Blood Bowl Sevens is the same Blood Bowl you know, but with a smaller pitch, seven players and quicker games! Perfect for a nice quick game of Blood Bowl when you haven’t got time for a full match!

Spike! Issue 22, up for pre order today contains all the rules you need to play Sevens, and combined with the new Blood Bowl Sevens pitch lets you jump straight into this new format!

In this full review we’ll be checking out Spike 22, talking about how Sevens plays and seeing if this is worth picking up for your collection. It’s not just Sevens up for pre order today though, as there’s also a trio of Big Guys now in plastic for the first time! We’ll be taking a look at each of these and painting them up to see what they look like in the flesh!

Massive thanks to Games Workshop for sending us these kits over to check out on the site. If you would like to support the site then why not order your Blood Bowl Sevens goodies through our affiliate Element Games and save yourself some money too?

We’ve also filmed a full unboxing and review which you can see just below or over on YouTube

So without further ado let’s check out Spike 22 and Sevens!

Blood Bowl Sevens – Spike 22 Review

So it’s been almost a year since the new edition of Blood Bowl was released, and 5 months since the last supplement was released containing the High Elves. I was expecting us to see more releases in that time, but today we have some cool ones up for pre order

Spike 22 (RRP £11) is an unusual one as it’s pretty much a mini-supplement to the game of Sevens, a 7-a-side variant of everyone’s favourite fantasy football game.

Previously available in 2021’s Death Zone, this is the first time we’ve had a book dedicated purely to Sevens, and I think it’s great that this isn’t buried away in another hardback book!

Alongside Spike there’s also a new boxed Sevens Pitch (RRP £36) – it’s worth noting here that if you only have a standard Blood Bowl pitch then you’re going to need this for Sevens, as it’s smaller and has a No Man’s Land in the centre – though if you have the one previously released in 2021 then you’re already good to go! As with all GW pitches this is double sided and includes the dugouts (which also are different than the standard ones as the games are shorter). I don’t think the price is bad considering between the book and the pitch you can pick up everything you need for less than £40 from sites such as Element Games

If you’ve not played Blood Bowl Sevens before, then this is essentially a “7 a side” game between amateurs who have not been signed up to the big leagues yet.

Spike 22 does a great job going into the background with a very tongue in cheek write up about how the Cabalvision network wanted a way of extracting more money from Blood Bowl by taking the format and coming up with a way of inserting more ad-breaks into it and then launching it with a massive 64 team tournament to showcase the event – I mean, that wouldn’t happen in the real world would it?

So the number of players was reduced, the game was made shorter (more time for ad-breaks between halves) and by using up and coming amateur teams, they could even schedule games when the main teams were playing! Oh, and as it’s hard enough to find someone to referee a normal game of Blood Bowl, the people they managed to get to adjudicate these games were more likely to look the other way during a foul or weapons being used, making these games particularly bloody!

Cabalvision profits were up and the fans loved it too!

The majority of the book goes into the rules – and the core of this is built upon the latest Blood Bowl rulebook (which you need to play) but has a few important changes. The main one being that you only have 7 players on the pitch, and only 4 of these can be non-linesmen. This essentially means you can take any 4 positional (but still within your normal quotas) and then the rest of your team is all linemen. Combined with the smaller budget of 600,000 gold this makes for some really interesting and fun teams!

You get a unique kick off chart, two new injury tables for standard and stunty players that are quicker to use and adjustments to things such as the kickoff and throw ins to make the ball not move as far (otherwise you’d be in danger of them coming off the smaller pitch all the time)

One thing I really like is the fact that the referees are amateurs and really don’t care what happens one way or the other, giving you a 1 in 3 chance of being able to argue the toss against them if someone is sent off! My Goblins will be taking full advantage of that!

There’s a couple of pages dedicated to both League Play and Matched Play, and in Blood Bowl Sevens your players advance a lot quicker – essentially instead of gaining star player points, one of your players earns a randomly generated skill – If you go for a secondary skills its randomised as normal, if you pick a primary skill then you pick 2 skills, your opponent picks 1 skill and you roll a D3 to see which ones sticks! It’s quick, fun and leads to your rookie players getting surprisingly good after a few games! To counter this, there’s a chance that your players will actually get signed by a “real” team to stand in for an injury and your player ends up missing your game!

The usual Spike Journal features are in here such as interviews and in universe background, but there’s also a decent section covering a number of different teams along with the tips and tactics to get them outfitted for Sevens! The Skaven, Norse, Goblins, Khrone and Chaos Chosen are all featured here, and it’s a bit of a shame the Spike format isn’t a little bigger to allow all the teams to have a page each – though by keeping to this short list it does keep the price of the book down too!

Blood Bowl Sevens looks like a great fun little format, and with the games being a lot quicker (only 6 turns a half) then this is a nice one to play on a lunch break or between bigger gaming sessions too!

Big Guys

Alongside Sevens, there’s also a trio of new Big Guy kits up for pre order today – The Minotaur, Rat Ogre and Morg n Thorg (Each at £27)

This is an interesting release, as previously a lot of Specialist Games models like this have been released in Resin (with all three of these previously being in the material)

I believe there is a push to reduce the kits that are being created in Resin and a slow process of moving everything over to plastic is starting – We’ve seen this with kits in Necromunda and Horus Heresy making the move, but this is the first time we’ve seen it for Blood Bowl – and I have a feeling we’ll see more of this in the future.

Each of these kits has lots of optional parts with all three being able to be built in 3 different ways. This allows for a lot of customisation and making the model “yours” but also means they can do some cool things such have Morg n Thorg in three different “kits” representing the different teams he has played for over the years – This is ace and I hope we get more like this in the future. It’s been a long time now since we’ve seen any stand alone resin releases, and I suspect this is why we have not seen any Star Players for this edition – perhaps we could see a plastic kit containing multiple ones maybe…

The kits look great when built up and I had loads of fun painting them up to match my existing teams! I’m actually tempted to pick up another couple boxes of Morg N Thorg to paint him up in his other kits, and I’m sure I’m not the only person who will be thinking that too!

I’m excited to see where this goes for Blood Bowl and wonder how long it’ll be till everything is in Plastic – while maybe not in the short term, I deffo think it’s something on the long term plans for GW

The Blood Bowl Sevens releases and Big Guys are up for pre order today and are released Saturday 22nd August.

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