For someone who is technically "retired", Jervis Johnson is a busy, busy man. Wargamer recently caught up with Johnson for an interview, which he joined fresh from a call with the team at Factory Fortress to discuss edits to Trench Crusade's living rulebook; and there was the manuscript for the Godzilla RPG waiting for him when our call wrapped up. And then there's the reason for our conversation: DreadBall All-Stars, a full-contact sci-fi sports board game coming to Kickstarter in March, and Johnson's most recent finished design. For those who know Johnson's work, there's a real sense of symmetry here - after all, it was another miniature heavy, sports-themed board game that kicked off his career, the timeless Warhammer spinoff Blood Bowl. The ways that the two games are similar and distinct proves to be fascinating.
Jervis Johnson worked in Games Workshop for 38 years, retiring in 2021, as one of the longest-serving Warhammer designers in the business. But it was pure chance that he became a designer at all. He joined GW's London office as an assistant in trade sales, handling customer accounts for roleplaying games and board games. When GW merged the London and Nottingham operations, "I came up and I was still looking after the board games, and I said 'It would be kind of useful if we had some little board games that were an intro to the hobby' - that was my initial pitch".
He expected then CEO Brian Ansell "To get Rick Priestley or Richard Halliwell, who were the game designers at the time, to do it. [Instead] he said 'Yeah that sounds like a great idea J, you can do it". And so he did. The concept he worked on, of course, was the original 1986 edition of Blood Bowl. A game of hyper-violent American football populated by Orcs and Humans, it proved to be enduringly popular. For its time it was very successful in its core mission - providing an entry point to the wider hobby of collecting, building, and painting miniatures, in a board game package.
That's something that Mantic CEO Ronnie Renton also hopes to achieve with DreadBall All-Stars, and made a core pillar of the design brief for Johnson. "He wanted a game that would be a good way for people who were interested in playing miniatures games to start to join in the hobby and then would kind of lead through to obviously the rest of what Mantic does", Johnson recalls. The design incorporates a lot of the "Basic mechanics that Mantic use in quite a lot of their games - it's a D8 exploding dice system".
Just like the early editions of Blood Bowl, DreadBall's miniatures don't require assembly, to minimise the time between opening the box and playing a game. But forty years of game development have changed what really counts as an 'introductory' game. DreadBall All-Star's play time is quick enough that "You can organize one day tournaments", and championships that will fit into a weekend.
A major difference between All-Stars, and both Blood Bowl and previous editions of DreadBall, is the activation system; coaches alternate activating one model at a time rather than one team at a time. "I think with DreadBall All-Stars, what you get is a game that's much more kinetic and fast-paced - it reminds me more of basketball or maybe ice hockey or five-a-side soccer" than American football. "It's much more focused on individual play rather than team play".
Johnson reflects on how that changes the feel of things. "One of the things that I find fascinating about American Football is that it keeps resetting; one team has a plan and the other team tries to disrupt it. And I think that Blood Ball does quite a good job of capturing that feeling - when it comes to your turn, the first thing you ask is 'What am I going to do this turn?', you come up with a play" for the whole team. In DreadBall All-Stars "You're almost always trying to score". The skill, of course, is doing that more reliably than your opponent can, and shutting down their own attempts on goal.
Johnson has designed 10 teams of five fixed players, though he doesn't know whether they will all be available in the upcoming Kickstarter. Rules for model stats, special abilities, and team abilities are provided on reference cards. Johnson recalls experiences from playtesting: "The first time that people play, what I generally see is they hardly ever use the special rules at all, and then after they've played a half of the game, they'll start looking at the cards properly and go, 'I didn't realize that that player could do that'," and begin to uncover the interactions and combos within their team.
The teams themselves have nice, broad themes. "Each team is basically the personal property of an unpleasant corporation of some kind or another, like big pharma, or the corporation that runs all of the prisons, things like that", Johnson explains. The team playstyles match their corporate owners' brand identity: the McKinley Jets are as fast as the aerospace equipment their owners are known for, the Juggernaughts are appropriately bulked up on their sponsor's bodybuilding supplements.
It's quite a comedically grimdark setting. "What the players don't know is that, hidden away in the back of the locker room, there are cloning banks with cloned versions of all of the players", Johnson says. "So if one of the players is a little bit badly hurt, maybe he's broken his leg, they'll quietly euthanize that version of the player and bring out the clone to send onto the pitch", to keep up the illusion that "By sheer grit and determination, he's carrying on playing".
As the lore suggests, there's no system for players to accrue injuries over the course of a league. But a kind of progress is possible, thanks to legacy cards. These are added to the card deck that you use for special actions during play, and you earn them by participating in championships. Each 'pitch' comes with a unique championship, and there are four in total, which "Include include enough legacy cards to allow you to run the championship at least three times". So while every McKinley Jets team has the same players, it could develop in a unique direction by participating in different events.
The pitches also come with light touch special rules and distinctive 'event decks', which add something that will be very familiar to Blood Bowl players: a touch of chaos. "Every time the ball is launched, an event card is drawn and that brings in character and wacky stuff", Johnson explains - players charging one another in fits of unsportsmanlike aggression, or a ticking timer before the ball explodes in a player's hands.
Johnson is proud of the project. "It's a great game to introduce people to the hobby, but I think it's got enough depth that if you're an established gamer you'll enjoy it as a good solid beer and pretzels game, a nice game to have in the collection." But his years of experience show through when he reflects: "Obviously I get passionate, enthusiastic about the things that I'm working on and I try to make them as good as I possibly can, but there's a zeitgeist that determines how well the game actually lands and whether it establishes itself out there in the hobby". He's hopeful, of course. For our part, we're eager to give the game a spin.
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