Blood Bowl 3 has orc nipple tassels, ultraviolence, and a proper release date

After many delays, Blood Bowl 3 has a proper release date. First announced in 2019 with a launch slated for the following year, a new trailer has announced that Cyanide Studio's absurd death sport will finally return to us on February 23, 2023. Talk about overtime.

The Blood Bowl videogame series is based on the Warhammer miniatures tabletop game of the same name: a hyper-violent and ridiculous parody of good old-fashioned American football. Your teams are armed and monstrous, made up of orcs, ogres, skaven, and lizardmen, and matches are more likely to end with fatalities than penalties. It can be a right old laugh, and we had a pretty good experience with it when we got some hands-on time with the game last year.

Blood Bowl has always been a little XCOM: Your games can go down the drain because of a quirk of the dice, but Cyanide is particularly emphasising the customisation options you'll get in Blood Bowl 3. You can rename your hapless and helpless players, as well as dress them up in all manner of spikes and blades. Also, visually distinct faction cheerleaders are returning from Blood Bowl 1, including orcs with weighted nipple tassels. So there's an image to follow you to the grave.

This will be the first edition of the videogame to use the latest and greatest Warhammer tabletop ruleset, and will feature 12 playable races when it hits in February. Hopefully it smooths down the rough edges and polishes the duller bits of Blood Bowl 2, a game which had potential but was hampered by endless dice rolls and a mazelike ruleset. Even if it doesn't, you can still have a merry time affixing all sorts of haunting accoutrements to your characters, I suppose.

Blood Bowl 3 releases on February 23 on Steam. You can follow development updates over on the game's website and Twitter.