• Game: Blood Bowl Team Manager: The Card Game
• Publisher: Fantasy Flight Games
• Designer: Jay Little
• Genre: Fantasy football
• Players: 2-4
• Playtime: 45-90 minutes



• What's Hot: Authentic, reformatted Blood Bowl experience; lots of customization and replayability; great tactical and strategic gameplay in a compact rules package; great value for the money



• What's Not: Analysis Paralysis can lead to longer than necessary games; Star Player rules are weirdly incongruous with the setting

by: Michael Barnes

Fantasy Flight Games’ new Blood Bowl spin-off may not be quite what you’d expect. It doesn’t attempt to translate the hilariously brutal on-the-field, play-by-play action of Games Workshop’s classic game of fantasy football set in the Warhammer world to a simpler, card game format. Instead, as its title implies, it offers a management-level kind of decision making and gameplay at a zoomed-out scale that abstracts an entire week’s worth of match-ups in a single round with only a few players and plays highlighted in each. Yet it totally captures the look, feel, and atmosphere of Blood Bowl in a structure radically different than the traditional miniatures format. It’s also a very compelling sports game model- it just happens to have matches between the Chaos All-Stars and the Athelorn Avengers rather than the Atlanta Falcons and the Miami Dolphins.

Six classic Blood Bowl teams are included in the package and each have particular styles of play, from the run-and-gun play of the Elven team to the brawling cheaters of the Chaos squad. These particular team advantages are conveyed chiefly through the available action icons each player card features- tackling, passing, evasion, and cheating. Team qualities are also conveyed through team-specific upgrade decks and keyword special abilities that depict traits like the hardy steadfastness of the Dwarves and the flexibility of the all-arounder human team. Teams start with a bench of 12 standard players, but named Star Players with enhanced skills as well as mercenary Freebooters can be added to the roster throughout the course of the game.

This game was initially developed as a deckbuilder, and some traces of that format persist in terms of selecting team members and upgrade cards. There is a degree of customization that is completely appropriate to the Team Manager concept, and I’ve really enjoyed this aspect of the game. I do have an issue with the way Star Players are put into common piles for each league (good guys and bad guys, essentially), which invariably results in Dwarf players with stubby legs running for the Elves and Humans linebacking for the Dwarves that they almost certainly tower over. I’m just not feeling this idea that Star Players aren’t playing for their respective home teams.

It’s a minor issue that’s easily house ruled and it doesn’t detract too much from the otherwise smooth-running and very tight process. In each season week, a Spike Magazine card is drawn that might impart an overall effect, restriction, or special rule for each of the matches played in the round or it could indicate that a major Bowl game occurs that week in which all teams can vie for football glory. There are as many matches played as there are players, and each is represented by a Highlight card that displays a winner’s payout as well as payouts for each side of the contest. These victory spoils include Fans (read: victory points) as well as draws from the team’s upgrade deck, a common Coaching upgrade deck, or the Star Player deck. You pick your fights based on what you want to achieve for the season.

Players take turns committing a player card from their hand into a match, which also establishes which of them their team will be participating in. When played, a player then uses any skill icons to move the match’s ball, tackle other players with a fun die roll, draw more cards, or draw a cheating token. Each player is rated on Star Power as a measure of their strength and ability, and once all players pass or have played out then the total Star Power on each side of every match is compared to determine winners, including the two point advantage that ball possession imparts.

Essentially, Team Manager is similar to Reiner Knizia’s Totten-Schotten (perhaps better known as Battle Line) or other card games where numerical superiority determines control of a central card, control point, or scoring opportunity. But what makes it far more than that is that it’s Blood Bowl. Tackles can shift the balance of power wildly or even result in an attacker getting knocked down. The cheating tokens might get a player ejected, or they may pull off some awesomely illegal move that delights the fans and earns some extra Star Power for the team. Or they could do nothing. Gameplay is competitive, full of one-upping cardplay, and it absolutely maintains that rollicking sense of violent fun that has made Blood Bowl a hobby classic for over 25 years.