

“I have to think that, yes, we played our part in showing Games Workshop the interest of the community in more Blood Bowl.” “It’s always a great thing to be able to showcase and sustain these great tabletop games,” Brésard says. Fans were finally relieved from the responsibility of life support, and joined by a new generation who had discovered the joys of grognard gridiron by competing online. Soon afterwards, Games Workshop went further - dusting off tabletop Blood Bowl for a new edition.

That first game was faithful, if unadorned, and a sequel in 2015 finally delivered the audio-visual crunch to match the mental image of a beastman forcibly lifting an elf into the air with a single punch. Yet in 2009, Games Workshop backed Cyanide in its attempt to recreate Blood Bowl on the PC. The Games Workshop is no longer interested in providing true support for this game.” “This is the rulebook designed to send Blood Bowl into a perpetual format. “Here is what may be the final edition of Blood Bowl,” read the opening page of that community manual. When I say that Blood Bowl used to be a dead game, Cyanide’s Gautier Brésard is quick to correct me: “I would say that it was a community-managed game.” In fact, for the two decades that the tabletop Warhammer bloodsport was out of print, fans worked diligently to ensure it wasn’t out of mind - creating a ‘living rulebook’ that ran to six iterations.
