Blue Lock is a football manga where the entire premise is that teamwork is overrated and the only way to win a World Cup is to build a striker so selfish he cannot be stopped. It is an absurd, brilliant idea, and it makes a decent board game hook too.
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Set up your group for freeNo Loading Games has announced Blue Lock Striker, a competitive game for two to four players in which you take on Yoichi Isagi, Hyoma Chigiri, Seishiro Nagi or Meguru Bachira and, in the publisher's words, "unleash unique powers" to outscore everyone else. If pure selfishness is not your style there is a 2v2 mode where you pair up with a teammate. It reaches retail in October 2026.
Worth being upfront: the announcement does not say how any of that works. No mechanics, no play time, no price. All we have so far is the character list, the player count and the promise of high-stakes decision-making, so file this one under "interesting, ask again nearer October".
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See how it worksThe licence, though, is huge. Muneyuki Kaneshiro and Yusuke Nomura started the manga in 2018, Kodansha brought it into English in 2021, and the anime landed in 2022, taking Anime Corner's Sports Anime of the Year for both its seasons. As of June 2026 there are over 60 million copies of the manga in circulation, and a live-action film opens in Japan in August.
No Loading Games is the Montreal publisher behind 2025's Gwent: The Legendary Card Game, which shipped in over 30 countries and 17 languages, so this is not its first go at a big property.
A quick, nasty sports game starring characters half your group already argues about is how you get non-gamers to sit down. October will tell us whether it plays.
Sources: No Loading Games
