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Blood Bowl’s tabletop incarnation last had its rules updated in 2020 with the “second season edition” and now Games Workshop has announced a third season is coming later this year. They’re at pains to let everyone know we won’t have to relearn all the rules, however, saying “The core game is exactly the same: the pitch hasn’t magically grown any new squares, there are no new stats, and everything should be very familiar.”
That said, changes have been made. The rules penalty for Wildly Inaccurate Passes are gone (which might encourage more desperate hail mary throws), the kick-off table’s been revised, and small players who survive being picked up and thrown down the pitch by bigger players will now earn a star player point where previously only the thrower did.
More significantly, there’s a whole new action that should let clumsy teams reliably pick up the ball. It’s called Secure the Ball and, while it ends your turn, it lets you grab the pigskin on a roll of 2+ no matter what your Agility is. You can only Secure the Ball if there are no opponents standing within two spaces of it, and “Big Guys and certain other powerful players aren’t able to perform it at all,” but it should give orcs a chance to actually try the running game if they feel like taking a break from winning games by punching their opponents to death.
A new edition of a Games Workshop game means a new boxed set, and in this case it comes with two new teams. The Tomb Kings return after being absent for a while, while the Bretonnians are a brand new contender. (Warhammer’s fantasy French folk did briefly have a team popularized in the videogame Blood Bowl 2, but when they made it to the tabletop officially they were reskinned as Imperial Nobility, so this will be a fresh interpretation of them.) The Bretonnians in particular are some lovely miniatures, with a real Monty Python goofiness to their knights and peasants.
What does this mean for the videogame Blood Bowl 3? Developers Cyanide say it’ll be updated to reflect the changes, though not until 2026.
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