http://bb-oftl.appspot.com/

Blood Bowl has lots of rules. I’ll gladly pay to not have to remember to roll all the right dice at each separate juncture of the game and all the exceptions with the different skills. How tabletop players manage to do all that and actually plan their moves in four minutes I’ll never understand.

With regards to Scott’s comment, thats all well and good, but for me personally, I now live a long way away from anyone I used to play with, I don’t know anyone who plays where I am now and am in no position to find them, I don’t have the space to set up the board (even though it is the most space conservative of all gw games), and I have neither the time nor the patience to paint and adapt my own models to make a team which isn’t just a bunch of soulless lead being pushed around a table.

I think the video game which all my previous friends now have and are able to play from their various locales together, in leagues or less seriously, a chat system that works well enough and skype for more personal contact, all packaged in a product which costs less than the original ttg did (especially when including personalised teams etc) pretty much takes a fantastic board game, which I enjoyed immensely, and makes it better and far more accessible in my adult life. While I understand your points, this is the natural and desirable evolution of a great game and I hope that cyanide get on with making it a more streamlined experience as the interface is, as Bill said, amateur, and the connection issues are both avoidable and inexcusable. Even with these problems however I am happily having 4-8 games a night against both friends and people I’ve never met, and am enjoying it with far more consistency than I ever did the ttg. I have played 3 single player games and most likely will never go back. There is no way a computer can simulate the unique and random plays a real person will make, and to expect it to, especially in as strange and eccentric a game as blood bowl is unrealistic imho. It is probably a good training exercise for new comers to the game in the basic rules, but thats it. This game is all about the unexpected, and that comes from the creative genius (or insanity, or recklessness, or inexperience) of a real human. To sum up, the only reason to port this to a computer is to allow more people to play it online.

As for the AI being so bad it teaches bad lessons, I have never played a game where the single player gave you any hope of performing well online against a real opponent from starcraft and dow2 to half life. They are 2 diametrically opposed states, one is purely to make the player have “fun”(the success of this is not guaranteed) the other is competitive in the most cut throat and blood thirsty of ways. I can’t remember the last rts I completed single player simply due to the fact that I am bored before the end. On the other hand I have never been so humbled as when logging into the online system of computerised RTS, and this happens with every new one I play. For me, this is the joy of the game, to start from scratch, be beaten to a pulp and publicly shamed, and then improve. The tangible feeling of achievement with every victory is why I play games.

Apologies for the length, lol. I evidently had something I wanted to say :)

Thankfully online works for the most part even if the league tools kinda suck; it’s a great, great game mechanically, but the design is rotten and amateurish.