How close to the board game rule set are you trying to keep the game? I know a lot of Blood Bowl fans are hoping that it’s almost a direct port of what they play on the table.

Indeed, we worked closely with Games Workshop to strictly adapt the Living Rulebook 5.0’s rules to the video game. So yes, it’s basically a direct port of the board game. Fans of the original game should be at ease as soon as they play the game. Though, we thought about newcomers to the game, so we added as an optional dynamic an action-packed real-time mode, a new way to become familiar with the basics, in addition to the classical turn-based mode.

The classic BB match-up: Humans vs. Orcs

Yes, Chaos League was played in real-time so I know you have experience with that design idea, but I also read that the reason for the latest delay was that the real time segment wasn’t where you wanted it. How much does the real time design differ from Chaos League? Why has it been tricky to implement?

Games Workshop approved our proposition to add a real-time mode in the Blood Bowl video game. They were confident with our experience in that kind of gameplay regarding what we did in Chaos League.

However, we had to take a very different approach with Blood Bowl. With Chaos League, we worked from scratch and could do whatever we wanted with the rules to fit the real-time. If we felt that there were too many players on the pitch for the user to control them, we just had to drop one and re-balance the races. Basically, the real-time mode was driving the development. Here, it’s the opposite; we had to take a turn based game and make it work as a real-time game without affecting the balance between races. This was a tricky process but it seems to work.

The delay is not to work on the mechanics as it’s pretty stable now but more on the way the gamer can control his players in real-time with a console gamepad.

Back to the custom options. A big part of the board game, and Chaos League for that matter, is off the field team management. Is that being carried over to Blood Bowl? Will players suffer season long injuries, improve in skills, etc?

Yes, they will, just like in the board game. Original rules were very realistic on that point. If one or several of your players are injured or killed during a match, you need to replace them for one or several of the next matches until they are ready to go back to the field. If you lack money to heal them, you will still be able to play them, but you’ll have to prepare to face serious loss in your ranks in case they are killed.

As your players take part in tournaments, they gain experience and level up. They can use skill points to buy new abilities that will make the difference during a match – improve their dice rolls, have a second chance on a bad roll, and other bonuses along those lines.

How are the leagues and seasons set up? Can you customize how long a season will be? I guess a better way of asking this is what game modes are available?

You can customize almost everything: teams, races, players, championship rules, and much more.

In the multiplayer mode, you can customize championships, cups, playoffs… there are 25 elements that you can customize as you wish. For example, the number of teams allowed to participate, the match length, participation of sponsors or not…

The dev team is mostly made of Blood Bowl board game players; it was a key goal for us. We wanted to allow a maximum number of possibilities because we were ourselves used to playing with our own championship rules!

Goblins with chainsaws and a pogo stick...crazy gits

I think the game might be a great fit for the DS and PSP. I understand that the handheld versions are turn-based only – are there any other differences between the editions?

The main difference is that you can’t customize rules for seasons, players, and teams. There is also only one stadium.

On the PSP, players still have the possibility to improve the gear of their players but unfortunately it hasn’t been possible on the DS because of the technical limitations of the platform. The game is very fun to play though, since rules are always similar to the board game.

There is no league system on PSP and DS. You can play in hotseat mode, or in wireless mode with the PSP.