What Makes Myth & Goal A Great Blood Bowl Alternative? Designer Interview With James M. Hewitt!
August 24, 2021 by avernos
Dive into a designer interview with James M. Hewitt from Needy Cat Games about Black List Games' new Fantasy Football game, Myth & Goal.
Check Out More From Myth & Goal Here
Check Out More From Blacklist Games Here
Check Out More From Needy Cat Games Here
In this interview, we discuss what makes Myth & Goal different and a good Blood Bowl alternative. We dive into how you bring your Fantasy teams to life and some of the quirks to the mechanics and feel of the game that make it stand out.
Are you going to be diving into Myth & Goal when it hits Kickstarter on 21st September 2021?
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Interesting but not yet convinced. I’d like to see a play through. I bought the original BB back in the 80s, but I agree it was a “fiddly” game to learn the rules and play. I had hoped the relaunch would have taken the rules and updated them, so I remain interested in Myth & Goal, even if it hasn’t hit all my buttons yet.
I’m interested.. I think it could be fun
So, essentially they wanted to get in on the 3rd party miniatures market for BB, but the company behind it wanted a game to sell (as that would make more money one assumes).
Bodes well when you have the miniatures first and then throw together a game to sell them.
Also should the article not be titled “Will Myth & Goal be a Great Blood Bowl Alternative?” Bearing in mind that this really looks to be just in the design phase at the moment and no one has actually saw how it plays, how the finished components look etc.
Seems less than impartial to me to title this “What makes Myth & Bowl a great Blood Bowl Alternative”.
Nope not convinced by this at all.
It’s been in playtesting for at least the past six months – believe me, it’s well past the design phase!
If it’s any reassurance, every single Games Workshop game is designed around a set of miniatures. And every non GW game I’ve designed has started with a brief, which contains constraints that are just as limiting as “fit this set of minis”.
Please take my word for it – the game wasn’t thrown together!
Oh, but I do agree with your last statement. The game wasn’t designed to beat blood bowl, it was designed to stand alongside it and be something different with a similar theme.
thanks for taking the time out to respond.
And good luck with it, I shall be keeping an eye out on further updates, even if its just to see the quality / style of the miniatures.
Thanks! Blacklist Games have been posting designer diaries over on their website, so more info’s being released constantly 🙂
It’s designed by James M. Hewitt, who’s designed a fair number of boardgames. He was involved in the 2016 edition of Blood Bowl itself. : https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/212445/blood-bowl-2016-edition
I’d begrudge the number of fantasy football games on the market, but then I’d have to admit how many dungeoncrawlers I seem to have in my gaming closet. 😀
So did I hear the price correctly? “3 – 4 times a GW BB team”? That’s 100 – 135€. Or did I mishear that?
That’s the target price he said previous games from the same company had sold at, so yeah, it sounds like 100-120 quid/euros is where it’s aiming to come in.
What makes it better?
Still not sure.
I desperately want it to be. And having the guy who designed Blitz Bowl is a promising start. But I’m still not sure what the game is, let alone how it’s better than Blood Bowl. I’m still not entirely sure even how many players are on a team. Five on the pitch and three reserves = eight? But the box comes with four full Blood Bowl teams? (which are either 11 players or 16 depending on whether you talk squad or fieldable players).
It’s nice that we got to see the pitch, and the idea of playing cards as “boosters” on a turn sound fun – but I’m left with ever more questions and not one question I had has been answered!
Fingers crossed. This has all the right ingredients to be a good game – it just feels like it’s being trailed a little too early, with no gameplay videos available anywhere.
Ask away!
I re-watched the video and I think there are five players on the pitch at one time? From a team/squad of eight? I think it’s the references to “four full Blood Bowl teams” that muddied that waters (I’m old school, so a BB team is 16 – meaning 64 minis?). Are there four teams of eight, or four teams of 16, or some other number? (I’m not entirely convinced I’ve understood how big a team in Myth & Goal is!)
I love the look of the pitch, but a grid of 5×5 (plus “end zones”) seems pretty small for two teams of eight to be moving around – or is it two teams of five? (still, 10 out of 25 squares occupied at a time feels like a pretty crowded field). Then again, I like my tabletop skirmish games to be “full” and don’t like games with large, empty areas – so this could be a good thing. But that’s assuming that each square on the pitch can only contain one mini at a time (it’s hard to tell how big, physically, the pitch is and those squares would be pretty massive if it’s a “quarter-typical-tabletop-sized” 2ftx3ft board).
(this month’s Wargames Illustrated came with rules for a tabletop game on a 3ft x 3ft – it may even have been 2ft x 2ft – board with a 5×5 grid on it, where each square is a “zone” that can contain multiple miniatures – until this month, one square = one mini for my gaming; is this the same?)
Characters “teleporting” to the “bench” after scoring – how are they re-introduced to the game? Placed anywhere or through a specific square or squares?
I guess I’m just impatient for a playthrough – trying to understand what special player characteristics can do, and how cards affect the game, without understand how the game actually plays is just too much for my brain to cope with!
So it’s: five players on the pitch at any one time from a team of eight?
A pitch of 5×5 plus “end zones” and each mini occupies one square at a time?
Presumably players get involved in “blocking” or knocking opponent characters over?
Are opposing players “pinned” if they’re in base-to-base contact with an opponent or can they run freely between “marked” squares? In a pretty crowded pitch (up to ten characters in “open play” on a 5×5 grid) it doesn’t seem to leave many free squares.
I feel like I’m guessing at how the game plays, rather than having had it explained at anything other than a very high concept-level. Which is fine. But the question posed was “what makes this a great alternative to Blood Bowl?” (and at the minute, I’ve no idea!)
Okay! I can answer pretty much all of that. I’m currently on a camping holiday with my family though, so bear with me ?
Wow. Not just talking directly to the game designer, but interrupting his family holiday to boot! Sometimes I love the internet. But, hey, first things first – enjoy your holidays. We’ll still be here when you get back (worst luck!).
Haha, I was waiting in a long queue for the toilets, so I thought I’d check my phone and see what the response was like… back in the office now, though!
So – first up, designer diaries 2 and 3 will give detailed answers to a lot of your questions. 2 is already up over at the Blacklist Games website, and 3 is on its way next week.
In short:
– Three players per team, five in play at once with the others in reserve.
– The box contains two sets of each of the four teams, so 64 miniatures in total. This is for two reasons: a) yes, that’s four full sixteen-player teams for Another Fantasy Football Game Of Your Coice, and b) the Free Agent rules let you draft other players into your team – so if you have a four-team league, you still have spare players for that purpose.
– An area can generally hold three players; more can move in, but they’ll be displaced at the end of the turn.
– When players get teleported away, they go to their team’s Encampment, and can re-enter at their end of the field on a later turn.
As I say, more details will follow in the design diaries, but hopefully this helps!
Any more news on this game? Is there a play-through anywhere?
I just checked the latest design diary and while the intro promises to explain “how a game plays out, and how a team uses its Tactics Cards” I’ve still no real idea about how the game actually plays!
“Up to three players a square” is about it, but no idea of what an action entails, how many per turn, how many characters activate per turn, etc (whether this is three players per team, per square (as suggested by your response above) up to a max of six in total – which could be quite a squash – or a total of three from all teams).
From the diary: “Picking your Tactics cards requires a bit of forward planning” doesn’t really help – it’s difficult to forward-plan for something if you don’t know how the game plays!
It feels like details on actual gameplay is being held back until the launch date? Is there a playthrough video anywhere that explains what the game actually is (other than an opportunity to grab some Blood Bowl proxies)?
The original question “what makes it a great Blood Bowl alternative?” is still impossible to answer! For decades I’ve loved the idea of Blood Bowl (the game itself, not so much). I was really impressed with Blitz Bowl (though it felt lacking in team advancement and campaign/league options). I was hoping this game would have the simple(ish) gameplay of Blitz Bowl and the “fluff” of Blood Bowl and would be throwing my money at the screen as soon as it came up; but I still know little about it other than “nice minis for other fantasy football games if you like”….
Yeah I think we are going to have to wait until the Kickstarter drops to actually get a proper view of this.
Which might not be a big thing having all the info in one place to digest.
I personally cannot quite get to grips with the scale of the playing board, so I definitely need to see some minis on that and people moving them about.
Good interview. The elements from Blitz Bowl and Blood Bowl Sevens are quite obvious. Some of the things I had thought about as a way of expanding Blitz Bowl as its been great to play, but upgrading to Blood Bowl is quite a jump (at least from the outside it seems so). On paper this all sounds good, but if it all adds up to something that really is enjoyable to play we’ll have to see.
Sounds great having game play rules from several game’s to make and interacting players to score points.
Good interview, and a conceptual look at the systems, the bit I didn’t get from this which I was looking for is what is the unique selling point. Blood bowl but different is kinda the feel I got. I guess the question is why do different – why not bloodbowl or dredball or even guild ball and why myth and goal?
I’ve backed three of Blacklist’s mini campaigns, and I love Blood Bowl, but unfortunately that means I’ve already bought almost all of GW’s new plastic teams! I’m still going to watch this one closely, and I did like hearing about an open activation system that addresses the problem of unused units (I was just thinking about how much I disliked that while playing Battlelore last week), but it’ll be a lot harder to throw money at this one seeing as I already have too much for fantasy football.
So let’s say I wanted to get in on this purely to use the models for BB (no offense, I’m getting old and can only remember so many sets of rules). Will there be a models-only option for this on the Kickstarter that makes it a good deal for this? Or will you be required to go for the full game? Thanks in advance for any response!