14 DAY TRIAL // One of the most over the top concepts created by Games Workshop, the guys that brought the gaming community such gems as the Warhammer fantasy setting and the well used Warhammer 40,000 universe, was Blood Bowl, a game that blended American Football, rugby and wrestling, complete with dismemberment, with a cast of players made up of dwarves, orcs, elves and other fantasy creatures.
After one intellectual property suit between Cyanide and Games Workshop, over the Chaos league game that Cyanide had created, the company was offered the chance to develop a Blood Bowl game and they took it. It is now in advanced development and it seems that it manages to capture the essence of the table top games without breaking a sweat or a goblin.
It will offer two game modes, one that is more tabletop like, with visible grid lines and dice which are rolled in turns by the players, and one streamlined real time game, which is also based on the tabletop rules, but with most of the mechanics hidden from view.
The players will get all the options they have in the table top game. Each in a blood bowl team can perform a wide arrange of moves and attacks and the game is as much about taking out players from the other team as it is about scoring points against the other team. Add-ons like better secondary coaches, Chaos cheerleaders or team apothecaries can mean the difference between defeat and victory. Big Orcs can throw smaller Goblins across the field for quick points. There are even top billed players that need to be tempted with big piles of cash to come into play for a single match to tilt the balance in your favor. Regular players will get experience from every game, which can be used to make them better. And they also tend to die a lot on the playing field, once a much bigger opponent manages to get in a particularly nasty tackle.
The game is such a weird take on the fantasy football genre that it's sure to draw interested looks when it launches, later in 2008, for the PC and the Xbox 360. PlayStation Portable and Nintendo DS versions are also in the pipeline.