Blood Bowl 2 - 2/20 hours

Five days and only 2 hours, it's inexcusable, really. My "defense" is that I played Starbound for about 30 hours in those five days. That was a mistake, not only in terms of time wasted, but because I'd forgotten how good it feels to just play a game because I want to and not because it filled some arbitrary slot on a pre-determined schedule. It was enough to give me doubts about the moral mission of the blog.

Which shouldn't reflect on Blood Bowl 2 in any way. My two hours was pretty spread out, so I'm going to be a little vague on the details, but so far, it's a fine game that I'm happy to play. It's a parody of American football in board game form where the teams are all these different fantasy races like orcs, dwarves, or elves. But that's at a pretty high level of abstraction. In the particulars, it is a turn-based strategy game of positioning, resource management, and area control. It doesn't always feel like the game of football, but that might have as much to do with it being British as it does with it being a board game.

Blood Bowl 2's greatest strength is the way it skewers the violence of real football by very slightly exaggerating it. It's funny to see these goofily dressed fantasy figures smash each other into the dust for the sake of a ball, and you can usually rely on the game's announcers to deliver an amusing quip about the action. Of course, like many of America's most enduring cultural institutions, real football is already a celebration of excess that borders on self-parody, so I can't really say that the orc and the vampire who call these Blood Bowl games are more entertaining than, say, John Madden.

I've been playing the campaign mode, which introduces the game's rules piecemeal, making each match slightly more complicated than the last. It came as a real shock when I learned that picking up the ball requires a dice roll that may fail 1/3 to 1/2 of the time, but I think I can get used to it. Seeing the little guys on my team knocked out and injured, however, is probably something that's always going to take an emotional toll.

I can't say with certainty that I will finish Blood Bowl 2 in a timely manner. There's still a lot I want to do with Starbound. What I can say is that its combination of precision board game tactics and over-the-top violence will definitely bring me back . . . hopefully before it's too late.