Missing in action: Where are Blood Bowl and Star Realms?

It’s a punt.

It’s come to my attention that some of you are performing a dark cabalistic ritual to summon the mysteriously delayed mobile edition of Blood Bowl. STOP. You are performing the wrong dark cabalistic ritual. I know you meant well, but you appear to have summoned this Kim Kardashian game into existence instead. Also the Jonas Brothers have been crashing on my couch for the last three days. You’re not allowed to watch E! while invoking the occult anymore.

Instead of beseeching the dark powers for aid, I sent around inquiries to see what the holdup is on high-fantasy football game Blood Bowl (announced for “early July” a few weeks ago) and on the iOS version of sci-fi deck-building card game Star Realms (which was meant to be here around July 4th).

Details of what I uncovered after the jump. But fair warning: none of it is particularly good news.

Back at the beginning of the month there were hearts set a-thumping everywhere by the news that Games Workshop’s (literally) fantasy football tabletop game Blood Bowl was coming to mobile in “early July”. Clearly, that has not come to pass.

After some effort I got in touch with Focus Home Interactive, the French publisher in charge of the project. They told me on Wednesday that the game has been “slightly delayed”. Well, yes. I think we knew that. More news was promised “very soon”, but the takeaway here is that nobody knows what’s up with Blood Bowl, so don’t expect an imminent release.

Launch aborted. Again.

Sci-fi deck-builder Star Realms has been a huge hit in its physical card game form, and I was mightily impressed with the PC beta. The Android edition launched over the July 4th holiday weekend with iOS meant to be following close in its wake — instead, Android users have enjoyed a rare period of platform exclusivity as the iOS version keeps getting rejected by Apple.

Producer Rob Dougherty told me this afternoon that the game has been rejected by Apple again (the game’s been submitted for approval at least twice this month) just yesterday. He didn’t give me any details as to why, exactly, but Star Realms’ cross-platform play between iOS, Android, and PC might have something to do with it — as might the game’s unique “pay once, unlock every platform” scheme.

Dougherty also said that he doesn’t want to keep players on pins and needles obsessively checking the App Store — he told me that if and when Star Realms gets approved by the powers that be at Cupertino, he’ll let everybody know in advance what day the game will drop. They’re planning on re-submitting this weekend.