Every drive forced me to decide how many of my limited roster of players to use beating the snot out of the opposing side, how many to use trying to obtain or keep the ball, and how I was going to pull ahead or stay ahead over the course of 16 turns. The breakneck pace of making decisions under the gun of a turn timer got my blood pumping and my tactical senses tingling.]Still, when the dice gods seem kind (or, at least, impartial), the breakneck pace of making decisions under the gun of a turn timer got my blood pumping and my tactical senses tingling. Like Warhammer 40K: Space Hulk before it, Blood Bowl 2 suffers from its slavish devotion to replicating the rules of a physical product without considering the differences in media.

This is true in the tabletop game a well, but it gets on my nerves more in a video game when my opponent is a cold, unfeeling AI and not a drinking buddy who can laugh at my misfortune with me. When any play you make has at least a one in six chance of failure (before considering bonus dice and rerolls that are available situationally), certain matches can feel decided more on the whims of chance than actual player skill. On the other hand, the decision to base the chances of success on real dice is a limitation that leads to never feeling confident in any action. Said dice are represented by actual D6s on the screen, which lend a cool tactile feel to the random number generation and remove some of the arbitrary feel of events. An often gory, and always satisfying slow-motion animation could end with the opposing player knocked down, knocked out, injured, or even dead, depending on how the virtual dice fall. In addition to running and passing, players can take a “block” action, which is really more of an attack. And when I say brutal and deadly, I mean that literally. What they might not expect is that the teams might be made up of brutal orcs, or agile, deadly dark elves, among other fantasy races. An often gory, and always satisfying slow-motion animation could end with the opposing player dead.The concept of Blood Bowl is straightforward and easy to understand for anyone who’s watched an NFL game: the 11 players on one side try to prevent the opposing 11 from passing or running a ball into their end zone.

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