What games meet these criteria?

[JM]

I'm looking for a game that captures the feeling that a Blood Bowl tournament gives you - not in terms of the fantasy setting, or even the fact that it's a "sports" game, but:


you control a small selection of units
you choose the units from a wide range at the start (a roster)
the units can advance RPG-style, or be killed off / removed
multiplayer with clear objectives
multiple tactics and strategies
fairly simple to pick up but difficult to master
campaign mode (or league) as well as single games
games don't take all day!Games Workshop seem to be pretty good at making that kind of thing on the tabletop with Blood Bowl, Necromunda, Mordheim... Java Blood Bowl is fantastic fun and is closest to what I'm looking for here.

I had a poke around the net for something similar and the only thing I could find were Battletech/mech games which didn't quite fulfill the criteria. What else is there?

[Nathan]

Are you just looking for tabletop games? Because you've just described X-Com, Jagged Alliance 2, and to a lesser extent most of the Nippon Ichi PS2 games.

Edit: Sorry, I just realized you included "multiplayer". Never mind.

[Kirian]

Chaos League? That is pretty much Blood Bowl without an official license. The expansion is out too, and it garnered respectable, but not brilliant scores. It is real-time (I think), however.

Mechcommander 2, possibly? Or you could wait- GW are expanding into videogames rapidly, so Fanatic games are not too far into the future. I suspect Inquisitor or Necromunda first. Inquisitor whould make a great MMO SRPG, as would Necromunda.

[JM]

Chaos League was disappointing, but yeah - it's along those lines (given that it's a homage to Blood Bowl, that's to be expected).

I'll have a look at Mechcommander 2. There's some mech games on Sourceforge I might have a bash at as well.

Nathan: I realised when I was writing the post that I was basically talking about a version of X-Com/JA designed around multiplayer. Just a shame it doesn't exist outside of tech demos :)

[SlyFrog]

Guys who made Chaos League have settled their dispute with Games Workshop, so I hope they will come up with a real Blood Bowl (turn based) sometime soon. Of course, there is always the online Blood Bowl league that plays the real thing.

Interestingly, what you discussed reminds me of an older game, Chaos Overlords. That was pretty fun if I recall.

[JM]

I remember getting massively addicted to Chaos Overlords a long time ago - single player only, though. I guess I'll give that a try in MP, thanks!

Good to hear about Blood Bowl; given the success of the Java client for it, I'm surprised that it hasn't been done for any of GW's other specialist games.

[Kirian]

If you are going to play MechCommander 2, Microsoft have released the entire source code (including art assets). You need XNA, and both are available on the Microsoft website (search for MC2 open source).

[EFlannum]

I think Poxnora meets most (if not all of those criteria) have you given it a try yet?

[JM]

I registered but didn't actually get round to trying it. Followed the discussion on it with interest so perhaps I should actually give it a go :)