In order to accurately review a game like Blood Bowl, you have to look at it from two entirely separate perspectives. On one hand is the type of gamer who is intimately familiar with the warm embrace of the Warhammer tabletop games and their subgenera. You remember the days of wielding your 28 mm metal miniatures as if they held the power of Thor’s hammer. The rules already lay dormant in the back of your mind, ready to be awoken and destroy Tokyo by the depth charge that is a Blood Bowl video game. On the other hand, you have the other 90% of gamers who are going to play this and didn’t even have a clue that Blood Bowl was a tabletop game to begin with. That gives developer Cyanide the double edged sword of having to make a game that appeals to a large amount of gamers while staying true to the source material. If they pitch the balance too far from one side to the other they will either have a game inaccessible to new comers, or have to face the ire of a whole lot of people who are hardcore enough that they might have the Living Rulebook tattooed all over their body like they are in a Clive Barker novel.

So roll a d16 and see which one you are…