There’s a decent case to be made that 40 years on from blitzing its way into the British gaming public’s consciousness that, if you’re looking for it, the beating spiritual heart of Warhammer is to be found in Blood Bowl, Games Workshop’s somewhat anarchic game of Fantasy Football. Whilst the company’s wargames still like to inject the occasional bit of black humour into the midst of all the horror, both their fantasy and sci-fi games are increasingly played straight. Blood Bowl on the other hand still revels in both gratuitous slapstick and ultra-violence, a custard pie to the face, swiftly followed by a chainsaw.

This was, and happily still is, the home of goblins on pogo sticks, dwarves with steamrollers and probably the only place you’ll see a snotling pump-wagon ever again. It's a game where instead of snapping up the latest meta-breaking army on day one, players will often purposefully chose to play the clearly tiered, worse teams just for the fun of it. This is, of course, all rather wonderful.

I say 'somewhat anarchic' up there though, as for all its intentional mayhem Blood Bowl does still come with a sizeable rulebook. Just as it has retained its anarchic spirit it’s still also very much the vestigial remains of an 80s wargame and can, for all the tweaks it has received down the years and editions, be a a bit of a fussy thing.

Unfortunately this tendency is only exacerbated in Dungeon Bowl, a spin-off game featuring smaller teams that, as you've probably guessed, is played in a dungeon. The idea here is that the teams are representatives of various schools of magic, itself a nice take on the baffling American college football system. In a notable difference from the main game Dungeon Bowl teams have access to a much wider selection of players culled from multiple different species.

If you happen to have several Blood Bowl teams already then this can be a great way to mix and match models and play with some unusual combinations. If you don’t though you’re a bit stumped and at their fairly keen prices you’re unlikely to buy two, or even three, sets just to assemble one bespoke Dungeon Bowl team.

Still what Warhammer enjoyer has never ended up buying more models than they know what to do with and making that process a little easier the Death Match supplement comes with two ready-made crews. The College of Life's mix of halflings and elves and a motley assortment of ghosts, ghouls, skeletons, mummies and zombies who. unsurprisingly, represent the College of Death.

It goes, almost, without saying that the models are wonderful, Games Workshop's side-games like Blood Bowl and Necromunda are home to some of their most characterful models and the halflings in particular are a joyfully portly, if inevitably doomed, bunch who seem to have inadvertently wandered into the action on the way to an all-you-can-eat buffet.

But does the game itself do these models justice? Sadly, only some of the time. What feels like it should be an even scrappier, more mayhem packed version of Blood Bowl often becomes bogged down in tedious minutia. This is especially the case when over the half the dungeon’s rooms have their own unique rules that slows play to a crawl as time and time again you must thumb your way back and forwards through the nice looking but frustratingly index free rulebook.

A case in point, during one of our first games a lumbering zombie lineman was confronted with a spiked pit he needed to navigate. One bad roll later and what should have been an amusing moment turned into a procedural cascade that required us to check around six different, wholly discrete, rules one after the other. After what felt like 10 minutes of head scratching and cross referencing we were prepared to hurl both rulebook and game into a spiked pit of its own.

But then, just as you're about to abandon all hope, the magic happens. Or rather absolute comic disaster does. You see in Dungeon Bowl they’ve done away with anything as mundane as a kick-off, low ceilings making that a non-starter. Instead the ball is hidden inside one of 6 treasure chest scattered around the map, the other five instead rigged to explode upon opening, often with bloody, if morbidly hilarious, consequences.

The game that salvaged Dungeon Bowl’s reputation I this house began with around five halflings blown limb from limb just trying to find the ball. By the time my opponent’s Ghoul Runner had finally located the accursed pigskin, well over half of both teams were dead or in various pieces of disrepair. In other games this might be a source of despair but Dungeon Bowl lifts failure into sublime slapstick.

Deciding to risk a shortcut around a particularly troublesome room that had already claimed the lives of two other players, our ghoul chanced his luck with one of the dungeon's teleporters. Unfortunately for him this set off a chain reaction sending four other players zipping around the table, before he finally teleported onto himself and was blasted into the aether.

The ball, now free of his undead claws, was picked up by one of the few remaining halflings who just had to canter through one small room to win the game. He was promptly eaten by a wandering werewolf. It was a sequence of events that brought home everything best about this game and that makes it even more frustrating when the rules once again conspire to get in the way.

This is made all the more galling by the fact that on some level Games Workshop are clearly aware of this and have already solved many of the game’s problems with Blitz Bowl, another Blood Bowl spinoff that strips the game back further and actually applies some of the last few decade's advances in board game design. Unfortunately Blitz Bowl is one of those inexplicably hard-to-find games that Games Workshop occasionally release to select stores in even more select countries, and so for many of us remains a thing of myth and legend, known only by the glowing reviews of those lucky enough to bag a copy.

Whilst familiarity with the rules does eventually speed things up, unless you're really obsessed with game the chances are that this is one that you’ll only pull off your shelf once in a while. Which unless you’re blessed with an eidetic memory inevitably means you’re in for another frustrating experience as you get back up to speed.

For all its many faults Blood Bowl is still a very fun game. Dungeon Bowl makes you work even harder for those moments of joy, in the end perhaps too hard. If you’re fully invested in the main game with several teams to hand then it can be a nice way to get some more use out of your models but the investment required, both in money and time probably makes this one just for the truly dedicated followers of Nuffle.

Published by Games Workshop

This feature originally appeared in Wyrd Science Vol.1, Issue 4 (April '23)

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