The description “American football but with Orcs” is a quite literal one: you have a 13 by 24 square pitch divided into two halves, with two teams of eleven players facing off across the line of scrimmage along the centre of the pitch. Have Cyanide learned from the first game’s shortcomings?įirst, a not-so-quick rundown of Blood Bowl itself. Their first Blood Bowl game didn’t really manage it, but this is a review of Blood Bowl 2, released in 2016 but which I picked up for cheap a few weeks back to play in a league with some friends.
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So when judged on a metric of “playing Blood Bowl against your friends on a computer machine”, the Cyanide Blood Bowl needs to offer something over and above just adapting the ruleset to justify why I’d pay some money for that instead of going with the free equivalent.
FUMBLL is much more basic than Cyanide’s effort in terms of UI and graphics (although the pixel art used for the players is not unattractive) but it has been around for nearly twenty years and is fully feature complete, including every single team available in the board game. There’s a reason I keep referring to it as “the Cyanide Blood Bowl”, though, and that’s because when it comes to the business of playing other people using a 1:1 adaption of the Blood Bowl rules it’s actually got some competition in the form of the far older FUMBLL client. Blood Bowl is always going to be at its best when played against another human being, of course, and for a time the Cyanide Blood Bowl had a few bustling online leagues going based out of places like the RPS forum community, and so this wasn’t quite the kneecapper it probably should have been. Its biggest problem, though, was that its AI was basically non-functional and couldn’t even put up slight resistance to a moderately skilled human player. I have a lot of time for the Cyanide Blood Bowl despite there being an awful lot wrong with it – the baffling real-time mode, the limited league options and the ridiculous network errors being just the stuff I can remember off the top of my head eleven years later. It already does.Īs long as you have somebody else to play it with, anyway. You don’t need to go tinkering with the gameplay to make it work.
The other is that people liked the old Specialist Games for a reason, and Blood Bowl is the best of the lot. One is that while it was far from perfect Cyanide had managed to balance automating away most of the cruft that slows down a physical game of Blood Bowl while still preserving the board game feeling with stuff like highly visible digital dice rolls. This proved to be an unusually successful approach, for two very good reasons that I’m surprised the later GW adaptations (including some of Cyanide’s own) didn’t pick up on.
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Unlike the many games that followed it Blood Bowl didn’t piss about trying to figure out how to convert the board game into something more appropriate for a videogame, and instead just ported the board game rules across on a 1:1 basis. Years before the floodgates opened, however, there was Cyanide’s 2009 adaptation of the classic American-Football-but-with-Orcs punch ‘em up Blood Bowl, which was a game that got a headstart on everyone else through a surprising application of copyright infringement 1. These days you can’t throw a rock without hitting a digital version of one of their Specialist Games from the ‘90s – Space Hulk, Mordheim, Adeptus Titanicus, Man O’ War, Battlefleet Gothic and so on - and with the notable exception of Battlefleet Gothic all of them have ranged in quality from “sub-par” to “indescribably awful”. We also present BotBowl I, the first AI competition that will use FFAI along withbaseline agents and preliminary reinforcement learning results.In this age of Steam shovelware and low-effort mobile ports it’s difficult to remember a time when we weren’t awash in terrible adaptations of various Games Workshop properties. We present the Fantasy Football AI (FFAI)framework that implements the core rules of Blood Bowl andincludes a forward model, several OpenAI Gym environments forreinforcement learning, competition functionalities, and a webapplication that allows for human play. Additionally,scoring points in the game is rare and difficult, which makes ithard to design heuristics for search algorithms or apply rein-forcement learning. At first sight, the gameought to be approachable by numerous game-playing algorithms.However, as all pieces on the board belonging to a player can bemoved several times each turn, theturn-wisebranching factorbecomes overwhelming for traditional algorithms. Blood Bowlis a fully-observable, stochastic, turn-based, modern-style boardgame with a grid-based game board.
Blood Bowl: A New Board Game Challengeand Competition for AIĪbstract-We propose the popular board game Blood Bowlas a new challenge for Artificial Intelligence (AI).
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