Blood Bowl Pre-Season League

Blood Bowl League Rules: Playing in Halves

House rules for running a league where each fixture is **one 8-turn half** instead of a full two-half game. Based on Season 3 (Third Season Edition) core rules, adapted for shorter sessions.

1. Game Length

- Each league fixture consists of **one half only (8 rounds / 8 turns per coach)**.

- There is no half-time break, no reset of Team Re-rolls mid-game, and no second kick-off.

- The coach who receives the ball is determined by the normal pre-match sequence (coin flip / higher Fan Factor, etc.) — whoever wins the roll-off chooses to Kick or Receive, exactly as in a normal game.

2. Rationale for Coaches

- Fewer turns means less time for a losing team to come back, so variance is higher per fixture. Consider running each pairing as **two fixtures (each coach receives once)** across the season and combining results, so kicking/receiving imbalance evens out — see Section 6.

3. Team Re-rolls

- Teams start the fixture with their full complement of Team Re-rolls, used exactly as normal. Since there's no second half, **unused re-rolls are simply lost at the end of the half** (same as they would be lost at full-time in a normal game).

4. Injuries, Casualties, and Star Player Points

- All Casualty, Armour, and Injury rolls apply exactly as normal.

- **SPP (Star Player Points)** are awarded per the normal rules (Touchdown, Casualty, MVP, etc.) — do not halve these, since fewer turns already reduces opportunities to earn them.

- **MVP** is still awarded once per team per fixture as normal.

5. Winnings and Post-Game Sequence

- Run the full Post-Game Sequence as normal (Winnings, King injuries recovering, Aging/season effects if used, etc.), just skip anything that explicitly refers to "half-time" events (there isn't one).

- Gold winnings are halved

6. Balancing Kick/Receive Advantage

Because there's no second half to "even out" who received first, receiving is a bigger advantage in a half-only format. Two common fixes:

Double Fixture (recommended for season standings):**

- Each pairing plays twice across the season: once with Team A receiving, once with Team B receiving. Combine touchdowns/casualties across both halves for the league table, similar to a home-and-away leg.

7. Tied Games

- If the score is level at the end of the half, treat it as a **draw** for league point purposes (no sudden-death overtime), unless your league specifically wants a decisive result for playoffs/cup rounds — in which case, play a single extra round (turn) each as a shoot-out, per the standard Season 3 tie-breaker approach used in playoff/cup formats.

8. Scheduling

- Because each fixture is roughly half the length of a full game, you can typically schedule **two fixtures per session** (e.g., one league match against each of two different opponents, or the "double fixture" home-and-away pair from Option A above) rather than one full game.

- Keep the same round-based time limit approach as normal league play (e.g., 2 weeks per round) — just note each round may now represent two half-fixtures instead of one full game if you're using Option A.

9. What Stays the Same

Everything not mentioned above — skills, kick-off table, weather table, fouls, inducements, Star Players, roster building, advancement rolls — is unchanged from the standard Season 3 rules. This is purely a change to *game length and how a single fixture is structured*, not a new ruleset.

---

*These are unofficial house rules, not an official Games Workshop or NAF publication.