Blood Bowl 3, launching February 23, is a new turn-based video game based on the well-known fantasy football Warhammer board game “Blood Bowl,” faithfully using the latest edition of its rules and up-to-date content.

Blood Bowl 3 comes seven years after its predecessor, Blood Bowl 2, released in 2015. We had time to freshen things up and are confident that it was worth the wait!

With Blood Bowl 3 we had two major objectives in mind:

• Shaping a game that will please the core fans, who have been loving Blood Bowl for decades in some cases. We owe it to them to meet their expectations.
• Making Blood Bowl 3 a more accessible video game for new players who may be interested in the theme of this game – American football with orcs, dwarfs and elves beating the snot out of each other, which although a simple concept, holds many complexities as a game.

That second objective was really important to us, here’s some some more on why now is the best time to start playing Blood Bowl!

The solo campaign​

In the new solo campaign “Clash of Sponsors,” players will be invited to follow the advice of an Agent, and will join different competitions organized by sponsors while facing their best Teams and Star Players.

This theme was also chosen for gameplay-related reasons. Contrary to Blood Bowl 2, we wanted the players to be able to create their team based on any faction, giving more flexibility, and allowing players to enjoy their favorite factions or get familiarized with different ones. This way, you can learn Blood Bowl basics while enjoying the different scenarios, gather experience and get ready before meeting other players online, if that’s what you want to do. Or, you can just enjoy the solo content offline with a variation of teams, outside of simple match vs AI.

Easy to play, hard to master​

Blood Bowl is a very deep tactical game. That will never change as this is also what makes Blood Bowl… well, Blood Bowl! However, we believed a lot could be done to help new players comprehend the game. We wanted Blood Bowl 3 to have the ‘easy to play, hard to master’ tagline.

One of the first things we did to that end was to simplify the User Interface. We wanted it to be simple and clear, which is important given the variety of content. A new player could easily be confused by all the different leagues, tournaments, and ladders, each having a different set of rules. This could lead to them giving up when they could potentially be the next number one Blood Bowl champion!

With the new interface, new and returning players find what they were looking for with ease. That attention was also applied to the different menus such as team creation or formation, which are not only simpler, but will also save you a lot of time from one game to another by allowing you to save your different formations.

These are little quality of life improvements that, once put together, will make a real difference in Blood Bowl 3. On the topic of saving time, one of the major things we believed was important to change was the duration of a game.

We wanted to give more flexibility to players, so they do not feel obliged to commit to a long specific amount of time whenever they want to play a game.

For this reason, we did our best to reduce the length of a match while keeping all the aspects that give a Blood Bowl game its identity. We are quite happy with the result as we managed to cut the duration of a match in half in some cases.

One of the main features allowing this is the Turn timer. Players have less allocated time per turn, with an allocated time bank allowing some flexibility during turns that require creative thinking or more actions. For comparison, while Blood Bowl 2 gave players 4 minutes per round, Blood Bowl 3 will cut that time in half, giving 2 minutes per round, with a total of 7 minutes and 30 seconds to allocate to turns that need more than 2 minutes. This will make for more dynamic games and keep you more involved in the match even when you are not playing.

We hope all this will encourage players to try Blood Bowl 3 when it launches February 23, and open the door to discovering its depth in a smoother way, so they can see how great Blood Bowl is and what it has to offer!