Geek Syndicate Issue 8 | Page 108

Geek Syndicate
to play and dice are used
whenever a team member attempts to tackle an opponent
or to activate certain special
abilities. Many team members are required to take one
or more randomised Cheating Tokens every time they are
allocated to a matchup, the
value of which will alter their
effectiveness in that confrontation or (distressingly often)
result in them being sent off
altogether. There’s no way to
control the odds of this happening and players will frequently find themselves being crippled for a round after
carefully constructing an otherwise bulletproof play. While
this aspect of BBTM is far from
overwhelming in real terms,
the level of randomness is
high for a strategy-based card
game. If that upsets you, move
along swiftly.

As an example, certain types
of Star Player can be “drafted”
into your team, replacing one
of your existing cards instead
of simply adding to the stack
as a normal Star Player would
be. The benefits of opting to
do this, while eventually becoming clear in-game, are not
spelled out up-front and might
be counter-intuitive to new
players. In one case, a pretty
major rebalancing exercise –
involving the actual removal
of key components from the
main game and the creation
of a whole new play variant to
slot them back in – was passed
off as a simple “errata” in the
official FAQ document. That’s
the level of opacity we’re talking about here: “Sorry, guys.
We didn’t test these cards at
all and it turns out they break
something fundamental in
Image © Fantasy Flight Games

The rulebook, unfortunately,
represents a back slide toward
the old days of FFG’s output.
It’s not as bad as first-edition Descent or Arkham Horror,
where they pretty much just
loaded the system into a giant
Rules Cannon and dumped it

randomly onto the page, but
in comparison to games like XWing and Android: Netrunner,
it’s disorganised and clumsy.
Terminology is used loosely
(and occasionally never even
explained) and the underlying structure of the system is
sometimes opaque.

the game, but we’re not going
to explain how or why so you
needn’t bother your pretty little heads over it.”
Most FFG games (in fact, most
games in general) take some
measure of flack for balance
issues, but BBTM seems to be
reasonably well gauged across
all the team types. There isn’t
really any optimal team build
– and even if there were it’d be
hard to manufacture in play
due to the random selection
of new team members and
upgrades. In the final analysis, you’re basically trying
to wrestle a wilful, half-wild
game in your direction, rather
than plotting and executing
some perfect, crystalline master plan. It’s chaotic and rewarding, but not one for control freaks or Bond villains.
The thing is, nothing in the
(admittedly extensive) “however” section above can counterbalance the fact that BBTM
is just plain fun to play. It can
be frustrating to get a randomly selected player sent off
from your randomly selected
team because of a randomly
selected compulsory Cheating Token, but the navigation
of chaotic systems has always
been what Blood Bowl’s about.
Besides, it’ll all be over in half
an hour and you can play
again – which you’ll almost
certainly want to do.

Cy Dethan
Nic Wilkinson
Rating

G G G GG
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