Kiwi Farms

Blood Bowl is a discontinued Specialist Game by Games Workshop that bills itself as a Fantasy Football tabletop. Of course, not in the traditional way people mean Fantasy Football. Instead, as the story goes, in the middle of a battle in the Warhammer Fantasy Universe the two armies unearth a temple to a lesser diety... of football. And after one thing lead to another Blood Bowl became both the most popular sport in the world, as well as the preferred method to settle conflicts.



The game itself is less like American Football and more akin to Rugby mixed with a Boxing match. Each side gets 11 players from their race, and while ostensibly the goal of the game is to score the most points by bringing the ball into the opponents endzone, oftentimes it degenerates into simply trying to kill the other team's players in order to force an opening. Getting knocked out cold is fairly common in play, injuries and death are less so, but still happen frequently enough. Since players are persistant for a team, losing your star player can hurt you in the long run, unless you want to reroll your team.

Although the actuall miniatures are out of production now, the game itself lives on in two particular varieties. The first one is in the computer game made by Cyanide, appropriately titled Blood Bowl.

This version has several editions out, only the latest of two of which are still compatible with the multiplayer servers, and the sequel with better graphics, and supposedly fewer bugs, is due out sometime next year. The "Legendary Edition" which includes all the races except Chaos Dwarves, Daemons of Khorne, and the Lizardmen can be had on Steam for $20 compared to the latest edition which is $30, although the latest is on sale untill the 24th for $12, so its a better buy at the moment.

Edit: These versions are now outdated, and the matchmaking MP community for them is completely dead. Instead see the sequel, with a much improved UI and matchmaking system. The Mixed reviews are mostly from people understandably upset at the slow pace of team releases and the fact they had to essentially rebuy the game, and from people who can't understand dice, but for a new player those are issues don't matter.

The other version out there is free and java based with simple 2d graphics, called FUMBBL. FUMBBL has been around for years now, and includes of course all of the races and the latest community driven rulesets. However it's UI is a bit more unweildly than the Cyanide one, and the Java client can be a little bit of a bitch to work with. It does seem to have less glitches though, (Sequel of the above has far less glitches than both) and in a tabletop game, this can be fairly important.

So, anyone else here a Blood Bowl player?