There’s something a little bit special about a Games Workshop ‘Big Box’ game turning up in time for Christmas. It’s the mix of unpainted models, new rules and eye-catching design and art that has you exploring the box in seconds, sorting through the various bits and making plans to get the game played. The promise of hours of fun wrapped up in the smells of ink, paper and plastic
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Dungeon Bowl originally came out in 1989, and was a dungeon crawl variant of American Football/Gridiron parody, Blood Bowl. It’s a complete game, separate but compatible. With the recent relaunch of Bloodbowl, we were delighted to see that it’s chunkier, stranger cousin has finally been re-imagined.
The lovely team at Games Workshop sent us a copy to review, and we dove straight into the box.
It’s a big box – you get 26 models in two separate colours; College of Fire vs College of Shadow. One of the ways Dungeon Bowl is different from it’s bloody cousin is that the teams are a mix of races, and the core game pits a band of Ogres, Dwarves, goblin-like Gnoblars against Skaven and Elves. The models are exactly the sort of high quality thing we’ve come to expect from GW but you do have to assemble (and maybe paint) them yourself.
The ogres are a lot of fun, the skaven are amazing (their tails are equipped to play ball games) and the dwarven troll-slayer looks like it’s stepped out of a fantasy novel. The poses are pretty fixed and they’re easy to click together. (As always though, use glue).
We also get plenty of dungeon accessories; you can never have too many doors and treasure chests.
The board is a dungeon, and yes, this is at the scale that you can use these pieces with other dungeon tiles you may own. Dungeon creation is pretty straight forward and competitive, meaning that strategy is a constant throughout the game. The rooms have special rules (traps, bonuses to combat, etc).
Rules wise, this is essentially the same as Blood Bowl, they’ve streamlined it a bit, but they are now ‘dungeon crawling’ rules added in so the net result is a game as involved, just different. So you are always looking for low risk moves first, before steadily taking on bigger challenges. Failure means your turn ends.
It’s easy to assume that a weird mish-mash of a fantasy combat skirmish game, dungeon crawl and sports emulator shouldn’t work. It really, really does. It’s also a game that allows for lots of lee-way and probably a game you’ll find yourself adding to the more you play. We really liked the campaign rules and are currently planning our next team.
Dungeon Bowl is a great gift for the geek in your life who likes sports and fantasy, and is a good bit of two player fun for the family.
