Review by: William Abner

For the uninitiated, Blood Bowl is a combination of American football, rugby, and all out war, where fantasy races such as Dwarfs, Elves, Goblins, Skaven (ratmen), and others take to the pitch to score touchdowns and beat the crap out of each other. It’s a turn based zone of control wargame wrapped inside the context of sports, and I have been playing the boardgame for nearly 20 years. Blood Bowl is in my wheelhouse.

In the mid 90s MicroLeague published a dreadful PC version of the game, and ever since then I have waited, as the years rolled by, for someone to take another crack at it – to bring this marvelous game to a wider audience. Here it is some 15 years later and French developer Cyanide and publisher Focus Home have created a faithful adaptation of the boardgame. It looks like Blood Bowl and acts like Blood Bowl, but in the end it’s a mild disappointment. Not because Cyanide failed to port the rules correctly – in fact the developer did a fantastic job – this is the boardgame in PC form, but rather due to the execution of the periphery items like the interface and the artificial intelligence; the stuff that any good computer strategy game needs in order to succeed.

I won’t try and explain all of the rules (but you can read them here http://www.bloodbowlonline.com/LivingRulebook5.pdf if you are inclined). It’s not a terribly difficult game to learn and the PC version does a decent job of showing you the very basic concepts, although those brand new to the game will be best served by reading the many, many boardgame strategy guides peppered throughout the internet. The tutorials show only the bare bone necessities.

During a game, you’ll be rolling a lot of virtual dice – block dice with special symbols on them as well as normal “D6” rolls, and for the most part the game shows you what you need to virtually roll in order to succeed. Move your mouse over the ball and a little number like “3+” will appear over it to indicate what you need to roll to pick it up.