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For gamers of a certain age, Blood Bowl has a special resonance. Pitched as “the game of fantasy football,” it’s gridiron for Tolkien fans, in which two teams taken from numerous fantasy races beat the ever-living crap out of one another while vaguely attempting to get a ball over a line. It is amazing.

This is the game's first boxed edition and its first new player models in something like 22 years—a criminal amount of time to wait for something so good. And while the components may be all-new and its models may benefit from two decades of improvements in plastics technology, the rules themselves are basically unchanged, and they're all the better for it.

Game details Designer: Jervis Johnson

Publisher: Games Workshop

Players: 2

Age: 12+

Playing time: 45-150 minutes

Price: ~£55

Cartoonish fantasy violence is the order of the day. It’s actual (American) football dialled up to 111, without league commissioners who pretend that they care about players’ head injuries. There’s simply an incredible amount of flavour, and past editions have seen teams of just about every fantasy trope released, from leagues of vampires who file thralls as linemen in case they need to feed during a match to mobs of goblins wielding chainsaws, pogo sticks, and big round bombs. You’ve got dwarves, elves, mummies, ogres, halflings (if you are particularly unbothered about winning a match), ratmen, demons, amazons, and the list goes on. Few of these factions are out yet, either as models or as rules, and no one except the designers themselves knows how many will eventually be released. It just depends on how many people buy the base game.

Tom Mendelsohn

Tom Mendelsohn

Tom Mendelsohn

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. 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.

The old ones are the best

Everything 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. 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. 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. The generous titbits of lore that pepper the rulebook are frequently hilarious, if not entirely changed from the last printed edition.

Teams, meanwhile, are given affectionate cod-NFL names, clever puns like the Orcland Raiders, the Darkside Cowboys, and the Washington Deadskins. 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).

Beyond 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. It’s all just a lot of fun.

The fun in the lore would count for very little if it were swaddled in a crappy game, however. In case I haven’t made it clear, this is anything but. Fair warning: Blood Bowl is a game of dice. It rewards careful coaching and tactical nous, but there’s nothing you can do in the face of horrible dice rolls. 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. 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. Blood Bowl then becomes a game of tactics and weighing probabilities. 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.

How it plays

You start with 11 dudes a side (because that number is for whatever reason sacred to Nuffle), whether they’re ogres or halflings. Each team has limits on the numbers of specialised players they can field, so you’ll never line up against 11 trolls. Every team member has stats: movement, strength, agility, and armour. 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. 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 dicec have custom symbols that either knock them over, knock you over, knock you both over, or push them back. The more dice, the better. Agility is for dodging out of tackle zones, making and intercepting passes, and picking up the ball. Armour determines how easy it is to injure you.

The more injuries (deaths, serious injuries, knock-outs, stuns, or simple knockdowns) you sustain, the less able you are to prevent the tide of the enemy overwhelming you. There are a load of skills, too. Some make you better at clobbering opponents or avoiding a clobbering, while others, if you’re playing the right team, might let you leap over the heads of the enemy, chuck your teammate like a ball while he’s carrying the ball (in the case of ogres and goblins), or grow an extra arm to make catching easier (if you’re playing for the mutation-happy god of decay).

Otherwise, Blood Bowl basically proceeds like an actual NFL game, albeit one where murder isn’t a sending-off offence. The rules, honed by a sanctioned committee of dedicated fans over two decades in the wilderness, pretty much cover every eventuality and convey the experience gloriously. And whatever you do, don’t let anyone describe Blood Bowl as a "beer ’n’ pretzels" strategy-light game. It might have dice, but it’s pitched in a particularly sweet spot that favours skilled players but allows noobs to pull off satisfying upsets.

The real joy of Blood Bowl, though, is playing in a league. You don’t get league rules in the base set—fair enough, because as far as I’m aware, you never did—but they’re available in the first printed supplement for the new edition, Death Zone Season 1, which costs £15. It’s worth every penny, not just because it gives you rules for another seven teams. A Blood Bowl league is one of the purest forms of joy known to mankind, and it can be played with as few as four people or as many as the actual NFL—provided the person organising it has bottomless reserves of patience.

The rules allow for players to gain experience in the form of star player points, from successful passes, touchdowns, and inflicting injuries. A veteran with boosted stats and extra skills is a precious thing, and it hurts even more when inevitably they die to a lucky nut-punch from a wimpy elf thrower. The league rules, too, are basically bulletproof after a gestation of this length, and they carefully avoid mismatches by allowing teams to recruit wandering star players, or buy various inducements from tasty beer that prevents injuries, to wizards you hire to casually chuck fireballs at the opposition ball-carrier as he bears down on your endzone.

There are also several massive online Blood Bowl communities that run leagues across the world.

Minor gripes

In general, the package is great—though at £65, it’s perhaps a touch on the pricey side, at least in comparison with non-Games Workshop games. The components are excellent: detailed miniatures, a solid double-sided board showing orc and human pitches, all the measuring equipment and dice one could possibly need, as well as a satisfyingly dense rulebook and a handful of “special play” cards to throw you that extra in-game curveball.

It’s not entirely without its flaws, however. There are, for instance, several barriers to entry for total neophytes: the miniatures, while heavy on detail and, comparatively to other Warhammer minis, easy to put together, come on fiddly sprues. You absolutely need a sharp modelling knife and a steady hand to cut them loose; prior experience at liberating hard plastic from sprues would be of great help. I haven’t touched a multipart plastic miniature in decades, and I definitely made a few sub-optimal cuts when setting up.

The minis themselves are all carefully designed in three parts and generally snap firmly together. The orc blockers’ faces have an unfortunate tendency to come off, however, and the blitzers’ entire right arms are worse; it’s nothing that can’t be fixed with plastic glue, but it adds another layer of complexity for people who didn’t spend their childhoods gluing armies together. Plus, you’re kinda supposed to paint the models. Nigh-on 25 years of crummily painted miniatures in various games have taught me that I’m never going to be that guy—plus, if you don’t own supplies, buying paints and brushes is very expensive. Without paintjobs, many of the models look similar, but that’s a minor concern.

Another major omission are sample team lists. There are 12 dudes per team in the box, but because orcs are slightly tougher than humans, they cost a bit more gold, meaning it’s not quite fair to just give both players even sides. Our first time out, we were forced to spend ages totting up gold values for our respective teams because the box doesn’t make the obvious inclusion of two pre-made team lists. And with league rules in the supplement, the box is only set up for one-off games anyway. It turns out that the humans should basically get to start with one additional team reroll, but that's not immediately apparent, and there’s no reason it shouldn’t have been.

While we’re at it, older editions of the game came with a nice thick pad of team roster sheets, which would have made for another simple inclusion in the new package. There’s one in the rulebook to photocopy, but that’s fiddly both because it forces you to bend the already-weak binding out of shape to get it flat and because not everyone has access to a scanner. No-one wants to be the dweeb caught doing that at work.

The next gripe is more of an old pros’ concern: neither team comes with the optimal types of players. The best human teams have four blitzers, two catchers, and probably only one thrower rather than the two, two, and two you’re given. Similarly, orcs generally want more hitty guys and fewer linemen, and if you want to make a league team, you’ll likely have to buy another box (and indeed the ogre or the troll when they’re released) without getting a lot of use out of most of the contents. The same apparently goes for the skaven team, which is especially vulnerable without its rat ogre. This is undoubtedly a conscious decision made by the notoriously pennywise Games Workshop, and it rankles.

Early reports coming out of the notoriously secretive Games Workshop studios in Nottingham (at least, reports I read on Reddit from people who attended a recent open day) are suggesting that the new release of the game has smashed sales expectations, and that this will likely mean more products. At present, a couple of classic star players have appeared alongside a standalone ogre, a skaven rat ogre, a troll for the orcs, and a dwarven death-roller, though some of these are being released through the company's yet-more-expensive Forge World brand in resin, which is harder to model than plastic. Various flavours of elves are detailed in Death Zone, alongside the cheerfully rotting acolytes of the god of decay (harder to tackle as a result of their BO, basically); presumably they’ll see the light of day, too. Sundry other gubbins have been promised as well—including differently designed boards and one or two limited edition star players that are presently only available at Games Workshop HQ.

Even if it didn't recieve ongoing support, the base game is a great package. There are enough third-party model-makers and gamers for you to start or join a local league, and the game has survived more than two decades in the wilderness already. With luck, however, it will keep growing, getting that support, and blossoming into something long-lasting and beautiful.

Listing image by Games Workshop