Thankfully, there is a saving grace. Online play is the heart and soul of what makes Blood Bowl tick. Playing against another human opponent is just as engaging as playing the boardgame, and if you are lucky enough to get involved in a dedicated league then all the better. Teams evolve over time just like the solo game as you earn skill points and craft your squad how you see fit. The game is loaded with skills, each with their own specific use and when you combine that with the radical differences in team strength and tactics it makes for a wildly compelling strategy game.

As a coach you are presented with a lot of juicy decisions: which skill do I pick for my star player? How should I spend my match earnings? Another team re-roll? Maybe I should save the money to buy another player? Perhaps it’s time I invested in an apothecary? It’s these decisions that fuel the desire to keep playing – to watch your team evolve from a bunch of rookies into a team of grizzled veterans.

Aside from private leagues, there is a “Public League” for those who wish to simply play one-off matches without a dedicated league schedule, but this has no real payoff and the lobby design is odd in that in order to find a game you have to spam the chat channel telling everyone “hey I’m looking for a game.” There is no dedicated matchmaking system in place so the chat room is more or less a place for players to beg one another to play. This usually isn’t a problem as the lobby is typically loaded with players but this is not the optimal way to handle this.

Additionally, the league tools are nowhere near as robust as they need to be. You are only allowed to host (act as league commissioner) in one league. I have no clue why. You don’t get seemingly obvious items like league leaders in various statistical categories. Want to know which player has the most kills in your league? Or touchdowns? Or catches? You have to track all that yourself. You can view player stats on each team page, but it’s a huge hassle to track the league wide stats yourself. There isn’t even a true playoff system. You simply play out the schedule, a winner is declared based on record, and the league starts over again.

These are certainly frustrations, but they still don’t negate the fact that playing Blood Bowl online against another human opponent is about as good as tactical turn-based gaming gets. There is a real-time option but it‘s a chaotic mess, and Cyanide would have been much better off ditching it entirely and spending more valuable development time on polishing the base game.

Blood Bowl is much like the recently released strategy game DemiGod from Stardock and Gas Powered Games. The game shipped with an assortment of issues and single player was basically an afterthought, but the core game remained brilliant. Again much like DemiGod, Blood Bowl is receiving support. The game has received three patches since launch and we can only hope that Cyanide steps up to the plate and delivers the quality of AI and online league tools the company promised during the game’s development.

As easy as it is to knock Blood Bowl for its obvious shortcomings I still cannot wait to play my next league match and to start up another tournament—to see if my rough and tumble Orc squad can get another win in order to afford to purchase a Troll…or maybe another Black Orc…or maybe a Goblin for the Troll to hurl toward the end zone! But as good as it is, I can’t help but think it should have been better. Blood Bowl is an A+ boardgame trapped inside a C level computer game design.

Questions or comments? We'd love to hear from you .