Blood Bowl – DeathZone Fantasy Football Stock

We talked about the initial six teams of Blood Bowls 3rd edition and how those are represented in my collection, now it is time to go further and look what DeathZone brings to the table (top).DeathZone was the expansion for Blood Bowl, adding more complexity and options to the core game. And it did this for the first time in 1987, as well as for the 3rd edition in 1994 - this is the one we're talking about. Funnily enough, the '94 release even picks up some of the initial designs, for example spotting a huge minotaur on the cover. The most current edition of Blood Bowl got its DeathZone as well.

Just like the core game we get another batch of six different teams, and a lot - honestly, a looot - of new star players. Unlike the initial batch we do not get 3 "good" and 3 "evil" teams, but a variety of rather special rosters.

Blood Bowl – Fantasy Football Stock

It is time for some stock taking and to give you an idea of the size of this project and collection. I did the same for Necromunda a while back, and now it is time to do the same for Blood Bowl. And in this regards Blood Bowl is something very special, as it was my very first miniature wargame back in 1996.

I talked about my fascination about the Warhammer / Citadel miniatures of the 90s, and why Blood Bowl means so much to me as well. But let us set the scope for my own Blood Bowl journey, the Chaosbunker Blood Bowl League (CBBL).

As mentioned multiple times - the third edition of Blood Bowl was my first full contact with a Games Workshop game (I only had a Blood Angels Captain before and a few White Dwarfs), and this will provide the frame. It depends a bit on how you count the further editions - we are excluding the major update of Blood Bowl 2016 (which is current in Season 2). The third edition was re-released in 2001 and the 2002 handbook, with updated rules was subsequently packed with the boxed set, as an update.

Why does this matter? Well, due to the updates of the Living Rule Book to the rosters, some positions were changed, meaning you would need more or less of certain miniatures per team. Thus having an effect on my collection and the size or at least types of miniatures for each team. For this project I went with what the 3rd/4th edition gave me as an option and kept my orientation on this. In most cases the major changes were the costs of the positionals and Re-roll counters, rarely the quantity.

The core of this project is the German Starter Set, that I was gifted for Christmas in 1996 and still is in my possession and clearly used. This will be the backbone, along with some further additions to the upcoming content, especially the match reports. I came across a remaining stock of a store, where I picked up multiple team boxes, and lots and lots of blisters, with positionals, star players and big ones, moving me very close to completion in the early 2000s.

The core set provided you with the rosters of six different teams, three "good" ones and three "evil" ones, if you want to split them this way. And these are the ones, we are going to take a closer look upon in this article.