Dreadball

Dreadball is mantic games most exciting game by far, a marvelous mix of design and theme. That blends sports with warfare in a gret way.

Originally Dreadball appeared to be a joke, and used to be compared to Blood Bowl. But over 8 years since its original publication, with 2 editions(and one really XTREME wargamish spinoff) and 7 seasons worth of teams, dreadball is becoming it's own creation. If BloodBowl is the grandfather of grid based miniature sports games(that's a weird title to be honest), Dreadball is the angsty teenager that is finally becoming it's own man a very violent and fast old man.

Thing is comparing dreadball to bloodbowl could be a great way of comparing how eurogame mechanics have meshed with traditional mini wargame design, as well as how wargames have changed in their scale and scope. Dreadball is a game where the player controlls fewer players than in blood bowl(6 instead of 14, actually 14 is the maximun ammount of players a roster can have) and instead of activating all of them, he uses activation tokens, a really euro mechanic. Also instead of scoring touchdowns, players need to score strikes, which means, yes shooting on goal rather than running towards it. And players don't reset their formartion after a strike is scored. So in dreadball players don't just need to score, they are also required to defend properly, and since scoring ends a player turn, planing is vital. Oh and did we miss the part where strikes are recorded in a shared score track, where the marker is moved towards one part or the other, and if a pleyer ever reaches 7 unopossed points he wins by a landslide, yep, in dreadball the scoring mechanism is more dinamic while veing no less brutal than in Bloodbowl.

Finally Dreadball teams are quite streamlined when it comes to composition, having only 3 types of player(guard, jack and striker) who are unevenley distributed in all teams, some have all 3, others just 2 out of three and 2 teams(Tsudochan and Zee) only have jacks. This makes the game easy to memorize when it comes to it's core mechanics, while not taking away flavour from the teams, since each has it's own rules and stats.