What's wrong with Orcs? They're not high tier, I get that. But putting them in line with Vampires and Dwarves?

Hang on.... Whaaaat? The "sophistication" in your moves is that you CAN plan for commiting players to matchups depending on player, matchup settings and whatever other factors are in the balance. The sophistication is that I have Griff Oberwald in my hand in the last round and that I want to make sure that he will have a major impact in the matchup I'm going to commit him in, which usually takes a chunk of calculation from my side along with prediction of my opposition's next move. And hope that my opponents' respective star players are either commited elsewhere or do not blank out what I just did. The fouling mechanisms just takes this capability, throw it into the fire, and ditch the aches into Mount Doom, by effectively stripping you of a card at random. You cannot plan anything any longer since you don't know what's going to be in your hand when you start your turn again. Fouling is a cheaty way (in the context of gaming in general, I'm not talking about the theme in Foul Play here) to force your opponents to discard their best cards and in some cases leave them with nothing in hand but linemen or stuff that won't do anything. I am curious to see people's opinions about the expansion and I can definitely understand some people enjoy some of the mechanisms in it more than we do. However I find completely mindblowing to see people claim that Fouling would add another level of strategy to this game. It's not, it NEGATES strategy, that's all it does. Even if you mean the psychological game of being forced to play your stars by fear of discarding them next round, I mean I fail to see how players can think of this as a satisfying way to play a game. If you're in for a randomness extravaganza sure, by any means, but if you're gathered with friends that are expecting a bit of strategy in a game then I really don't know what you can find that appealing with it.

No worries. Sometimes we miss out things in the rules too even if it's blatantly clear

OK, I thought it was going to be tricky to answer this, but I found out that it's not The rules actually say that the referee moves an amount of space that equals the PRINTED standing star power. Even if your player has a -1 from the disease token, his PRINTED star power is still the original value.

Agreed. For our part we will need a couple of more games to be able to settle on which rules will be kept or not. Feels like something has to go. I wish it was Fouling, but unless I can photoshop away the symbol on the player cards and find a way to compensate for it, it looks like we are stuck with it as long as we want to play with the new teams :-/

If you think the game is more enjoyable this way then go for it by any means My point however is that you are not obliged to take this Warhammer background full on if you don't want to. It's fantasy football, period. Then whether Chaos Dwarves and Orcs share animosity in the Warhammer stories, or if the Reikland Reivers are completely despised by Dwarves in the Warhammer stories I have no idea about and find this totally uninteresting from the perspective of playing the game. I could definitely find myself reading some trivia about the world behind BBTM, but that would be all. Again, throw as much flavor and background as you want into BBTM. I personally won't because I don't think it brings anything to the game experience. I respect that other persons do not share this view, but on the other hand I wouldn't want the players to become too elitists and strict about what can be done or not because of this Old World background, especially on these forums. If it stays within your playgroup, fine. Just don't want newcomers to think that they need to dig into the Warhammer trivia in order to play this game. Which is not what you mean, I know, but you see what I mean, lol. I have to say though that the downside you mentioned where you say that all teams would be all-rounders really seems marginal to me, because the chances of drafting the star players you need to make your team completely all around is near zero anyway, considering the amount of players available, the number of star players you would need to draft to do this etc. Another thing in my mind is that I don't think this all-around aspect you mention would be a downside at all, in fact. Teams keep their playing spirit/style, they would just be complemented by players who can do other things than your linemen. Plus it would give a serious hand to those teams which are completely trapped in some subpar sets of abilities (or lack of) compared to the other teams. Still, I don't think you would "break" a team by adding Jordell Freshbreeze to your Goblins, even if that sounds like heresy to Warhammer afficionados. Anyway, play the game the way you think is best.

I don't think so. Skills are just the icons on the card, the text below refers to abilities, including come into play abilities like Spree. So no, you can't chain Spree abilities. Your extra player will execute his skills if he has any (before the player you commited at the first place) but that's it. You should ignore the come into play abilty. Abilities on the extra player are still valid thorough the game, though. Just not when you execute Spree.

Actually scratch that. My biggest hope is that the future expansions will EXPAND on the game experience rather than restricting the choices of the players. I want mechanisms that diversify my plays and I want new options and ways for my team to compete with my opposition rather than forcing me to give way matchups and handing it all over to luck. I want to follow the playstyle of my team but I also want to be encouraged for giving it my own direction. After all I'm the manager. Above all I want the game to reward players for taking a risk rather than making the players dread the consequences of even the slightest play. I want punishment to be fierce but I want most plays to be worth taking the risk. I want card synergies rather than card disruption. Finally I don't want the game to take any longer time to play than what it does currently.

Exactly, this player is absolutely insane against low power teams. In a tournament this guy can spread mayhem across the teams.

My only wish is that I wont have to wait 2 years for a new expansion to be released. I don't really care about which new teams are introduced, however I would like FFG to keep releasing content for the old teams, especially for those who need it.

The latter. The effect only triggers when you commit players to the matchup the ref is at.

Nope Whether the opposing players is standing or already down is irrelevant, you still roll for a tackle. The use of the tackling skill is by definition a tackle. Injuring a player is a subset of the possible results for tackling a player. So yeah, you get the extra tackle. And btw, you get the extra tackle for EVERY TIME he succeeds. Yup, he gets infinite tackle up to the point when he fails one.

We just had our first game with the expansion. We played a 5 players game with all three new teams, Wood Elves and Humans, and all of the additional rules as described in the rules book. We all agreed that it was too much, a lot of things were going on everywhere, and that it took far too long to play the game, 4 hours I think, granted we were 5 and some of us really like to take our time... On the other hand, I think we all enjoyed the game despite the fact some players -including me- were a bit reluctant about the randomness. It turned out to be like I said previously, but I wanted to observe the new mechanisms even at the price of my capacity to strategize. Before I go and explain what we thought about Foul Play, I need to say that we assumed that all the penalty cards saying "next time you would draw a <insert reward>, discard one of them" would apply in the next scoreboard phase, as opposed to affecting the current payouts. Penalties resolve once all payouts are stacked in piles before revealing them, so that's AFTER you draw the cards. If you think we did this wrongly please give a shout. It felt strange that some penalties would not apply straight away as you could intentionally decide not to go for whatever payout type because there's a penalty sitting there and waiting to remove it from you. None of us went off with the penalties thingy, still we managed to draw 3/4 of the deck somehow. We only defied the stadium regulations a couple of times, one because of a misplay and one (me) because it would help me to win a matchup on the spot. Otherwise nobody dared applying skills in a stadium having the corresponding limitation. We liked the additonal payouts from the stadiums. It made us think more about where to commit players. The "2 strength or more" stadium should have been "3 or more" though. 2 or more is 95% of all players and some teams don't even have 1 power players, so this particular stadium felt a bit like a miss. Because of the steeper rules, we were sort of forced to rationalize more and put our heads around the sequencing of things a lot more than what we normally in with this game, which added further to the time. The yellow card mentions about the replenish phase, which nobody except me knew about as there was no reason for me to even mention its name before. The resolution of the faceup cheating tokens, when to apply disease tokens, the referee mechanism etc. there are MANY more instances when you need to think about which phase you´re currently in and how it interacts with all of the upgrades and so on. Overall, we think it was a bit too much. The game needs to flow nicely. Fouling as a skill is horrible and does a ton of grief, but I am biased because I absolutely hate discard strategies in any game. Still, I did not want this aspect in a game like BBTM where the cards you draw are already random and where you can force your opponent to play the wrong card at the wrong matchup by baiting him or faking your interest on rewards you are not intending to go for anyway. It feels like there were ways already to force your opponents' hand without having the need to hard-draw one card and force a discard. It led to tensions in our playgroup. Most of us like to keep a strong card for the last play and the Fouling skill nerfs this strategy by removing said card. So yeah, I feel a bit robbed by this skill, as including the new teams forces me to play with this mechanism. The penalties that sticked around were really cool. The "no penalty" card was cool too, as it gave you a hope that you could get away with the penalty. Red card and yellow cards were really powerful as expected. The loss of fans really affected our total scores. The winner ended up with 45 or so, which is pretty low compared to our previous games sans the expansion. We liked the referree more than I though we would, because it introduced a new element of strategy in the game, e.g. knowing when to commit players to a matchup in order to move him and therefore force players to get sent off or managers to get a penalty. The downside though, which kind of made the thing fall a tad flat tbh is that you need to commit players across more matchups to get a chance to get access to matchups where he stands, which is something not every team can afford. But when we could it was fun. I´m just still sceptical regarding the referree as it really interfered with my plans as a coach. I was either hoping that this **** ref would move away from my matchups, or that I wished he had been where I´m at to take away the whistles I had on my players. I did not like the various restrictions in the game, following up on what I said earlier, so that I´m not going to expand on that any further. Stadiums, Fouling etc. This being said, I think it all comes down to your attitude towards the game. If you can adapt and accept the randomness factor then you can enjoy this. If you don't want anything to spoil your capacity to make choices then this is not for you. You see, I prefer CHOOSING to get a penalty for applying a forbidden skill at a stadium rather than suffering a random effect from the game or getting fooled by an opponent. I like the "you play cards, I play cards" aspect of the original BBTM game so to me moving on to a "I try to play cards, you try to play cards" is not an obvious move to make. About the teams. I played Nurgle (and lost). I did not find the disease tokens being as double-edged as some people here said earlier, because I made sure that I was in control of the matchup and did not have to commit more players to it if these tokens sat in midfield. The team upgrades were really weak though. The one making your linemen stand up lost relevance very quickly as I aquired freebooters and got rid of said rotter linemen. The additional disease tokens from the upgrade can be nice but you are limited to 6 of them, and if you compare these upgrades to the ones your opponents get then you can feel a difference in game impact. Toying with one or two disease tokens was only situationally good. I found that the Beast of Nurgle was cool but hindered me more than helping me because of the Pestigors, also because I wanted to draft players with the passing skill as a way to remedy to the lack of... passing skill in my roster. All in all, I am not sure about this team. It was the weakest of the three by far for that particular game, but I have to say, also because the Goblins were present and sucked in all the disease tokens especially at tournaments, making them totally inefective since they have players ignoring player power upon tackling them. If the Goblins are not around then maybe it gets easier for the Nurgle team. I wouldn't go as far as saying they are weak and in pair with Vampires or Dwarves, but I haven't experienced a good sequence of play with them. No particular interaction or synergy, and an overall lack of firepower against the other teams. The Goblins were really cool and nasty, but also very random. They are a huge chunk of the randomness effect in the new expansion.The bombardier player, the short fuse upgrade making you down all standing players if you roll a tackling sysmbol etc. They had a major impact on the game. Not sure yet if they are a top tier team, but I liked the potential. It felt however like they replaced Orcs and therefore made them obsolete somehow. Hoping that I´m wrong. The Chaos Dwarves were impressive. I really liked the fact they could down a player, which would execute his down skill, for getting an additional tackling skill. Synergy-wise, they felt really strong, The best team of the three, at least most stable than the others, I like their players, they have insane star players, I like their upgrades. Really a team I would like to play with. I think the new mechanisms put some teams ahead of the rest. I can plainly see Chaos being more competitive now as they can collect cheating collects in a far more effective way. I think top-mid tier teams will stil be able to compete, but I pity Dwarves and Vampires, No idea how to compete with that, unless you intend to surf over the wave of randomness and hope for a cheaty victory.

The rules say "When any player is either commited or moved to a matchup with one or more disease token at midfield, immediatly assign that player all of those disease tokens". Seems pretty clear to me that the above occurs BEFORE the player applies his skills and come into play abilities.

8 players in two groups is probably better than 6 players from a pure game balance perspective. 3 players is not a good number at all for this game, as the risk of only getting one matchup for your team (bar the tournament) is just too high. Also, we thought that running the game with 6 players in two groups would be the same as running a 3 players game from a duration perspective, the idea being that the games rom both groups were being run in parallel. Turned out we were wrong as it took us 3 hours to end the session. The time it takes to re-seat people and sort out the groups takes a good chuink of that total. Even worse, there is waiting time too as one group is always behind the other one. I thought originally that the last round would feature all the teams together for a big FFA, but I changed my mind in the end as I saw how late it was already.

The balancing issues or lack of playtesting is one thing. I personally don't think the game is so unbalanced between the teams due to the sheer luck factor in the game anyway, apart from two of them which clearly are at the bottom of the ladder, and potentially Nurgle as the third team if my concerns are confirmed. Aside from that any team can win so I'm not complaining too much about that. What bothers me however is that some thoughts (analysis phase) have been given to remove payouts from players, to negate skills in matchups and to punish people heavily by taking a risk in the game. I don't understand how people could sit at this workshop and think how cool that would be to implement. I would have largely preferred a meteorite crashing on a stadium every round at random, downing all players at once instead of that **** referee giving you penalties which just take your roster and your upgrades, toss them in the air and wait them to land before throwing napalm on them. This to me is nothing to do with playtesting per say, although one could argue that playtesters should probably have said: "man, the game is really tough on the coaches now, are you sure this penalty deck is not too punishing?". I just want to hear from one person here when would be appropriate to defy the stadium regulations and get a penalty on purpose. Tell me ONE situation where this would be the optimal play to do. I don't want to hear "at the very last round for your last commited player in the Blood Bowl Tournament so that you can win the tourney and the game as well on the spot" because that's crap as a reason. Tell me instead when you would intentionally suffer a penalty during a normal game of BBTM and how you can possibly take the risk to gather these cards in a normal game of BBTM. Bearing in mind the destruction creep in this penalty deck. Tell me also in what circunstances you would prefer to commit a player with tackling skill to a matchup with a stadium forbidding the tackling skill instead of a matchup without the restriction. Again "at the last round just to add his power to your team at that matchup" doesn't make it as a reason. I want to hear about real motivation for doing so during a game before you know you can win a matchup. Bar all marginal situations. When I heard about the direction for this expansion I thought cool, they are going to introduce cards or abilities that alter other abilities or hidden cards that allow you to respond to abilities or skills. Maybe even introduce cards that allow a player to cheat in and execute a skill but at the risk of getting sent off or getting additional cheating tokens. Use that referee to indicate where such penalty is at greatest risk, maybe. You could introduce weather cards and upgrades that help your team to become resilient against weather condition, etc etc. I mean, it adds to the luck factor in the game, but you still keep your capacity to decide how to play your team without fear that it will backfire on you so much that you lose the game.

I have received my copy and will be testing the new rules next week with my playgroup. I have early thoughts about what I've seen, bearing in mind the total lack of testing, though. They are the same as the ones I had originally about the expansion when they previewed the stadiums. All of these new rules turn the game into a randomness feast. I like randomness, I like dices, I like drawing cards, but I can see how these new mechanisms will generate huge plays coming from nowhere with no direct player skill implication, that will frequently ruin your attempts to strategize around your own plays. I have a problem with that, but more importantly I have some players in my playgroup who enjoy BBTM but already dislike the high luck factor in it (even before Foul Play) and these guys may turn out hating on these new rules. I have to take that into account. I am going to test every rule, but I feel like nor stadiums, referee and penalty decks will stay very long in our games. I think they add nothing to the game (apart from randomness, which could be a reason to include these rules btw if all you're looking for is a chaotic session) and actually destroy the experience more than contribute to it. The biggest problem is that some players have the new penalty skill. What if you don't want to play with penalties then? Looks like either you are forced not to play with these teams, or you need the full randomizer set to your game. Meh. I like the Goblins a lot. I really love the come into play effect and I really love their star players. The Chaos Dwarves look fine but are more of a regular team with no particular flavor. I would't mind drafting them, but it wouldn't make me jump off my seat directly. The Nurgle team has a very similar feel as the Vampires. I feel like this team can completely fall flat if you can't get your tokens out and use them to the best of their capabilities. I haven't really checked at the team upgrades yet. Penalties. I don't want to bash too much on this expansion, but removing payouts/rewards is probably the worst thing I can possibly think of introducing in a game. The game is fun because you can upgrade your team. Look, Rob struggles with his Vampires and managed to get a star player as a payout as he really needs to get hold of one of these Vampire star players to get his team's head above the water. To win the matchup he had to do whatever and got a penalty for it. Payout phase, he gets what he wants. But hey, the penalty removes it straight away. How FUN is this for Rob? Have you ever felt what it's like to end a round with no reward while everybody else is drafting upgrades and a billion star players? I really don't like stadiums. I like the thematics but I hate adding restrictions of that kind to the matchups. It ends up nerfing a ton of teams and boosting teams that shouldn't have gotten away otherwise. Example. I play Wood Elves. Every round the two stadiums disabling Pass and Sprint skills are drawn. That's virtually two matchups I have to give away for trying to maximize my team's overall potential. I have 50% less choices in the game just for that. Same example, Vicky plays Chaos. Well, good for her, she can go in there with no restriction on her team. Cool. Oh sure, you can "cheat" and apply the skill despite the stadium's limitation. Now would you really take a minute to evaluate the risk of drawing one of these "remove payout" cards against the fact that thanks to the skill you "might" end up winning the matchup (and therefore potentially lose its reward anyway). Something does not compute. What about this Red Card? Does the game really need cards that powerful to remain interesting? So we remove your payouts, but we also remove your previous payouts? This is absolutely mindblowing to me, and will freeze many players capacity to make choices by fear of something horrible happening to them (read: lose the game on the spot). The worst is, I don't even think I'm exagerating. All in all, still bearing in mind I haven't played the expansion, it seems like it will introduce chaos more than fun. If you are a player like me who likes to diversify his strategies rather than firing rockets at them, then it might end up being a disappointment. I love bashing at people and destroying people's strategies even if it implies a bit of luck, but this expansion seems to bring this luck factor to a far greater level than what I can actually enjoy. OK that you have to draw from a deck with different levels of penalties, but it feels to me like I would never put myself in a position where I need to draw from this deck after what I've seen was in it. I will test and revert on that as for whether my fears were confirmed or if the game plays out better than I thought it would. Otherwise yeah, more teams is a good thing and that's almost all I would have expected from FFG for this new expansion. Sudden Death seemed more solid with regards to keeping the base game to its original level of balance/feel. It seems Foul Play will even out everything due to raw randomness and that's a shame, as the coaches' tactical choice don't have the same weight anymore as they can be blanked out completely due to the mechanisms of this expansion. We will see.

No, thematics around this are truly awful. Impact on game balance has been discussed above already (and I fully agree with what has been said so far), but thematically it does not make any sense to me to restrict the players you can draft to your own race. The drafting mechanism is among the best things in this game and also replicates what you would find in normal sports. These are not nations, these are teams from different cities across the old world. Game-wise, it allows you to spread out your strengthes by including players that are good at things you're normally bad at (which is crucial for certain teams), and helps you palliating your own weaknesses by making your team more resilient to race-specific issues. See, when I hear about such restriction, I don't feel like it would be fun to implement at all. Fine if you want to test a specific race's capabilities with no foreign player implication, but from a gameplay and thematic perspective, I'm all for mixing up players. **** man, tossing in star players in matchups from the same race as your opponent must be the most hysterical part of the game. Also don't forget the drafting mechanism works with a dedicated deck. Is it so bad to draft an Orc player for your Chaos team? I would actually try to implement the exact opposite to what you are trying to do. I wouldn¨t mind at all mixing all star players deck all together. Who cares? It would allow some crazy combinations. Component wise there is no limitation to such thing. You could also keep all 4 decks separate but every time you draft a player you would decide which deck to draw the cards from, or several of them if you draft more than one. That to me sounds like a thrilling thing to do. Yours feels like a tough restriction to the game that takes away some fun rather than adding to it, it's somethng I would have come up with myself back in the days when I played this game with the minis by fear of mixing things too much and not being able to recognize a player's team. In this game, no. You put your team token next to it, that's it. But I mean, do as you want if that's how you want to enjoy the game. I just wanted to give my opinion, if I was in your playgroup I would be firmly opposed to play the game like this.

Yeah, we tried a very similar configuration with 6 players spread across two groups. The teams would rotate then every round so the groups would be different every time. We did not like it. It was messy if not chaotic to handle, in terms of player seating and reach to the game components. Material-wise, I reckon there was plenty enough to support 6 or even more players. We never ran out of anything. Especially now that we have a fourt division with Foul Play, people should have access to upgrades and star players. I would play this game with 5 players max imho. 4 is best, 5 is okay, 6 felt like it was too much.

Any news about the release date for Crown of Destinies? The sites says 11th of July, which is.... today..

Well thank you! I wouldn't call myself talented or anything as I really struggled doing these with virtually no time to spend for it, but I would say that any painting job is better than the original colors. Heck, I have a friend who just put a layer of black paint with gloss shade over every tan monster and it looks twice better than the original Yeah, I was also aware of that, but it's tough to get hold of the foam trays without having to buy the bag as well. The trays alone are on the catalogue but it seems like most retailers only import the transport bag, even empty sometimes. I was thinking naively that foam trays could potentially be found in building stores or something, but it doesn't look like the material is used anywhere else than transport (I was thinking isolation jobs).

Any idea if they have retailers in Europe? I've been looking to death on the web, for some reason it's not something I can get hold of easily. Anyhow, The problem I have with these pics is that the boxes themselves are freaking ugly and difficult to store, at least for people like me who don't have a gaming room or a dedicated place to put everything in. I have normal book shelves and that's it. I also travel a lot (by train) and cannot carry huge boxes of that size with me. The price tag is probably something too, but I admit that I haven't checked. My current storage solution is far from optimal, but the point is to use the original game boxes to the best of their capability. The plus is that any of these boxes looks way better and is much easier to store (as per my personal situation). So this is what I have inside the boxes. I split everything in two, first the "active" components, which is what I´m currently using for the upcoming sessions and what I'm actually carrying with me, secondly the stuff that stays at home. The reason is that I want to limit space and weight for travelling reasons. So yeah, I do this job of extracting the material I need while setting up the next sessions, with the help of a tracking sheet to make sure nothing is forgotten. Works well so far. - Trollfens box (small size): This is where I store all of the cards/tokens components I need for the next session, all in zip plastic bags. We turn the lock of the box upside down on the table and put all the tokens in piles. Decks are ready so setup takes no time. - LoR box (medium size): Here go all the booklets, the tiles and the monsters I need (not on the picture) wrapped in tissue ton avoid friction. I put all the tiles together for a given encounter, so setting up the map takes no time. Now only used for storage (these boxes never move and stay on a shelf at home) - Base Game box: This is where I have all the tiles and terrain objects, all in zip plastic bags for sorting purpose. The bigger tiles are on their own at the bottom of the box, sorted numerically too. I find this very practical and there is a lot of space left for new tiles. - LoW box (small): Where all the unused cards go. Note the Rumor cards are there - SoN box (medium size): the rest of the unused components and the other million of threat tokens. It looks messy on the pictures, but the plastic bag solution is in fact extremely practical as it virtually removed the need to have compartiments for the components. Bluntly put, do your sorting with the help of these bags, and throw everything into a box or two and you're set. Then yeah sure, the "players tray" posted above is really nice and tidy, it's just that I can't travel with that. - So where are the minis? Yeah, cause they don't fit basically. Actually they do, but then the boxes would explode. So I just have two separate boxes containing the miniatures (I have many of them painted now), with all minis standing except a few who are just too tall. When we have a session coming our way I pre-select the monsters like any OL would do and just move what I need to the LoR box. Put together and my minis I'm currently painting on top, all on top of a shelf Let's say that the above is the best I could come up with, considering the amount of required practicality against the effort and required storage.

Just wait until your heroes buy Ice Storm, use the basic Stalker bow (Black Widow I think) or anything with this condition inprinted on it, then base their whole strategy around it. All of my heroes have chosen to buy bows so everybody can shoot, some of them for ridiculous range or damage. They just need to snipe everything and alongside Immobilized there are encounters that are just game over for me as the OL unless I manage to draw a very specific set of OL cards (Dark Charm for instance) to put me back into the game. It's not like that 100% of the time, but if heroes can control range and have these weapons available then it is really hard for my monsters to reach them, if not impossible. So you agree that it shouldnt be buffed then? Yeah I think you correctly read my mind lol

I assume that's after winning encounter 1 as the OL, which is a huge difference. My view exactly. Otherwise you're screwed.

Just wait until your heroes buy Ice Storm, use the basic Stalker bow (Black Widow I think) or anything with this condition inprinted on it, then base their whole strategy around it. All of my heroes have chosen to buy bows so everybody can shoot, some of them for ridiculous range or damage. They just need to snipe everything and alongside Immobilized there are encounters that are just game over for me as the OL unless I manage to draw a very specific set of OL cards (Dark Charm for instance) to put me back into the game. It's not like that 100% of the time, but if heroes can control range and have these weapons available then it is really hard for my monsters to reach them, if not impossible.