Blood Bowl is a strange game. Partly, it’s strange because it isn’t really a videogame – it’s a virtually recreated board game. Partly, it’s because it’s perversely fun, despite all its issues. And partly, it’s because it’s difficult to gauge at whom Blood Bowl is aimed.

For those who don’t know, Blood Bowl is a virtual adaptation of a classic board game from Games Workshop, the fantasy hobbyists. It mixes American football with goblins, elves, ogres, and dwarves, then underpins the entire sport with brutal, sadistic violence. Out here in this irritating thing called reality, fans will buy the board game, spend hours assembling and painting models, talk with fellow fans, discuss the rules, make up new ones, invent tournaments and scenarios, host grudge matches, and more. Adapting this for the small screen rather negates these huge parts of the hobby – actually playing is just one aspect of belonging to the war game fraternity.

Back in my youthful heydays of eating space raiders from the tuck shop, telling porkies about how the dog ate my homework, and failing to entice girls behind the bike sheds, I was a Games Workshop devotee. I played Blood Bowl – a lot. Strangely, this makes me feel rather over-qualified to judge the merits of this curious offering from Cyanide Studio. Not only do I have a nostalgic attachment to the board game, but also a firm grasp on the rules, even after all these years. As a result, I like Blood Bowl because of its failings, not despite them.

Allow me to elaborate. Firstly, it’s difficult for me to fathom exactly how accessible this is to anyone who hasn’t already played the board game. Certainly, the tutorials fail to initiate newcomers properly – while sketching the vaguest of outlines about the rules, it acted more as trigger to fire up my dusty synapses than as a proper explanation. I can’t imagine those unfamiliar would’ve had much of a clue about what was transpiring. The real purpose of the tutorials seemed to be to walk you through how to input commands, rather than enlighten the confused acolytes as to what these commands actually mean. Furthermore, I couldn’t find anything explaining how to earn Star Player Points and help shove your players into the limelight of cup-winning games.

But I’m getting ahead of myself – let’s rewind. Developers Cyanide are French; unfortunately, this shows. I don’t mean this in some horribly racist way, but there are a host of errors in the translated menus and in-game text. Despite this, Cyanide has managed to preserve most of the daft humour and silliness of Games Workshop’s asides, histories, and anecdotes. The commentary – such as it is – also captures the flavour and pitch of gleefully homicidal sport, but is alarmingly sparse. There are no more than a handful of phrases, and they get very repetitive very quickly.

Visually, it’s no treat, either. The pre-rendered CGI cut-scenes are actually quite impressive, and a great introduction to the world of Blood Bowl. By comparison, the characters models are tame, with uninventive (but reasonably-well-implemented) animations. The brutality of the sport could be better directed through some clever animations, and so it fails – although this iteration does certainly improve on the inevitably static poses of the board game models. In many ways, Blood Bowl is hardly a step on from Cyanide’s prototype, Chaos League (Cyanide Studio reached an out-of-court settlement with Games Workshop; one of the terms of the settlement was for Cyanide to deliver a game using the full Blood Bowl licence). In fact, in an ironic twist, this version of Blood Bowl is almost a carbon copy of 2004’s Chaos League – make of that what you will.

Players have the option to play using a new real-time method, but – seeing as this quickly degenerates into a frantic and confusing mess – the heart of Blood Bowl remains in turn-based play. It is a perfect recreation of the board game; no more, no less. Tackle zones, dodging, blocking, blitzing, casualties, armour rolls, earning SPPs to rank up acquire skills – it’s all here. Even the dice rolls remain – and just like its corporeal counterpart, lady luck will sometimes have you howling with incredulity at what has just transpired. The AI is solid, for the most part – games are a decent challenge, even on easy (thanks in part to the random element of the dice rolls), and your virtual opponent is rarely foolish. That said, the AI will still make occasionally unfathomable decisions, mucking up the order in which it attempts its offensive drive and gifting you a turnover (a failed play ends your turn). It also isn’t quite aggressive enough – human players will show no such compunction in sticking the boot in, literally.

The online side works well – although I will admit I have only played private matches so far. You can play as pre-built teams of varying skill, allowing for handicaps in ability where it might be appropriate. These matches are hugely enjoyable, and, as such, it is the purest recreation of Blood Bowl available. The banter, the gloating, the arguing, the sore losing – it all took me back to those rose-tinted days of playground enthusiasm.

The painstakingly faithful recreation of Blood Bowl is perhaps both its saving grace and ultimate undoing. No doubt some hobbyists – in the broad sense of the word – will fail to see the appeal of playing this on a computer, while for others it will present instant accessibility – games are over inside 45 minutes, and you can play whenever you like. Furthermore, Blood Bowl is a one-off investment (DLC notwithstanding) – no more scrabbling around for money to expand your team, for paints, or even to buy the revised rules; everything you need is to hand for the retail price. Most importantly, I fail to see how, exactly, new players are truly embraced into the fold – but then I could be doing my fellow gamers a disservice in underestimating how quickly they can get to grips with this.

Blood Bowl is pointedly niche – it delights in the complex rules, cunning strategies, and polarised agility-or-brutality playing styles. I can’t help but want to take my team all the way to the top, revelling in the personal victories of each individual player, watching in disbelief as a catcher floors a minotaur or a troll scores the unlikeliest of touchdowns. If ever you enjoyed the chaos, fun, and utter childishness of a game in which you can throw a goblin down the pitch, then this is for you, despite everything else about it that is so staggeringly average. Perhaps the most telling comment I can make is that it almost made me want to head back to Games Workshop, buy a load of miniatures, and start painting them again. Almost.

VideogameUK verdict: 5.5/10 (7.5/10 if you like the board game)