Fantasy Football that I sort of cared about...Blood Bowl

The Basics: Old-School Fantasy themed Football boardgame brought to PC

Previous Time Spent: 10 minutes

Expectation of learning Curve: high 

Why I bought this: I'm a farily big Games Workshop nerd, having painted and collected Warhammer stuff in High School and a little bit in College, and the wackiness of this idea met a great steam sale, leading to an unwise purchase. 

First Impressions: The first things that jumped out at me were the irritating voices of the announcers and the fairly ugly UI design.

My 3 hours: I played through the tutorial, and a number of games as Dwarves, Orcs, Skaven, Chaos Dwarves and Demons of Nurgle, one of the Chaos Gods presented in game. I was expecting something along the lines of fantasy Madden, and was initially very frustrated with the difficulty of the game and the presentation. This is not a game that holds your hands outside of the brief tutorial, and based on my notes, I pretty consistently believed myself to be terrible at it. Over time though, I came to appreciate how much it felt like a boardgame, and the way that a more dedicated person could invest a lot of time in learning the systems and developing a team.

This game is great when it comes to variety and character. Each one of the races that I tried felt very different in play, and led to a lot of fun on the field. My favorite (which was not a surprise to me at all due to my history with the tabletop game) were the Skaven, the weirdo coward rat-men from Warhammer Fantasy. They handled very differently than the other races, and seemed to have an interesting mix of speed and mean-spirited play that suited me well. I also enjoyed the variety of cool arenas.

I found some elements frustrating, including the aforementioned announcers, and the bizarre level of challenge for activities that I would expect to be a near 100% chance of success. The announcers quickly became fairly repetitive, and I just never found them as funny or helpful as I think they were intended to be. Additionally, the chance of completing some tasks seemed hilariously low. For instance, picking up the football from the ground would frequently fail, leading me to wonder if my players were athletes or drunken toddlers in the bodies of adults. Nonetheless, I think a lot of my frustrations with the game would be resolved with taking more time to learn the systems involved.  

My highlight: Playing as the Skaven and playing a game to a tie, rather than a crushing defeat. After a high level of difficulty is established, a tie feels pretty good. 

My verdict: Blood Bowl is a fun and bizarre take on a classic board-game, but I think if it's skewing so close to the way the board game is played, I'd rather just take it to the table-top with friends. I also have to give it credit for making me halfway care about football for a few hours. 

Next post will come in roughly 2 weeks with the whimsy of Indie Darling Braid.