Warhammer: Blood Bowl is going to miss its Christmas release window, and is now set to launch in the spring of 2027, according to an announcement by publisher Slitherine Games and developer Cyanide Studio this Saturday. The change will also push back the Blood Bowl World Cup until an unspecified new date, after the new game is in players’ hands.
Alberto Casulini, business development manager at Slitherine Games, made the announcement on stage during the Slitherine Next showcase at the Games Ground convention in Berlin, Germany, stating that the game needs longer in the oven before it’s ready. Programmer Mathieu Valero adds extra detail: “There’s been a bit of an issue on Xbox” – which has already affected the final season of the current game Blood Bowl 3 – “we’re sorting it out [but] we want to be sure to release the game on all platforms at the same time”.
This is the second time the launch of Warhammer: Blood Bowl has been pushed back. Developer Cyanide Studio originally hoped to release it in the spring this year. Then, struggling publisher Nacon sold Cyanide to Slitherine in July, and the release date was pushed back to a nebulous “Q4 2026”. With no release date announced yet, many fans were expecting a further delay.
Warhammer: Blood Bowl sits somewhere between a revised edition of the current digital client Blood Bowl III, and a sequel. The game engine is more or less the same, but it updates the game to run on the latest edition of the tabletop rules, will launch with a seven-a-side mode called Rumble, and adds two new factions, Bretonnians and Tomb Kings.
Cyanide has pledged to ensure that all previous purchases of new teams and cosmetics will be accessible in the new game on day one, and Valero says “that process needs to be 100% failure proof on all platforms, it’s not a trivial job”.
A beta playtest version of Warhammer Blood Bowl is already up and running, and Valero confirmed that it’s going to stay up until a couple of weeks before the full launch. With the beta hanging around for so long players may wonder if leagues that begin in that client will continue into the full release – Valero says that the decision to delay the launch is so fresh, there really isn’t an answer to the question yet.
Though initially launched just to check stability and find bugs, the playtest has actually gained features, including Rumble mode. Valero suggested that the new factions, Bretonnians and Tomb Kings, may appear in it, as well as some of the “juicy star players” queued up for the future. Those apparently include the doubty treeman Deeproot Strongarm, werewolf Wilhelm Chaney, and berserk Akhorne the Squirrel.
Thanks to an invitation by publisher Slitherine I was able to attend Slitherine Next live, and got some hands on time with a build containing the Bretonnians and Tomb Kings. The two teams came in the box for the most recent edition of tabletop Blood Bowl, and – as ever – Cyanide has made a faithful adaptation of them.
Tomb Kings are a slow and relentless bashy team. They rely on a core of four Tomb Guardians, Big Guys who don’t have any negative skills that risk losing their activation, to form a wall of bandage-wrapped muscle. Their main weakness is the lacklustre competence of the rest of the roster and their speed – when something goes wrong for them they struggle to respond – but overall they’re dependable.
Bretonnians are a somewhat gimmicky human faction. Their positionals are all knights with the Dauntless skill, giving every one of them a chance to match the strength of a more powerful foe when they Block, while their linemen are all peasants who can skill Wrestle, prone to dragging even skilled opponents into the mud. The Grail Knight blitzer was the first player in the game to get the new and controversial Steady Footing skill, which gives them a slim chance to avoid being knocked down.
The two teams are implemented in the graphical style Cyanide has been honing since it started working on the series. The Tomb King animation in particular is packed with character, the undead awkwardly lurching and staggering while they walk, then dropping into a corpselike rictus when they’re knocked down.
The build I played was apparently destined for Games Workshop to look at and give feedback on – this stuff’s moving. But fans have a while to wait yet before they get to kickoff.
I interviewed Valero during the previous Slitherine Next event: check out my interviews if you want to learn more about Cyanide’s priorities when it came to develop the new game, or learn about some of the challenges the team faced when it made Blood Bowl 3.
Source: Wargamer
