Blood Bowl

Ted Puffer's Rating: 3 stars. Maybe a bit more. We'll see how the season progresses

Blood Bowl? Blood Bowl! This started out as a board game for people who loved the idea of Warhammer, but didn't want to drop a few hundred bucks on miniatures. The good people at Games Workshop made a side game for their Warhammer line that centers on fantasy football. I'm not talking about the lame stats game that floats around the office every year. I'm talking about football played with trolls, minotaurs, Skaven, Elves and the occasional human.
This game confirms my belief that there are other people who find football excruciatingly boring and would see the addition of medieval brutality as a vast improvement. And boy is it ever!
The game came out on a foam board representing the playing field and a handful of miniatures for the team. Rules are simple, get the ball from one side of the field to the other.

Of course, there was a catch. Rules for interceptions and running were accomplished with clear plastic rulers showing pass/fail percentages along it's length. Special stats given to a single player had to be remembered and calculated differently. It's not to much to handle, but takes a bit of getting used to.
By translating the game to the computer, the computer again fulfills is full potential and greatest purpose. Namely, assisting in fantasy games.

Blood Bowl actually came out for the PC years ago. You don't remember? Probably because not many people remember buggy games with system requirements so steep to make them virtually unplayable. I tried. Lord knows, I tried. But my system would lock up, drop out of the game unexpectedly and make the usual complaints of an overtaxed processor.

This game is much better. The graphics are good. Much better than the previous incarnation of course, but that really doesn't count for much. When you're playing a game based on miniature moving across tiles, graphics don't figure into the equation. As long as you can tell which players are yours, they are suitable.
The game is stable, or as far as I can tell. The rules straightforward enough to be grasped and the AI makes a good challenge. The only complaint that is constantly being discussed in the gaming forums is the possibility that the game cheats. I'm not inclined to believe this. For one, the game will show all the rolls it makes, and they appear to be legit. The real problem is that the game doesn't rely on lucky rolls for the players.
When playing the board game, it was easy to create a strategy that required multiple lucky rolls to pull off. When you're physically rolling the dice, you're willing them to fall your way. Having the computer take the dice from your grasping mitts negates this feeling. A roll is a roll. And players planning on three or four '6's' in a roll will be disappointed. More than that, they'll be suddenly behind in touchdowns.
The winning strategy is to play cautiously. Move your free players first. Team up on each hit and advance slowly. Pass when necessary, but only when necessary.

And start with Orcs. Orcs are the beginning players best friend, which is probably the first time that sentence has ever been uttered.

Ted Puffer's teams so far:
Sandow's Slammers - Orc (with troll, not bad)
Ted's Mayhem Mob - Chaos (hammered by humans, grrr.)
Sandow's Slayers - Orc (up a division, WHOOT!)