DungeonBowl

I got together with some of the members of the Blood Bowl league I am joining for a 4 player game of Dungeonbowl.  Now the rules for Blood Bowl are pretty well established having been mainly the same for 20 years now with just fine tuning on the skills and league stuff.  There are a couple variations on the rosters to make the teams more balanced that you can find but the core is the same.  Dungeonbowl is really not like that.  There was an official 2nd edition release for which I show my board from above.  There were then releases done through White Dwarf for 3rd edition which used heroquest type tiles or online but nothing truly official in a long time.



One of the core issues is the field, how you structure and fine tune the rules depends a lot on how the dungeon is set up.  Too narrow of passages and too many players clogs up the motion of the ball.  Add in variations on the teleporters and how far you can throw and you can find multiple versions online to try.  Our commissioner used a 4 player map and ruleset from Dungeonbowl.com but forgot that they had reduced roster sizes with only like 550K for players while we had our normal rosters (minus our team rerolls) but we also got inducements from one the teams being higher value which players either used for stars or apothecaries.  The map was like a square with a plus inside with all the chests and teleporters located closer to the center on the plus.

Our teams were all slow and bashy (Dwarf, Chaos Dwarf, Orc, and Khemri)  but also high armor and with plenty of reserve players it took a long time for anyone to threaten to score.  In the end we ran out of time with the Khemri having the best scoring chances just really needing to pick up the ball to score but it is Khemri so while his CRP+ Break Tackle Tomb Guardians where hard to hold in place, the top line 2 AG on his other players got him in the end.  He also managed to throw 2 interceptions with a Throw Ra.   My Chaos Dwarves never held onto a ball(tough to pick up or catch with all those AG 2 players and no rerolls) but were the first to find a bomb in a chest.  I mainly played spoiler by knifing a troll slayer in the back.  Due to most of the interesting things being in the center, there was a big scrum for a couple of turns before the balls (2 for a 4 player game) made it out wide.

Overall everyone had fun but we probably need to stick to the reduced max roster value and just force people to temporarily cut down their players to get to the right level.  Down at that level if you have teams with advancements you might have to make hard choices about who to bring into the game.  At 550K a starting Chaos Dwarf team would be like 1 Bull, 4 Dwarves, and 3 Hobbos.

We also seemed to have an issue with people bringing reserves on through their endzones as it allowed you to hold a guy in defense then jump him right where you needed him.  Also losing the ball half the time you went on a teleporter seemed a bit harsh.  I think that makes sense if you are trying to play for a single score but if you want multiple scores in a continuous flow I would probably change it to 1 in 6  and just bump up to 8 teleporters with 2 move used for the teleporters.  Might be fun to try out some two player games on different board types to see how it plays for different.  A wide open board will probably favor fast AG teams but the high chances of losing the ball on teleporters and limiting to quick and short passes might help with that.

I ended up leveling up a Chaos Dwarf and getting enough winnings to buy another to get to 6 so it was a fine game for me in terms of my new team in the league.  On another good note I also got to use my treasure chest set which everyone liked.