I’m surprised they never released ultimate properly outside of the 2bd edition Kickstarter. I backed that so have everything but it seemed weird not to just ship it.

Honestly I always got the feeling that Dreadball 2e Kickstarter did not reach Mantics expectations. At the time their reputation for delivering was a bit shaky which likely hampered it, but they seemed to abandon actively pushing the game almost as soon as it delivered.

They put out the basics like the event deck and new teams in retail boxes but not alot else.

I think there’s room for Mantic to still do things with Dreadball. Why even simply remastering the existing teams and producing them in resin would probably have more than a few veteran players investing in getting a team or two. The First three seasons worth of teams were HORRIBLE models (lots of tiny parts in a hard to work restic material), The second three seasons (the ones that came out the same time as the Dreadball Xtreme game were a LOT better in a more hard plastic material and requiring very little effort to build (these were the best ones… Read more »

On the new expansion book, I’m in too minds about it. Reworking the teams for better balance is probably going to be my trigger to buy it. But new rules for “assistant trainers” falls into Mantics flaw with the game (bringing out yet more rules to “sell” you more miniatures). The basic game works fine, adding these rules just further complicates things and causes issues with balance (I can already see an issue that’s going to occur that could be gamebreaking for combinations of a trainer and certain teams). As too a “combat” version of Dreadball. I always thought that… Read more »

I agree. I think Dreadball needs to be morphed to a “monopoly” style boardgame model. There is limited scope for producing new models, other than improving existing ranges, and so any expansions should be careful not to mess up the core game, and all the while the base game needs to be kept available for league play etc so that there is a stable core for new players to buy into.

I’m not sure what you mean by ‘monopoly style’ tbh @osbad?

I do agree and gave been thinking the same about expansion though. Updating the oldest and unavailable team models would surely be the best way to raise interest over more and often niche new stuff.

By “monopoly style” I mean that the core rules are the core rules and they are fixed. THey don’t fluctuate every year. Once they have been locked down they will never change. If you know how to play monopoly, then you will always know how to play monopoly even in 20 or 5o years time. Expansions, reskins, reinterpretations may come along to such games and provide a more interesting experience for the jaded, but the core rules will never change and stay as a classic, and are therefore easy to get into for new players.

But that’s the point of Arena and Extreme isn’t it? They are simply side games that spin off the core Dreadball. Dreadball is always there as the standard 2 pksyer future sport and hasn’t changed drastically since it was first released.