Blood Bowl

Along with the adherence to Living Rulebook rules, any game, campaign or league can be run with extensions including player contracts, purchasable equipment, team sponsors, and other inducements that add a great deal of importance to the off-field game.

In a game with as broad a base as Blood Bowl, not everything can make the cut. But while a lot of rules and, in particular, some well loved races are missing from the game launch, Villepreux hopes the reception for the game will be strong enough to give them a market for adding even more extensions to the setting.

"Of course new races would come first, and we already know which ones," he says. "But we can also imagine adding more stadiums, or adding existing board game extensions, like cards."

Blood Bowl is something of a genre buster. Sport management sim meets turn-based strategy by way of fantasy warfare plus a healthy dash of humour. Some might even say it could be the ultimate blend of sport and fantasy gaming.

"Well I don't see many strategy/fantasy/sport crossovers out there anyway," says Villepreux. "That mix is fun! We do think any player interested by strategy should be interested in Blood Bowl. And that strategic aspect being combined with violence and lot of fun brings some fresh air to videogames."

Let's hope we get the game we've been waiting for, and the world falls in love, so we can get our hands on some extensions and additional races. Undead FTW!

Blood Bowl: A Primer
Also known as "Insights into why a bunch of grown men giggling like schoolgirls about the arrival of a fantasy gridiron rip-off as an up to date computer game."

For the newbies, Blood Bowl is a table-top miniatures based board game from Games Workshop, basing teams around Warhammer Fantasy races.

In the computer game the races at launch will be Humans, Orcs, Dwarfs, Skaven, Lizardmen, Goblins, Wood Elves and Chaos. The board game features many more races, such as more Elves, Dwarfs, Halflings, Ogres, and a wealth of Undead.

While the game is at its core about scoring touchdowns, the game's fun is in doing your utmost to hurt the opposition in violent, and amusing, ways. A team is much more than its on-field players, with fans, cheerleaders, apothecaries, spells, and dirty tricks all playing a role in shifting the balance of power in a match.

And just as any Warhammer fan loves to build their army, Blood Bowl brought the fast-paced feel of a sports game together with every miniatures fan's love of building the best possible team they can make based around races that suited their personal preference. In a sense, there is also a roleplaying aspect to Blood Bowl as players gain experience and develop skills over the course of seasons and tournaments.

Compared with playing Warhammer, Blood Bowl offers a broader set of hooks for different kinds of players. Miniatures fiends can dive into painting up teams just like they can their armies, stat lovers can tweak and refine their team skill set to create the perfect Elven passing team or a Dwarfish brick wall defensive unit, and more casual players can just have a team that hits the field for an hour, causes some mayhem, scores some TDs, and heads on their merry way.

With player customisation options, deep team management, and easy play on offer within this new game, there is potential to still deliver all the most loved features in videogame form, while letting us play online far more regularly than we could ever get together with other Blood Bowl lovers to play the table-top version. And THAT is what we're so damn excited about.