Blood Bowl 3 will bring murderous American football to new consoles in 2021

Cyanide has revealed Blood Bowl 3, the latest iteration of its turn-based strategy series. The sequel will arrive in 2021 and adapt the new edition and teams from Games Workshop’s tabletop game.

You’ll be able to field teams from 12 races, including the new Black Orcs and Imperial Nobility, in both a single-player campaign and multiplayer. Cyanide has plans for post-launch updates, too.

Best described as sporting XCOM, Blood Bowl casts you as the coach overlooking a match of American football-inspired violence. The goal is to score as many touchdowns as possible, but if you can kill a star player along the way, that won’t hurt your chances of winning. 

Parisian studio Cyanide has been responsible for all of Blood Bowl’s digital adaptations to date, though it’s found a new publisher this time in Nacon, formerly known as Bigben Interactive.

Cyanide and Nacon previously collaborated on Paranoia: Happiness in Mandatory, the RPG that mysteriously disappeared from the Epic Store a month or two after release. The game suffered poor reviews, but to this day, there’s never been an official explanation for its absence - it’s still listed as ‘coming soon’ to Steam.

Blood Bowl 2, however, was a robust and entertaining adaptation. To describe the tabletop game as an inspiration would be underplaying it - Cyanide has previously adapted Blood Bowl down to the last rule, so expect a similar approach here.

Blood Bowl 3 will come to PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, Steam, and Nintendo Switch in early 2021.

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Jeremy Peel

Jeremy is a freelance editor and writer with a decade’s experience across publications like GamesRadar, Rock Paper Shotgun, PC Gamer and Edge. He specialises in features and interviews, and gets a special kick out of meeting the word count exactly. He missed the golden age of magazines, so is making up for lost time while maintaining a healthy modern guilt over the paper waste. Jeremy was once told off by the director of Dishonored 2 for not having played Dishonored 2, an error he has since corrected.