Hello Sports Fans and welcome to the Third Season of Blood Bowl, the game of fantasy football! Long rumoured, but up for pre order today is the latest edition of the game and in this full review and unboxing we’ll be taking a look at everything that comes in the new Third Season boxed set and also checking out the new rulebook and everything that has changed. For those who are new to Blood Bowl we’ll also be digging into the game and seeing what has made it such a Games Workshop classic for years, and how best to jump into the game. We’ve also built and painted both of the new teams – we’ll be taking a look at the models, and also chatting about how they play in our reviews of Spike! 19 and Spike! 20, also up on the site today.

Massive thanks to Games Workshop for sending us over a free review copy. If you would like to support the site then why not order your goodies through our affiliate Element Games and save yourself some money too?

We’ve also filmed a full unboxing of both the Third Season box and the two new Spike! magazines, which you can see just below or over on YouTube

So without further ago let’s jump into the latest edition of Blood Bowl!

Blood Bowl Third Season Review

Can you believe it’s been 5 years since the “Second Season” of Blood Bowl was released? After the return of the Specialist Games Studio in Games Workshop in 2016 alongside a brand new edition of the game, a tweaked second season was released in 2020 which has been well supported over the last few years with multiple supplements and teams such as the Chaos Dwarfs who landed not so long ago.

5 Years later we now have the Third Season, up for pre order today and out on store shelves on the 5th November. You’d be forgiven for thinking that this is the 3rd edition of the game, but I suppose it’s more accurate to say this is the 3rd edition of the new edition of Blood Bowl and the 7th edition overall. The game was originally released in 1986 (With cardboard playing pieces rather than miniatures) but over the years it turned into the game that we know today – and outside of a couple of differences, at it’s core Third Season is very much the same game. That’s not to say that things haven’t changed in this edition, quite a lot has, but mechanically if you know how to play Blood Bowl then you’ll still be at home playing the same game here.

This is American Football given a Warhammer twist, and is more a sports based board game than a wargame like The Old World – Each player controls a team of players drawn from the various Warhammer races, and over the course of two halves of 8 turns you are aiming to win the game by scoring more touchdowns than your opponent (while causing as much carnage as you can doing it).

So first things first, what’s in the box and what do you get for your money?

With recent price increases I have to admit I was a little worried about how much the set was going to cost. Thankfully this is still a great value set, with the Third Season box retailing at £88 (Which can be found at under £70 at places like Element Games)

While existing players might just want to pick up the new core rulebook, there’s a lot of goodies in this box for the money, and it really does have everything you need to for two people to play the game.

First up, you’re going to need a pitch to play on and the Third Edition box has a great looking double sided board. One side is your classic grass pitch, while the reverse is a dangerous looking flagstoned version. This board is exactly the same dimensions as previous pitches – there’s no extra spaces or a change in layout. If you have any of the existing boards from the last few editions of the game you’ll still be able to use them, which is especially good when it comes to the really nice thematic team specific ones they have put out for Blood Bowl over the last few years

Alongside this are dugouts for each team – again these are double sided to match the designs of the pitch and are the same layout as previous ones.

Each team also gets a set of Blood Bowl dice – 2 D6, 3 custom Block Dice, a D16 and a D8 for each team – Bone and black for the Tomb Kings and red and black for the Bretonnians. I actually really like these dice and are distinct enough for each team. Again, nothing has changed on the dice, so any existing ones are still compatible with the latest edition.

It’s served us well over the years, but we get the same ruler and scatter markers that were in the 2016 edition. These are used for working out the difficulty of a throw and to work out throw ins and bounces by mapping each direction to a different dice face to randomise the results.

What is new here however is the token sprue. Previously in games of Blood Bowl you would lie your models down on the pitch to show that they are prone or stunned. This has a couple of issues – firstly, this can chip the paintwork on your models, but secondly some models (especially the big guys) are so large now that they would actually cover a couple of squares when put prone – this could make it difficult to see which square exactly they are in. With the new tokens you can simply place the token next to them so see the status. There’s some really useful stuff here too – Prone and Stunned are on opposite sides of the same token, so you can simply flip the marker over to go from Stunned to Prone for example. In addition there’s markers for things such as Chomped, Rooted and Eye Gouge to mark those statuses and even a token to show that a player has blitzed this turn.

None of the new models have holes in the bases any more – previously Blood Bowl bases had a slot for the model and then a hole in which to slot a ball to show which player has possession. This was a cool idea but was a bit fiddly in practice. Instead, in this edition we get a token that the player’s base sits on top of. There’s still a hole in this token to put the ball and still have the visual of them running with it. This is much better executed than last time, and also means going forward we will have less slot filling needed on bases for future teams.

My only criticism here is that I’d like to have seen two copies of this sprue in the box. While you can get away with sharing the tokens between two players, it would have been nice to have a set for each player (Especially as in a particularly bloody game you could start running out of some tokens) – I believe this token sheet is available separately for people who do want another set though.

We also get two cheat sheets in the box – these cover all the key priciples and charts you might need to roll on in a game. The layout is much better than the previous ones and they also have page references for the player actions too. One really nice touch is that both of the sheets have the rules for each team on the back too, with the blue sheet covering the Tomb Kings and the red the Brets. This is a really nice touch for new players looking to learn the game who perhaps have not picked up the card decks.

Speaking of the teams, we also get two brand new Blood Bowl teams in the box. Both are on coloured sprues so that you can get away with just building the models and using them right away. The Bretonnians are in red and the Tomb Kings in bone.

We also get a full transfer sheet for both with iconography, player numbers and positional names to make identifying your players as easy as possible

First up we have the Bretonnains – these take the look and feel of the Old World range and make them into a really fun looking Blood Bowl team. You get 6 Squires (3 different bodies duplicated, but enough parts to make the 6 finished models look different), 2 Grail Knights, 2 Knight Catchers (with a couple of different heads each) and 2 Knight Throwers (With a couple of different arm options). I really enjoyed painting these, and there’s some really nice touches such as the Knights all having spurs on their boots, the Catchers having no armour plates on their boots (as they would just slow them down) and the Squires all spoiling for a fight! one of the design cues of the new edition has been to make sure that all positionals are included in a box, so no needing to get a second set in order to get your full quota of Grail Knights for example. Now you may need more Linesmen down the line, you do get a spare one so I’m not really sure that’s the issue the internet is making it out to be right now.

The other team in the box are the Tomb Kings and these guys are just glorious! With the upcoming new Chaos Maraurders for Old World, this team really makes me want to see new Tomb Kinds infantry too as this team is just so cool. With the Tomb Kings being cheaper in gold to hire you get 14 models on the sprues – 4 Tomb Guardians (Massive armoured mummies!), 2 Tomb Kings Throwers, 2 Tomb Kings Blitzers and 6 Linemen. Again, like with the Bretonnains you get a couple of different parts to make a full team look varied, though less so compared with the Bretonnains, probably due to the number of parts on the frame to build the additional players. Out of the two teams these are by far my favourite and I had so much fun painting them up! What I really like about both of these teams is that they have different textures and styles that make them both really enjoyable to work on

Like with previous teams you also get turn markers, coins and balls on the sprue too, with the special balls having rules in the Spike! Journals (Check out our review of both Spikes! for a deeper look into what both of the teams do and what fun extra rules they have.)

The final thing in the box is the new Third Season Edition Official Rulebook for Blood Bowl. This is the full hardback book that is also available outside of this box – so if you do not want the teams, tokens and board you can grab this by itself, though if you’re looking to pick up the book and one of the teams you may as well pick up the entire Third Season box as you’re pretty much getting the second team and tokens free at that point.

So what has changed? There are changes, and some pretty big when it comes to teams, but at its core this is still the same game.

One change that is a new addition to the game is the inclusion of a new Secure the Ball action. Previously you had to do an agility check to pick up the ball, which could lead to low agility teams struggling to pick up the ball, even when not marked. To get around this you can now attempt to Secure the Ball as long as there are no enemy players within 2 squares of you – this allows you to pick up the ball on a roll of 2+ making life a little easier for teams that previous struggled.

One of the things that often caused frustrations was players stalling – in the new edition this is actively discouraged with the crowd having a chance of knocking down a player who is able to score but chooses not to – this should stop a team trying to win 1-0 by just sitting on the ball near the touch zone.

Another big change is the removal of Officious Refs from the Kick Off Table. Instead there’s a new Dodgy Snack result – this has a random player have a bout of a bad belly during a game with their AV and MA reduced by 1, but there’s a chance that whatever they ate really didn’t agree with them as they are popped into the reserves box for the drive sat on the lavatory! This makes it so that you still have a “bad” result to roll, but without the bigger penalty of a player knocked down or sent off before the game has even begun!

Passes have also got another change with Wildly Inaccurate Passes no longer a thing, instead only a natural 1 will cause the ball to be dropped and bounce and a turnover to happen. This means that you’re less likely to suffer from the negative modifiers making it sometimes impossible to throw, but still have the downsides of your pass not landing on target due to scatter.

Skills have had one of the biggest changes in the new edition, with the Skill categories being widened with the addition of Devious alongside Agility, General, Mutation, Passing and Strength. Some things have had a rework here with Mighty Blow for example always being +1 rather than occassionally higher in the previous edition. In the Second Season book trying to find Skills and Talents was a nightmare as they were split by catagory and then by name. In the new edition all of the Skills and Talents are listed together in alphabetical order, which makes finding them much much easier than previously. Each skill catagory (and Talent) also has a symbol that is used to show which family they sit in too – all of this is a massive quality of life improvement and will make looking up skills mid game much quicker!

We get some new stuff too such as Hatred allowing you to reroll a player down result if you are blocking a target you hate (There’s now a keyword system – so for example you could have Hatred (Throwers) and get the bonus against just those positionals) or Violent Innovator which grants Star Power for causing a casualty with a special action.

We see some changes to Inducements in the new edition of Blood Bowl too, Special Play cards are gone completely and are instead replaced with Prayers to Nuffle. These are only 10k gold each and allow you to roll a D16 to get a random effect on the match – so for example you could roll “Friends with the Ref” which allows you to successfully Argue the Call on a 5 or 6 or Iron Man which allows you to pick a player and improve their AV by 1. There’s some really good results here and well worth gambling on if you have some spare cash. You can also hire a team mascot (And I hope we get some team mascot models, as that would just be amazing) who basically give you an extra reroll each half that only works on a roll of 4+. A lot of the costings have been adjusted too here, so it’s well worth having a look through before your first game!

A lot of teams have also been updated. I mentioned earlier that one of the things they have looked to do is adjust positionals so that you don’t need multiple boxes in order to have a full roster, but we also see stats, costs and skills change on a lot of players too. There’s lots of changes here, and thankfully every team including the two new ones is printed in the book – so if you’re picking up the new rulebook you’ll also have access to all your new team profiles too. Dwarfs for example now get Sprint on their Runners and Hatred Trolls on their Troll Slayers, while Imperial Nobility get Pro on their Throwers and Blitzers. Stats have also changed, some things that didn’t have a PA value now have one, and some players have had agility increased or reduced. With the shift in the Skill Categories some teams have access to new skills while others have lost ones that they used to have access to. It feels there has been a real effort to re-balance everything, while still having distinct tiers of play. Speaking of tiers, interestingly these are now going to be listed on a document on Warhammer Community rather than in the core book – suggesting that teams could be shifted up or down based on the meta of events.

While all of the teams are represented in the book, we only get 16 profiles for Star Players, with the rest being in a document on Warhammer Community. Again, like with the teams we see some shifts here, in particular a couple of particularly good star players have seen their costs go up compared to last time. I’d have really liked to have seen all Star Players in the book rather than having to have some in a PDF – but hopefully we get a future Spike! Almanac with this additional content included.

While there are changes, and you’ll want to dig into your teams and star players before you play a game, this is not the kind of massive shift we see in some other games. If you already know how to play Blood Bowl then you will still know how to play it here, you just might need to read through the book the first few games just to make sure you are still following the current rules.

One thing that I do want to give a shout out to in the new rulebook is the artwork. There’s some brilliant full page spreads for more fictional sponsors and products, and I’m already toying up how I can print out some advertising boards for my Blood Bowl pitch…

Summary

A new edition is often a time of panic and fear that the sky is falling, but Blood Bowl Third Season Edition takes the classic game and sands off a few rough edges while also giving the designers a chance to rebalance each team and mix up things with some new skills, Inducements and fun flavour. If you have an existing Blood Bowl team you’ll still be able to use them (Though you might have a few spare positionals if you have one of the older teams) and this is still the same game that you love. For new players, this is the perfect time to jump onboard. You get everything you need to play for 2 players, including the pitch, dice, teams and rules – on top of this the book in the box has the rules for every team currently available – so if you see a team you like you can simply pick up the box without having to buy any more books (Though I would recommend the Spike! Journals as they are fun reads!)

We’ve got full reviews of both the Tomb Kings and Bretonnians Spike! Journals here on the site, and in those articles we chat about how the teams play – so be sure to check them out too!

Blood Bowl Third Season Edition is up for pre order today and is released Saturday 15th November

Games Workshop provided Sprues & Brews with a free copy for review purposes.

Published by Matt Crowther

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