Games Workshop has as long line of games that fall outside of the company's bread and butter: the Warhammer Fantasy Battle and Warhammer 40K tabletop miniatures lines. One of those products is Blood Bowl -- a game that takes American football, mixes it with a form of Rugby and, well, war…and throws in most of the Warhammer Fantasy races in order to create a true blood sport. Fact is, Blood Bowl remains one of GW's more popular off-shoots spanning several editions (the game is over 20 years old) and is currently expanded by the Living Rulebook, a set of “official” house rules that has taken the game to new heights. Basically, if you ever wanted to play a game of pseudo-football where nimble Elves take their considerable athletic skills and do battle against a rough and tumble squad like the Dwarfs then Blood Bowl is for you. It's brutal, tactical, satisfyingly challenging, and (particularly when the Goblins and Halflings hit the pitch) absolutely hilarious. Best of all, it shines in a league format where teams improve and decline over time as players earn new skills or suffer career ending (or even life ending) injuries.

I recently had a chance to chat with Cyanide Studio CEO Patrick Pligersdorffer about what we can expect from his company's spin on the classic board game that is set for release hopefully sometime in June of this year on PC, Xbox 360, Nintendo DS, and PSP.

Being a lifelong Blood Bowl fan, I have always wanted a true computer version of the classic Games Workshop game, but for those unaware of the franchise, what is Blood Bowl all about?

The Blood Bowl video game is an adaptation of Games Workshop's highly successful board game. Matches, involving two teams of 11 players are as tactical as American football, but far more violent! The winner is the team that scores the most touchdowns (i.e. gets the ball into the opposition’s end zone) and it's basically no holds barred to that end! It can even happen that the players on one side are completely wiped out...

The board game is like many other great board games – they provide a chance for friends to share free time through the same activities and the video game has kept that spirit. It’s much more fun to play Blood Bowl in a multiplayer mode than in solo. But I’m not saying the game is not fun in solo mode. I’m just saying that you will prefer to play it against your friends or online. The game offers strong multiplayer and online options.

Blood Bowl: The Board Game

I want to touch on the online features in a moment, but coming off the development of Chaos League (a vastly underappreciated game in my view) did that experience help when attacking the Blood Bowl design?

Chaos League was a success because it still has a good recognition among players who tried it. It’s just a shame it wasn’t widely distributed. It has been a reference game for a while now.

I wouldn’t say that working on Chaos League made our job that much easier. Developing a video game will never be easy if you want to deliver high quality product, but yes, our experience with Chaos League helped a bit. In fact, the genre was not new to us. We had worked already on that kind of game and that’s why Games Workshop allowed us to port Blood Bowl to the PC and consoles. In terms of design, the main challenge was to recreate the atmosphere of violence and brutality of Blood Bowl events, and to translate character designs into 3D models. Other parts of the development concerned adapting original rules into codes and scripts.

When I look back to the beginning of the project, I’m pretty happy with the work we’ve done. The development team includes many talented developers and artists and the game looks very good. Currently, the community seems to be very excited by what we have shown, so it feels like we’re on the right track. Testing sessions at game shows have also been very successful and so we hope that it will be the same when the game hits store shelves.

What races will be available in the base game? I know it’s early but if things take off can we expect any additional downloadable content?

At the moment, we officially announced that the following races will be in the box at the release: Chaos, Dwarfs, Goblins, Humans, Lizardmen, Orcs, Skaven and Wood Elves.

It’s actually a bit early to speak of additional content. Keep in mind that Games Workshop has the power to approve or reject everything that concerns the Blood Bowl IP. We’re just allowed to port the license to the PC and consoles. That, however, does not prevent us from thinking about additional content and we’re eventually preparing to develop additional features but that’s not 100% confirmed. First, we’re going to launch the game and then we’ll be able to tell you more about add-ons.

One of the best parts of the board game is building your own squad. Can we create our own teams as far as rosters and colors and team names? Conversely, if I want to play with the classic teams from the board game like the Reikland Reavers, Orcland Raiders or the Skaven Scramblers – are they in the game as defaults?

Of course! And that’s the most interesting part of the game. Fans will be able to create and customize their team as they would have done it if they had painted their figurines.

Most of the classic teams have been implemented into Blood Bowl. So you should be able to play as the Reikland Reavers for example. This is only true in single match. In any of the career modes, you’ll start from scratch but you’ll have to face those teams at different moments of your career.

To meet them in tournaments, you’ll need to climb up the ladder ranks that separate you from the top level teams when you start playing the game as a rookie. Those teams are composed of tough and merciless players, though we won’t let you serve as cannon fodder for them!

Blood Bowl: The Video Game