I haven't been in the Blood Bowl fold since the first game was released way back in 2009. For the uninitiated, Blood Bowl is an adaptation of American football into the Warhammer setting, and it originally existed as a board game. You play as a team comprised of one of the factions in Warhammer, such as dwarves, elves, humans, orcs, etc., and you do whatever it takes to get the ball into the end zone. Sometimes this means crafty plays and gambling that your dodge chance or the rolls of the dice will let you pull off a skillful play. Other times, it might boil down to fouling a player on the opposing team to knock out his teeth.

It's great to see how the series has evolved in the last 13 years. I remember the original title as being great, and although it lacked extravagance and frills, it had solid gameplay and a clearly enthusiastic development team behind it. Immediately upon firing up the Blood Bowl 3 beta, the passion is still present, but this time, it feels like the team also had the chance to boost the presentation and have some fun with it. From the opening cut scene of a goblin who's sure he's going to become the greatest player the sport has ever seen (before getting absolutely taken out) to the slick user interface, it is clear that the game has added plenty of polish.

The preview build I played as part of the closed beta allowed players to create a team or play the game with one of the preexisting teams to jump right into the action. Although a campaign mode is clearly going to be a part of the final release, this build was limited to "friendly" matches against the AI. Given the blood sport that is Blood Bowl, the word "friendly" is clearly putting in some work.

When creating your own team, you have control over what race it is composed of as well as what its name, emblem, and colors are. You can hire different players to fill out your roster, and assistant coaches and cheerleaders can build up your sideline. These aren't just decorative, either; the cheerleaders can be beneficial during kickoff, so they're a good use of the hard-earned coin that you accumulate by winning matches.

Each match is composed of two halves, with each team getting eight turns in a half. Players can be utilized in any order, and your team gets a number of special actions that any player can perform per turn. For example, you might spend your blitz move to combine a move and an attack to rush over and perform a "block," which really means that you're trying to send as many of their teeth to the turf as possible. A truly successful block sends your target to the ground, at which point they are vulnerable to a foul action that can injure them or completely knock them out of the match.

It becomes a violent chess game from the first kickoff. Players cannot move through the opposing team's adjacent tiles (or "tackle zone") without risking getting hit, so positioning is key. It's even more so as you try to line up blocks with a friendly team member to give an assist. Actions are resolved via dice rolls, such as result die to decide if a block results in a hit ("pow"), a push, or knocking down one or both defenders. Your turn immediately ends any time you fail a roll, such as fumbling a ball, missing a pass, or getting a player knocked down. This ends up also making you perform the lower-risk actions first and saving the potentially risky ones until the end of your turn.

It can be a lot to take in. Even the closed beta has a decent tutorial to show you the ropes, but it can be difficult to understand it all without a couple of matches under your belt. In no time, you'll end up setting up fantastic plays, and it sure feels great to hand off the ball to a quick little goblin and see him scampering into the end zone. The result of dice rolls not only show up on-screen when they occur, but they are also logged and can be brought up should you want an instant replay.

The beta build still has a few rough edges that I hope the release will resolve. It can take the AI a little while to "get started" on its turn, and in one occurrence, the AI completely locked up trying to decide which result of a roll to choose, leaving me with little choice but to give up the match. These are things to be expected in a beta, of course, and with the level of care put into the rest of the game, my sense is the development team will get it ironed out soon enough.

The camera lovingly pans across the stadium to show that it's teeming with fans and decorations, the character models are well detailed, and the UI is informative and well-designed. Even in the beta state, this feels awfully close to a finished product, barring the obvious inclusion of features such as the campaign mode. I look forward to diving into that when the game releases, if for no other reason than I think that The Brazen Barrelsmashers that I coach really have a shot at any team on the roster.

It's good to see the Blood Bowl series progressing in positive ways while still feeling like the game that I remember from all those years ago. Fancy new graphics and other fanciness aside, the underlying fun gameplay that is Blood Bowl still seems well represented in this third entry in the franchise. Here's hoping that the few remaining rough edges get smoothed out and we all get a chance to split some skulls on the field when the game releases.

Previewed on: AMD Ryzen 7 3700X, 32 GB RAM, NVidia GTX 2070 Super