DUNGEON BALL (2021)

PLAYERS	TIME	DESIGNER	PUBLISHER
2	45 mins	Gabe Barrett	Barrett Publishing

One of my other hobbies, outside of board gaming, is following the NFL. When this fantasy themed football game appeared on Kickstarter, it was a no-brainer.

Players pick one of the available squads and then take to the field (or dungeon, if you flip the board) and battle it out.

When you’re on offense, you pick a card to represent your play. These are colour coded blue, red, and yellow.

The defense has to guess the colour of your play. If they are correct, you lose dice. If they are wrong, then you get extra.

After that you roll dice to try and match the faces on your play card, hopefully then moving the ball down the field.

I really like that mechanism, where two coaches are trying to out think each other. It’s all about mind games, especially if you play the same person regularly.

Something else I really like is that one of the faces you can roll is a clock symbol. This is the only symbol you can’t reroll. If you get clocks, they remain, clogging up your chances of getting the results you need.

But they also count down the clock. It gives that stop start of a football game where some downs last a minute, and others can drag on as teams dig in.

While there are ‘special’ cards in the game that you can use in game currency to play, they are few and some are duplicated across the six available teams. I would have perhaps liked to have seen a larger deck that you draw from.

And that’s the game. It’s a very slimmed down version of BLOOD BOWL at the end of the day, but it works perfectly for some like me who likes 2-player only games, likes fantasy as a theme, and likes American Football.

Orcs, werewolves, and other monsters battle it out on the field, while their coaches try to outwit each other from the sideline, in this fun ‘Fantasy Football’ board game.