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Slaughterball Coming To An Arena Near You
September 21, 2014 by deltagamegirl22
A new game company, Frog the What Games, has started a campaign on Kickstarter for their game Slaughterball.
In this board game you play one of the genetically enhanced teams that play and fight in an arena while trying to score points. This is a game for 1 to 4 players, and the game map is double sided. In this game you can actually score points for knocking down or taking out players along with scoring with the ball.
The game lets you build seasons and have leagues also. While looking at this I found a lot of similarities to one of our beloved games in our house and that is, Dreadball. I would be interested in hearing what all you Dreadball fans think.
Do you have room for another sport?
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Each of the positions in that game even seem to tie in with the dreadball positions of striker, jack, gaurd and big guy.
Not impressed. Far to similar. It’s as if blood bowl never existed lol
If people actually read the P&P rules as opposed to making an off the cuff judgement, I think you’ll find a lot to recommend this game over DreadBall:
1) The positions reflect standard expectations in all sports, so that’s hardly a criticism, and the players have a lot more varied roles in this game than simple “oh, this person cannot carry the ball for some reason…. because RULES”. Instead, some are dedicated pit strategists, and others are ball handlers or bruisers. Team special rules in exhibition and league games also increase the positional differentiation.
2) The game is well balanced from the get go. You can see that in the playtest leagues that Erik (wonderful guy) has uploaded on the game’s website. Because killing teams score points for slaughtering opponents, they don’t suffer the usual problems faced by slow bruisers in sports games, as they can rack up the score by taking out opponents and throwing the ball to injure rather than score. As opposed to DreadBall, which remains unbalanced.
3) Straight out of the box you can play multiplayer games, right from the get go, on the four player or three player arena surface. At higher and lower pledges you can also/instead get a more standard two team board. This game is scalable to that from day one, as opposed to funding these ‘expansions’ through a glorified pre-order system.
4) Miniatures are a really nice size, perfect for painting but also just for pick out and play. As opposed to, in my humble opinion, the tiny and fiddly DreadBall minis; which were something of a disappointment.
This game has been in development for years, and involves a great league progression and team development system and has plenty of room to grow. If you prefer Mantic’s first offering in the sci-fi sports genre, that’s fine, but I urge you to have a look at this indie game designers first ever game, and consider an important fact about wargaming and the industry in general: Do we, as gamers, support only those companies which have a massive following already, and which we gripe and moan about but don’t actually respond to in a meaningful way as consumers? Or do we honour the true meaning of this hobby (and Kickstarter) by backing cool and original ideas/games that we would like to play, and which someone has dedicated their time to creating for us?
So…. instead of going ‘oh, this looks like what Mantic does’ (which to be honest begs the ‘well duh!’ because Mantic always does what other companies do, but cheaper, which is no bad thing in and of itself) try and judge it on its own merits. There’s room for more than one sports game, and I am firmly convinced that Slaughterball is deserving of a place at this growing table!