Yesterday I beat Blood Bowl for the first time after about
three years of owning the game. I made it a game I ran alongside playing
through another game, as it is best enjoyed in small bursts and the fact that
it is saved on my hard drive meant that it was a quick dirty game I could just play
without having to be arsed to change the disc.
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| I can only assume this screenshot was taken from a version I don't have, because at no point did the game EVER look this good... |
So I tried covering Blood Bowl for a while during No Game
New Year, and I felt the need to make a note of who scored what etc so that the
narrative developed in the blog. There were two main problems with this
approach:
1.
It was a lot more busy-work than fun, and
2.
I chose Humans.
Not that there’s anything particularly wrong with Humans,
you understand, but I always missed playing the Chaos team.
So for this playthrough, I chose a Chaos team and named them
Children of the Gor. It was supposed to be Children of the Gore, but I ran out
of space before I did the ‘e’, and since Gor relates to Beastmen anyway it wasn’t
a huge loss. Their tactics, unsurprisingly, consist of the following two steps:
·
Find something,
·
Kill it.
Or to put it another way, rely on your blocks to utterly
destroy the opposing team. A very unsubtle way of playing Blood Bowl, but one
that worked very well after a while with the right combination of upgrades. It
tends to work best against Humans, Goblins, Dark Elves and Orcs, funnily
enough. Against Wood Elves and Skaven it would either work or it wouldn’t, and
it tended to depend on whether I could take enough of them out the game before
they scored too many points. With Dwarves the tactic itself didn’t work well,
but as long as you can keep them to one side of the pitch or the other you
could usually find a gap and take the win. Lizardmen were a pain in the bum
because they had the combination of small fast skinks and Saurus warriors who
were easily a match for most of my Beastmen.
For the first time, however, I actually planned how my team
was going to develop. In any game with a Dice mechanic, there is one rule you
should never forget: If you can get screwed by the dice, you will get screwed
by the dice. So I chose to take the upgrades that would present the dice with
as few opportunities as possible to screw me. Beastmen come with Horns by
default (+1 Strength with a Blitz action,) so wherever possible I gave them
Block, Tackle and if I rolled it Dodge. Once they had an outside possibility of
remaining upright for more than a couple of turns, I then proceeded to look at
Damage Output. Chaos can always take a Strength and Mutation upgrades so I
chose Mighty Blow and Claw if I could; that did a lot to take at least some of
the opposing players out of the game. The only exception to the plan was when
my level-up roll allowed me to take a stat increase; it is almost always worth
doing this.
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| Let's have some better commentary next time, eh? If I hear that quip about Margoth Doomgrin one more time... |
I took the team right the way through the 15 competitions in
the campaign mode, winning all but 2 of them and having them on top of the
rankings. It was a nice feeling to finally win the Blood Bowl after all this
time!
Now I know what you’re thinking: “But Blood Bowl’s crap! All
the reviews say so.” Well, yeah. But do you know what? I love it. It’s one of
the few games I own on the 360 that I’ve always been happy to come back to whenever
I feel like it. Yes, by the standards of most of the games of that period, it
is absolutely appalling – no variety in the gameplay, very little customisation
and the multiplayer is non-existent. But I’ve always enjoyed the game. I’ll
hang on to it because there are still some achievement points for me to get,
(none that relate to multiplayer for obvious reasons,) and it’ll be there ready
to come back to when I want to.
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