The Wood Elves are coming to Blood Bowl 3, the digital game of fantasy football set in the Warhammer world. Wargamer got a quick hands-on with the nimble new players ahead of their introduction in the game’s latest season pass, which goes live on March 12 at 6pm.
Tabletop Blood Bowl players will know the Wood Elves as one of the premier agility factions in the game, with almost every player sporting a healthy Agility 2+. They’re hard to pin down, but when they do take a hit, their paltry armor values mean they are all but guaranteed to take injuries.
They don’t have the luxury of throwing away players willy-nilly, either. Every Wood Elf is expensive, and while you get what you pay for – Wardancers, who start with Dodge, Block, and Leap, are incredibly nimble and hard to screen out of defensive cages – it’s tricky to build a team that doesn’t either scrimp on positional players or on rerolls.
It’s been a long time since Wargamer played Blood Bowl 3 regularly for our Blood Bowl 3 review, so our skills are very rusty, and our demo game with Cyanide Studios’ brand manager Clément Nicolin is a little one-sided. Still, it gives us plenty of opportunities to admire the combat animations as our team members are knocked unconscious.
Along with the new team – available immediately to anyone who pays for a subscription to this season’s Blood Pass, and for everyone else who makes it to the end of the experience track before the season finishes – a number of quality of life features are coming to BB3 with this update, as well as bug fixes, and updates to account for Games Workshop’s most recent errata to the Blood Bowl rules.
Some of the changes are aimed squarely at league administrators, joining a growing number of league admin tools currently available in beta. It will be possible to adjust the list of Prayers to Nuffle that are active for a league, for example to deactivate prayers which automatically trigger when there’s a large difference between Team Values. This should make it easier for league organisers to run leagues which impose handicaps on the starting value of specific, high-powered teams.
When creating teams, it will be possible to create a custom team with an unlimited budget. As well as making this team as large as you like, you’ll be able to add new skills to the team at creation. This will let you experiment with any teams you like in friendly games, and make it much easier for custom leagues to run with experienced teams. These pre-buffed teams will be excluded from the game’s official multi-player ladder.
That ladder is one route into the BB3 World Championship, but not the only one. This season Cyanide will be providing 38 golden tickets to selected community leagues and competitions which will also provide entry. The Team Value cap for the league is dropping from 1,800 to 1,600: “Different teams have an advantage at different Team Values”, Nicolin says.
The introduction of the Wood Elves, one of the most effective agility teams in Blood Bowl, might shake up a meta that is packed with strong aggressive teams.
Big fan of Wood Elves? Make sure you check out our Warhammer Wood Elves guide as well – they’re every bit as fragile, nimble, and tricksy in Warhammer: The Old World as they are on the gridiron!