A few weeks back I talked about Tutatis, a miniature, sport-game, which mimicked a cross between rugby and soccer quite nicely.
Well there is another recent addition to fantasy sport boardgaming which really deserves attention, and that is Dreadball from Mantic Games in Britain.
The game is one of those launched through the crowd-funding site Kickstarter. It had a modest goal of $50,000 when launched, and flirted with raising three-quarters of a million by the time the campaign had run its course.
Representing 2,500 funders, Dreadball had a thriving community before ever having a physical game available.
It helped that Mantic is a known quantity, with mini wargames such as Warpath already on the market, and the boardgame Project Pandora, reviewed here previously.
In the case of Dreadball, the game proved worth the high expectations.
Reminiscent of Bloodbowl, a game I cut my miniature gaming teeth on, Dreadball takes a fantasy football sim to a new level.
Where Bloodbowl had its much-loved aspects of fantasy football carnage, it did lack a level of fluidity, and was terribly skewed to specific skill-related dice rolls.
Dreadball, which is actually more a cross between hockey and basketball in terms of 'feel' than being purely a fantasy football sim, smoothes out some of the wrinkles of the earlier game.
With three scoring zones and no 're-set' after a score, play is fluid as in basketball.
That a player has five actions per turn, but six players on the board, each being allowed up to two actions a turn, there are a lot of options for a player. The variety of choices really gives players a feel of being a coach, and actually impacting a game with your action selection.
There of course remains lots of dice to roll, but here good rolls allow players to do some extraordinary things, and that means late game comebacks are possible.
Four teams, humans, dwarves, orcs and veer-myn (rat-men), were available with the initial release, four more just hitting the stores now as part of a 'Season 2' release.
The first teams are a mixed bag, with the veer-myn holding an edge in most games, and dwarves being a challenge to win with.
The components are good, and with league rules where team players gain skills with experience, replay-ability is huge.
Bloodbowl will always hold a special place for me as a gamer, but Dreadball is a game that offers more in the same genre, in large part fixing the shortfalls of a game designed years earlier.
Check Dreadball out at www.manticgames.com
If anyone is interested in this game, or other board games feel free to contact [email protected]
