More Old School

Well last night I revisited another "Golden Oldie" game Blood Bowl and once again Mike G was there to provided the game. Blood bowl is a fantasy football game by Games Workshop which pits teams of elves, orcs, humans and every other race from the Warhammer world against each other on the playing pitch.

Well last night saw the Skaven playing against Mikes human team. Sorry no pictures of this "pre-seaon" game, both teams were wearing their pratice uniforms (aka only primed!). Now we were using version 5 of the Living rulebook rules (which can be downloaded for free from Specialist games website http://www.specialist-games.com/ ). I have to say that this set of the rules are by far the best they have done for the game.

Let me take you back in time so I can explain why I think the rules are better now. About 13 years ago a buddy & I were at Brookhurst Hobbies in CA, that's were we decided to pick up this fun looking game called Blood Bowl. Well I remember it was Christmas time and when I got home I busted out the game. Now we had version 2 which included two teams the Orcs & Humans in really bad poses and the game came with the foam board called Astrogranite. We set about getting the two teams assembled and started to play a few games. We had so much fun that my wife Shannon even wanted to play. We also got our friend Don G to jump in and play. We soon had everyone going out & buying the game (About 8 box sets were purchased in the next week) as well as everyone getting their own teams (the old teams in the plastic boxes). Jeff & I soon went out and purchased the hard bound books for the game (Blood Bowl Companion & Star Players book) and were soon organizing a league. We even created a draft night so everyone could draft Star Players for their teams. I remember the Draft night because Jeff went hog wild & had cards & ranking order for all the Star players & people were bidding for each one.

After the draft the following week we started playing our first games with a 16 game schedule to follow. We had 8 people in the league & everyone was madly painting figures for the games. A few of us even decorated our playing boards in colors & designed end zone markers with our team names on them. But unfortunately after about the 4th week people started to flak out in wanting to play. And eventually we were down to only 4 of us playing on all the time (Myself, Jeff, Don and my Brother John). In fact a funny story about my wife was I ended up beating here High Elf team (the Rainbow Warriors which she painted) pretty bad & I got to spend the night sleeping on the couch!

We never did finish the league, partly because of the rules. It seemed that we were always finding issues with them. So Blood Bowl quietly was put away and left for dead. But now with the newest version, they have corrected allot of the rules issues we had back in the day. In fact, I wish our group didn't live in different states or I would get the league back together to play again.

So after last night I busted out the old figures and started to clean them up & get them ready for action once again. Who knows, I might even head down to Imperial Outpost on Wednesday night and try my hand in their ongoing Blood Bowl league, who knows?

The other game I tried last night was Legions of Steel by Global Games & figures by Rafm. The game is now out of print but Mike has a ton of the stuff. It's basicly a GW Space Hulk type of game were you battle it out against each other. It was a fun game and I wouldn't mind playing again. Thanks to Mike for busting that one out.

So there you have it, another night of Old school gaming. Now I'm looking at getting back into Warhammer Fantasy battle again, geesh what is the world comming to??

TK