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."
Blood Bowl's Next Top Models
When we're talking Blood Bowl, we're talking the same rabid dedication to miniatures you'll find in any Games Workshop universe. So just like the rules, Cyanide knew they had to pay close attention to how they executed on the player models in game. At launch the game will feature Humans, Dwarfs, Orcs, Wood Elves, Goblins, Lizardmen, Skaven, and Chaos races. Each with loyal fans expecting their race of choice to look just so. The big question for Cyanide was whether to target faithful interpretations of known game miniatures, or to add some of their own flair to the graphic designs for the game.
"Our first approach was indeed to take the miniatures and simply try to reproduce them," says Villepreux. "But it soon became clear, for us and Games Workshop, that it was not the way to go, and that with new support for Blood Bowl should come a new vision of the universe. So we worked a lot with Games Workshop to give this 'new look' to the characters, but keep the spirit intact. We had to find a good compromise between the old miniatures style and the more recent Warhammer miniatures style."
For those eager to customise their own teams, Blood Bowl doesn't have a team painting tool along the lines of what you can find in Dawn of War. But there are points of customisation included in the game covering colours, logos, equipment, and even skin and body variants to work with. Villepreux suggests that while they wouldn't consider what is available a 'tool', there is enough on offer that beta testers were modding characters and realising some great modified teams.
Blood Bowl as management sim?
Serious fans aren't going to be into this title for a quick match here and there, and to that end Cyanide offers an interesting, tangential pedigree that suits dynastic league and tournament modes where perfect coaching can be just as important as perfect play. While Chaos League showed its interest in the genre, the studio spends most of its time on niche sports management titles, including Pro Cycling Manager, Horse Racing Manager, and Pro Rugby Manager.
"We have a long tradition of management game making at Cyanide," says Villepreux. "And Blood Bowl did not avoid that treatment. You can build your own roster in several game modes."
When you start playing you can build a team from scratch, starting with a bunch of rookies who level up across matches and tournaments, gaining experience and skills as they become veteran and potentially even star players. But this is Blood Bowl, so managing your roster to ensure you always have new stars on the rise is important - your best player could be targeted and killed at any time, and dead is dead in this game.
In Competition mode you have championship and cup modes that run across multiple seasons, where you can also create your own custom competitions. Campaign mode offers different tournaments in a professional circuit, starting from small tournaments and then leading up to the greatest tournament of all, Blood Bowl, as you take your own team onto the field against the game's most famous teams, like the Reikland Reavers.
Online leagues can be played as private leagues played amongst friends or you can join the public leagues where you compete for standing on a world rankings table. Plus there are LAN and hot-seat modes so you can run entire leagues with a single game and a bunch of friends gathering at the one machine.
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.
