Football meets fantasy in Dungeonbowl, a “tactical sports game” that takes the classic Blood Bowl experience into the bowels of dark, dingy dungeons.
Football meets fantasy in Dungeonbowl, a “tactical sports game” that takes the classic Blood Bowl experience into the bowels of dark, dingy dungeons.
Set in the famous Warhammer Fantasy universe, Blood Bowl was originally released in 1987 as a very literal “fantasy football” board game that combined the violence of football – the American kind – with the ultra-violence of the Warhammer setting, which features endless, epic warfare between humans, elves, dwarves, orcs, ogres and numerous other, mostly mythological races. Various videogame translations followed, most recently the Blood Bowl “Legendary Edition” released by Cynanide Studio in October 2010.
And now Dungeonbowl, which was originally created as a supplementary addition to the Blood Bowl tabletop game, is getting a Cyanide-powered videogame makeover of its own. Dungeonbowl moves the action underground and adds a few unique twists: Teams in the new game will mix players from three races rather than just one, and this time around it’s an all-or-nothing game from the opening bell, because whichever team scores first wins the whole game. But the ball is hidden inside one of six treasure chests – and the other five are booby-trapped with explosives.
Like all good dungeons, those in Dungeonbowl will feature teleporters that will make things even trickier, allowing players to instantly move from one spot to another but also putting them at risk of being teleported right out of the arena. And don’t expect memorization to get you very far, because the game will include its very own editor, which will allow players to put together their own subterranean playing fields and then share them online.
Dungeonbowl, like Blood Bowl, sounds and looks a little goofy but will hopefully prove to be a satisfying experience for strategy fans, and maybe even sports fans too. Look for it early this summer, exclusively on the PC.
