Blood Bowl: Warhammer for part-timers

The year was 2003, Evanescence were bringing me back to life, my skin greasier than a stripper pole and my virginity was safer than Rolf Harris’ darkest secret. Unsurprisingly perhaps I spent every waking moment painting the guns of tiny plastic men...and elves...and weird skeletal alien creatures with balls protruding from their heads. Helloo ladies ;)

Warhammer was the forbidden fruit of many of my adolescent peers, kryptonite to potential girlfriends and an expensive, obsessive stop gap between Thomas the Tank engine and puberty. Many of us moved on of course, we buried our Space Marines in a tin box and saluted as our raging hormones drove us to pick up a guitar, skateboard, or football; depending on which tribe you had been inducted into.

However, I think there was sense for some, not least myself, that we never truly let go. Every time I watched starship troopers at half mast or caught a whiff of acrylic paint at a building site, I was transported back to my shed furiously shaking dice surrounded the mingling odours of several boys who hadn’t yet discovered showering. But that primal urge to paint and play was left dormant for those brave enough to admit it.

Then, in 2016 just when the final embers of my modelling dreams were fading, Blood Bowl’s second coming was announced with such platitudes it made Jesus’ return seem like a Fast & Furious sequel. For those who aren’t familiar Blood Bowl is essentially a turn based, tabletop mix of American Football, Rugby and the Warhammer swords & spells universe. Sure you can pass the ball, dance and weave your way to a touchdown, or you can field a team of 8ft orcs and kick the living hell out of a team of flimsy elves until they’re just a puddle of teeth and blood.

Blood Bowl ran parallel to Games Workshop’s Warhammer 40k and Fantasy Battle throughout the 80’s and 90’s but model production was discontinued and the game went underground and largely disappeared. As a teenager in the naughties I only ever heard whispers of the game and the models looked childish and poorly designed, which I thought with no hint of irony at the time.

So when my friend who is a few years older than me (we call him old father time) told me of Blood Bowl’s comeback, I sensed a way to appease the dormant, virginial model enthusiast and maintain my street cred simultaneously. It had been 12 long years since I picked up a paintbrush in anger and do you know what it felt like when I did? It felt like coming home.

At release there were only two teams available to purchase, the Reikland Rievers (humans) and the Skavenblight Scramblers (mutant rat things). I of course opted for the Skavenblight Scramblers; smaller and weaker than their human counterparts, but much faster and cheatier, and in a game where cheating is worked wonderfully into the rules this wouldn’t be a problem.

Our first few games consisted of figuring out the rules with two half painted teams, but as we grew in confidence and artistic prowess so too did our enjoyment. Shortly after the game’s release two more teams were released; an ork team and a dwarf team. Like the tired old trope of getting the band back together we wrangled two other suspiciously keen friends into joining us and started a weekend league whilst miraculously maintaining our relationships, social and work lives.

My team in production - The Yamaguchi Plague, named after the Japanese prefecture I lived in for a few years. Homemade flag in the background not included in the box, the inner geek took over a bit.

The game is literally hours of fun, and the rules are consciously designed for Warhammer part timers, they can be learnt much more quickly than their cumbersome and overly complicated cousins in 40k and Age of Sigmar world, and have speed and simplicity in mind. They also incorporate a healthy amount of RPG and character development into the game, the more your player scores, kills, passes, cheats etc the more points they accumulate for assignment into corresponding levels, and if they die, they die. By the fourth league game I had a gutter runner mutant rat who had grown a second tail for tripping and could leap over opponents to avoid their crushing orky blows. There is such a freedom of customisation in tabletop gaming not afforded by video games; we named teams after childhood hangouts, players after people we knew, so everything became a hilarious in joke with layers added after every game. It goes without saying that the customisation afforded by building and painting your own team gives it a personal feel and I really became attached to my tiny mutated rats after a few weeks. Old father time even went to so far as to build his own dugout out of leftover plastic and bits of spare wood.

A word of caution is probably necessary as well; everything Games Workshop related still carries a eyebrow raising price tag, same as it ever was. Just buying the brushes, paints, etc cost a small fortune before you’ve even bought the models. I would seriously recommend looking at buying non Games Workshop branded kit for assembling and making the models. It’s still not an investment for a casual hobbyist or part time geek, but it certainly takes some of the stigma and away, and requires much less involvement and understanding to play than the company’s other franchises.

So if you’re looking for something social to do and your love for miniatures never really died, this would be perfect for you. It has some potential to even bring you back to the old ways ok 40k and Age of Sigmar, but that’s a rabbit hole best left to the reader’s discretion.

I’ve really enjoyed playing this with my friends though and would happily give it 9 mutated rat heads out of 10.