Blood Bowl

Engine Room: We speak with Cyanide’s Antoine Villepreux about lifting a faithful, bloody violent version of Blood Bowl off the table top and onto PC.

You might never have played the game, but any geek worth their salt has at least heard of Blood Bowl. It's been almost 22 years since this now classic miniatures boardgame first joined the Games Workshop oeuvre, bringing a twisted, deadly version of American football to a fantasy realm. The game itself has evolved dramatically through four boxed releases and five further rules updates, and loyal fans have devised their own unofficial ways to play online.

It's also been 14 years since the last attempt to bring the game to life as a videogame, with fans in recent years devising their own methods for bringing the game to digital life. But now Cyanide Studio is adding the spit and polish to its new, richly detailed version for PC and consoles. And if what we're hearing is correct, fans are on notice - they're very serious about making it as true to the board as possible.

"Our primarily goal was to make a faithful adaptation," says Antoine Villepreux, Cyanide's Production Director and Blood Bowl Project Manager. "Simply because the tabletop game deserves it: it's a very rich and fun game that needed a better adaptation than the now very old one."

To that end, the videogame is focused on a turn-based mode that aims to carefully transcribe the Living Rulebook 5.0 and the overall spirit of the game.

While delivering a version of play ideal for league and tournament play for the current fan base, Cyanide is also delivering a 'Real Time' mode for those looking for something with a different flavour.

"We tried many gameplay styles for the Real Time. We even tried a very arcade one, but rapidly came back into what makes Blood Bowl unique - the strategy behind the sport aspect. So the Real Time mode looks more like a traditional RTS than a sport game."

Cyanide Studio isn't a complete stranger to the idea of violent fantasy football, having released their own game, Chaos League, in 2004. There were some tensions with Games Workshop at the time due to Blood Bowl similarities, but on the announcement that Cyanide was awarded the Blood Bowl license in 2006 all differences were settled and the Chaos League title was even assigned to Games Workshop as part of the deal.

That said, Villepreux was very clear that Blood Bowl was very much a 'back to square one' production. "We started everything from scratch again. Zero line of code or data was reused. In fact if you look at both games, you rapidly see they are really different games."

The team working on the game features a mix of interest levels in the source material. Some hadn't heard of the game before starting on the project, while others were deep enough into the scene they'd painted up their own teams. But Villepreux suggests more than a few have since gotten into it and now play on a regular basis.

With such a serious scene attached to the pre-existing game, getting the rules just right is clearly a top priority. Yet with many rules versions across the history of the game, finding a canonical interpretation is no simple task. One part of Cyanide's effort to be as faithful as possible in their adaptation was recruiting confirmed Blood Bowl board game players to early beta testing to get their insights into refining the product. But even with the latest rules now stable for almost three years, arguments still arise.

"Blood Bowl has very complicated rules that have often changed in the past, and we discovered that only a few people knew them perfectly," says Villepreux. "We had some interesting debates between players, and sometimes with Games Workshop's guys, having diverging point of views on particular aspects of the rulebook. I will not promise that nothing has been left out, but I'll ensure we did our best and put a lot of effort into it."