Review: Blood Bowl

Whenever I say Warcry is the best game Games Workshop has made, someone always chirps up to reply that I am wrong, that title belongs to Blood Bowl. It was hard to argue about a game I have never played. Blood Bowl is Games Workshop’s skirmish fantasy football game. You are basically playing Jervis Johnson’s take on American Football. Now having finally played, I have to admit it is pretty wonderful.

My friends and I decided to get start a league. I grabbed the Imperial Nobles team, and a rule book. I more or less instantly regretted not just grabbing the starter set, as I could have sold one of the teams, gained a pitch and tokens, and come out ahead price wise. So, don’t make the same mistake as me. The Third Season of Blood Bowl has tweaked the composition of all the teams so you can field a reasonable team from one box. This small change is what got my friend excited about playing. It’s really what sucked us all in.

My friend had played Blood Bowl in the 90s, so helped the game move along. When I first looked at the rule book I felt there were a lot of rules to make the game go, something I mentioned to my cousin who played in twenty years ago. He scoffed and replied the game was easy! Now having played, I would agree. It’s all quite intuitive. It does feel a bit like football. There was some looking stuff up here and there, but we got into the swing of the game quite quickly.

Blood Bowl is played over two halves. One team will kick the ball to the opposing team: place the ball on a square and roll to see where it ends up and bounces. It’s then up to the other team to grab the ball and move it up the pitch. If you make it to the end of the field, the end zone, you score a touch down. You activate all your minis one by one until there is a turnover. There is a long list of cases that can cause you to lose your turn, but they all eventually boil down to: one of your models falls down or you lose the ball. When this happens play flips to the other player and they take their turn. Each half is composed of 8 turns in a normal game of Blood Bowl.

Your players can move, pass the ball, hand-off the ball, catch, block, secure the ball, and foul players who are knocked down. The actions do what they say on the box. Because you are trying to avoid turnovers, you will generally attempt safer actions first, before riskier ones.

Movement simply has you move down the pitch (a grid) a number of squares as dictated by your move stat. You can rush up to two times, letting you move an additional square each time on a roll of 2+ on a d6. But if you roll a 1 you fall over. In our game my fried Dylan’s catcher fell over getting into position. Play turned over to me, and my turn ended the exact same way. We somehow rolled 1s back to back when rushing. That’s Blood Bowl.

Adjacent players can block, attempting to attack the other player. There are custom block dice to roll that tell you what happens. Hopefully you push the person out of the way and/or knock them down. It’s possible you might get knocked down yourself. Like typical skirmish games there is an advantage gained by having more of your players adjacent to the combat. The offensive players gains strength for their friends, similarly for the defensive player. You roll one block dice if you match the opposing players strength, two if you beat it, three if you more than double it. The player with the higher strength choose the result. (So tackling stronger players is a bad idea.) A lot of the game is positioning to try and gain extra dice for your block roll.

Moving the ball down the pitch will involve passing, catching, and hand offs. The further you attempt to pass, the more difficult the dice roll required. Players have a pass stat, and need to beat their attribute score. Catching and picking up the ball require making an agility score roll. So you could make a perfect throw, but still fumble the catch. You could run to pick up a ball off the ground and fall over. That’s blood bowl.

The secure the ball action is new to this edition of the game, a way to help teams with low agility gain control of the ball in a more conservative way. You secure the ball if you roll a 2+ on a d6, it doesn’t require a roll against your agility stat. The catch is the action triggers a turn over. It never came up in our game, but I can see how it would be useful if you have strong guys who can protect the ball and move it up in the subsequent turn.

After two halves the player with the most touchdowns wins. I lost my first game. That doesn’t matter. I had a lot of fun all the same.

Blood Bowl plays more or less exactly the same as it did in the 90s. An impressive piece of game design. The game is fast and feels really dynamic. There is a lot of back and forth due. Grid movement and no line of sight to worry about helps keep everything snappy.

We were playing sevens, a smaller version of Blood Bowl. You play on a smaller pitch with a smaller team and a smaller number of turns per half. It’s a way to speed up the game. The rules are basically unchanged. Was great, no notes.

I will report back once we have started playing our league and have played more games. Like Mordheim, the campaign system for Blood Bowl is apparently a source of much fun. Is the game better than Warcry? I’m not so sure, but it is certainly one of the greats.