{"id":1601,"date":"2009-07-02T13:28:28","date_gmt":"2009-07-02T18:28:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/?p=1601"},"modified":"2009-07-02T19:11:18","modified_gmt":"2009-07-03T00:11:18","slug":"blood-bowl-early-moments","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/2009\/07\/02\/blood-bowl-early-moments\/","title":{"rendered":"Blood Bowl Early Moments"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/nutweasel.blogspot.com\/2009\/06\/blood-bowl-achilles-heel.html\">Bill Abner has noticed a lot of AI blunders in Cyanide&#8217;s <em>Blood Bowl<\/em><\/a> which shows just how much more he knows about the game than I do. My solo campaign Elf team is getting hammered, mostly because I&#8217;m still getting used to how differently all of the teams play.<\/p>\n<p>Though it looks like a sports game, anyone familiar with <em>Blood Bowl<\/em> will tell you that that&#8217;s only part of the story. Yes, the team management stuff is pretty similar to the sort of thing you&#8217;ll find in many sports management games, but the matches themselves are wargames. You have to control the field in enough areas to allow you to move the ball forward to the goal. This means setting up zones of control, getting die rolls in your favor and eliminating your opponent&#8217;s most powerful weapons.<\/p>\n<p>Even if the AI is a little clueless, I&#8217;m having a great time so far. The color commentary is already repetitive and annoying. The transparency of the die rolls helps you understand the game pretty quickly. Tackle\/block zones are clearly marked on screen. The explanations and cues for when you need to make a decision are well written. In fact, <em>Blood Bowl<\/em> is the very model of a clear board game design. <\/p>\n<p>It should have a better tutorial and the manual is pretty brief. Like all board games, it&#8217;s best explained by somebody looking over your shoulder, but Cyanide has done a good job of explaining things otherwise. It&#8217;s not underdocumented, but it does err on the side of skimpy outside of the rollover and in game text.<\/p>\n<p>More to say on an upcoming podcast and when our <em>Blood Bowl<\/em> league starts play.<\/p>\n<p>If you want to see extended video of <em>Blood Bowl<\/em> in action, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.framerated.com\/gameplay.aspx?vid=187\">check out these videos at Frame Rated<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Bill Abner has noticed a lot of AI blunders in Cyanide&#8217;s Blood Bowl which shows just how much more he knows about the game than I do. My solo campaign Elf team is getting hammered, mostly because I&#8217;m still getting used to how differently all of the teams play. Though it looks like a sports [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[7,6],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5GFeQ-pP","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1601"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1601"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1601\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1603,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1601\/revisions\/1603"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1601"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1601"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1601"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}