just right. Blood Bowl then becomes a game of tactics and weighing probabilities. And if you make a bad roll by fumbling a pass or getting knocked over when you try and thump the opposition, it forces a turnover and you lose the rest of your moves. You have to develop a kind of zen calm when your star dude, a veteran of two dozen games, trips over while trying to run that one extra space to score and kills himself no matter how many rerolls and team apothecaries you wheel out to try and satiate the D6 gods. It rewards careful coaching and tactical nous, but there’s nothing you can do in the face of horrible dice rolls. Fair warning: Blood Bowl is a game of dice. In case I haven’t made it clear, this is anything but. The fun in the lore would count for very little if it were swaddled in a crappy game, however. If Games Workshop ever releases a team of chivalric knights like the one that comes with the Blood Bowl 2 video game, I’m calling them Olympic Lyonesse (which is a very witty pun on a popular French soccer team and the Arthurian island of legend, for confused readers).īeyond that, there’s a whole bunch of fluff about how playing the sport is actually giving praise to an ancient god called Nuffle whose high priests wore sacred robes of vertical black and white stripes and its subsequent long and ignominious history. Teams, meanwhile, are given affectionate cod-NFL names, clever puns like the Orcland Raiders, the Darkside Cowboys, and the Washington Deadskins. The generous titbits of lore that pepper the rulebook are frequently hilarious, if not entirely changed from the last printed edition. Everything is given a sardonic twist: the elves are haughty princelings, fans watch matches on a network of crystal balls via the Necromancers Broadcasting Circle (NBC) or the Association of Broadcasting Conjurers (ABC), and no one seems to mind playing against teams made up of literal demons. It’s set in a kind of high-fantasy mirror world, where the usual racial tensions tend to be solved on blood-soaked pitches rather than battlefields, and no one seems to be that worried about the body count. The old ones are the bestĮverything is prosecuted with a whopping dollop of wry British humour, all written with a love for both of the game's major tropes: football and fantasy. Happily, there is an enormous secondary market of off-brand fantasy-themed gridiron sports teams out there to buy, and many small miniatures companies will sell you fairly complete teams you’ll be able to use everywhere except for official Games Workshop tournaments, where non-official models are verboten. ![]() There are two additional team outs at present, the fast, fragile skaven (ratmen), and the dwarves-slow, tough, and somehow allowed to deploy a machine called a “death-roller”-but various others are apparently on their way. ![]()
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