

Those tweaks were never communicated to the fans beforehand and neither were other adjustments - such as the lack of a grid or visual guide for tackle zones, why matchmaking is calculated on team value (as opposed to a separate rating for win/losses) or money counting towards a team’s value once it exceed 150,000 and more. And yet no matter where you look, be it Cyanide’s official forums, the Blood Bowl sub-Reddit, the official Australian page for real world tournaments or threads on FUMBBL, there are posts and detailed lists of instances where Cyanide has tweaked things in their own vision. Understandably, anything that goes off-script from LBR6 - the current version - would be noticed by the Blood Bowl elite. The cost to purchase new players, value of team re-rolls and apothecaries, minimum team sizes, handling of stunned players, what dictates a turnover, and ways to handicap teams with enormous bank accounts towards the end of a long-running league are all set out in the Living Rulebook. Those rules don’t just dictate the skills for individual characters either. Blood Bowl is as much about the management of luck as it is proper planning - even the campaign in BB2 tells players to organise their turn by actions ranked from safest to the most risky, to compensate for a potentially awry die roll. While the core premise is simple, winning can become a surprisingly complex formula when the full range of races, player types, abilities, agility, armour and movement values are combined. The tabletop game, which blends the races of Warhammer with the physicality and simplicity of American football - get the ball to the end zone - was first released in 1986. It’s called the Living Rulebook because Blood Bowl has been around for virtually forever and the rules keep evolving. If you ever have a question, it’s the reference point, the be all and end all.

It’s the bible for Blood Bowl, much in the same way as the Player’s Handbook or Dungeon Master’s Guide is the sole reference point for everything in Dungeons and Dragons.
