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Blood Bowl

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Blood Bowl is a tabletop board game created by Jervis Johnson for the British games company Games Workshop as a parody of American Football. The game was first released in 1986 and has been re-released in new editions since. Blood Bowl is set in a fantasy universe similar to, but not the same as, Warhammer Fantasy, populated by traditional fantasy elements such as human warriors, goblins, dwarfs, elves, orcs and trolls. This genre of game is often called Fantasy Football despite having only a passing resemblance to American Football.

Contents

Game basics

Blood Bowl is a turn-based game of "fantasy football" for two active participants that uses typically 28-mm models to represent the players on the pitch. The aim of the game is to score touchdowns by having a player cross an end zone line with the ball. The team with the most touchdowns at the end of the set of turns is the winner. A board containing a grid of squares represents the field and game-play proceeds using dice, cards, and counters.

The "Blood" in Blood Bowl is represented by the violent actions available to players. The game play based on a hybrid of American Football, Rugby, and ultra-violent fictional sports such as Rollerball. Players may attempt to injure/maim the opposition in order to make scoring easier by reducing the number of enemy players in the way.

The players themselves are drawn from the ranks of fantasy races and have characteristics to reflect the abilities of those races. Elves tend to be fast and good at scoring, while Dwarfs and Orcs are more suited to a grinding, physical style of play. Players are also divided up into positions, typically noted by their most suited role on the field including Throwers, Catchers, Linemen and so on.

In league play, the players may gain additional skills and abilities based on the accumulation of experience points and also can pick up injuries or even die.

Strictly speaking, Blood Bowl is not a tabletop wargame, though it is probably closer to other Games Workshop inventions such as Warhammer 40,000 than it is to traditional board games such as Monopoly.

Fluff

The Blood Bowl universe is fleshed out with its own background or "fluff". The fluff functions as a means to develop the spirit of the game and is peppered with puns, profiles, and unusual events that attempt to establish that anything can happen in a game of Blood Bowl. The background itself is an explanation of how Blood Bowl came to be and begins to draw out the tone. A Blood Bowl deity is described, called Nuffle and is a pun on NFL. Additional fluff exists to describe the demeanour and character of the Blood Bowl players with frequent reference to rule breaking and over-the-top violence in a light-hearted manner often reminiscent of Acme Corporation.

Some of the over-the-top nature of the fluff is included in the game mechanics, notably the use of stylised secret weapons such as chainsaws and Dwarf death rollers as well as in-game effects in some editions.

History

The first edition of Blood Bowl was released in 1987 and was a simple game that used many of the elements of Games Workshop's tabletop games such as a "wounds" allowances that permitted players to remain active until it reached zero, and psychology including fear and hatred. The representations of players contained in the first edition boxed set were small pieces of cardboard illustrated with the picture of the player it indicated.

A second edition was released in 1988 that began to move Blood Bowl away from the battlefield mechanics of other Games Workshop systems and towards the more brutal sports oriented aspects. The game was played on a polystyrene board to represent the pitch and the players contained in the boxed set itself were plastic 28-mm miniatures. To support the game, Citadel Miniatures produced a set of metal miniatures to represent players from different races and additional support was provided by Games Workshop in the form of expansion packs, Star Players and the Blood Bowl Companion. These expansions added to the basic rules to create a varied and sometimes lengthy game that could easily last several hours.

Blood Bowl suffered something of a hiatus between the second and third edition but the new version was released in 1994 and radically changed the game play away from the complex and lengthy second edition to a simpler and more dramatic third edition. Two key changes were the introduction of the turnover rule which meant that in many cases a failed action ended a players turn, and the introduction of a set number of turns. These two changes increased the pace of the game and allowed it to be played within a couple of hours.

In 1995, Blood Bowl third edition won the Origins Award for Best Miniatures Rules of 1994.

There have been many changes since the third edition was released, many driven by the large and vociferous player base. The current version of the rules is known as the Living Rulebook and represents the result of continued refinements to the third edition ruleset. The Living Rulebook is the basis by which most Blood Bowl is played but variants exist, either as a result of house rules devised by individual people or groups, or because of the transition into online e-mail based games.

In 2004 work was started on the next version of the game, tentatively earmarked to be released in 2007, Blood Bowl's 20th Anniversary.

Leagues and tournaments

League play is the foundation upon which Blood Bowl games are based. A large number of variants exist to support league activity but the underlying effect is to create a campaign in which teams battle against each other over a period of time, developing new abilities and picking up injuries or worse before being crowned the league champion.

Tournaments are a relatively new phenomenon and are one-off events whereby large numbers of Blood Bowl players gather to play against each other and at the end of the session become the tournament winner. This form of play does not act like a campaign.

See also

External links

Resources

Online Blood Bowl Leagues

 

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