Blood Bowl 3 is coming next year

News
By published

The release of the new Warhammer-themed football game will coincide with an overhaul of the board game ruleset.

The Blood Bowl games are one of the more amusingly bizarre examples of Warhammer-branded videogames. It's basically American football played by teams of dwarves, elves, trolls, humans, and other races drawn from the Warhammer Fantasy setting. It's as silly as it sounds, ridiculously violent, and very niche: We included Blood Bowl 2 in our 2017 rundown of the best sports games on PC, noting that its commitment to dice-driven rules make it "simultaneously one of the most frustrating and entertaining games" on the list.

All of which leads us to the point that Blood Bowl 3 is in development at Cyanide Studios, the maker of the first two games in the series, and will be published by Bigben Interactive. Its release will coincide with the launch of an updated board game edition that will feature all-new rules, which will hopefully address at least some of James' complaints in his 2015 Blood Bowl 2 review, particularly its reliance on dice rolls for even the simplest actions, and the fundamental opaqueness about how it all works.

"The basic pitch is kooky, turn-based fantasy football, but what’s actually there feels needlessly convoluted and difficult to parse for newcomers," he wrote. 

Details are obviously non-existent at this point but Bigben said that more will be revealed "in the coming months." Blood Bowl 3 is expected to be out in 2020.   

Andy Chalk
Andy Chalk
US News Lead

Andy has been gaming on PCs from the very beginning, starting as a youngster with text adventures and primitive action games on a cassette-based TRS80. From there he graduated to the glory days of Sierra Online adventures and Microprose sims, ran a local BBS, learned how to build PCs, and developed a longstanding love of RPGs, immersive sims, and shooters. He began writing videogame news in 2007 for The Escapist and somehow managed to avoid getting fired until 2014, when he joined the storied ranks of PC Gamer. He covers all aspects of the industry, from new game announcements and patch notes to legal disputes, Twitch beefs, esports, and Henry Cavill. Lots of Henry Cavill.