Paul Reinerfelt
Sweden
Hörby
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DeathZone is an expansion for Blood Bowl (Third Edition) but for all intents and purposes, Blood Bowl can not be considered complete without DeathZone. This is where the league rules are. This is where the extra coaching staff rules are. This is where the improvement rules (Star player points, Skills, etc.) are. This is where the secret weapons are. Do I need to continue?
By far the most important part of DeathZone, however, are the Special Play cards. The Special Play cards are intended to balance the play by giving more cards to the underdog. This system of handicap were replaced in fourth edition by tables of special plays and by Inducements in fifth edition. Special Play cards are back in fifth edition though because of demand. Cards have one important advantage over tables of special abilities and that is the sheer psychological pressure of a face-down card on the opponent's side!  Because of this, no card is totally useless, simply because the opponent does not know that your remaining card is useless, it might just be in reserve.
The Special Play cards are divided into Random Events, Dirty Tricks and Magic Items. Only one Magic Item per team per game may be taken (and it should be taken, it might be the Magic Helmet, the only permanent card in the stacks). Dirty Tricks deals with different ways of interfering with the rules and the game, giving the player "unfair" advantages (hence "dirty" tricks). The Random Events tend to deal with events around the game, they might come into play at the beginning, before first set-up or after the match is over. Sometimes Random Events happen at the line-ups or when player came too close to the edge of the board. In general, the Random Events are the most likely to increase your cash so any coach that have the opportunity should take a few. This goes double for coaches of elven teams, they need all the cash they can get.
Speaking of elves, DeathZone also adds roosters for six new teams; Chaos, Undead, Goblin, Wood Elf, Halfling and Chaos Dwarfs. The Halflings are well-known for being next to useless and BloodBowl fake history informs us about one rule violation that only Halflings do; "Making the ball all sticky and gooey because the player was eating an iced bun while handling the ball" 
The rest of the teams are good though and Undead are equipped with the strongest players on the pitch (except for some Big Guys), Mummies! Wood Elves, despite being the most fragile of the elven teams, have the most skilled (and expensive) rookie players of all teams, the Wardancer, with Block, Dodge and Leap (as well as the elven Agility and high Movement) from the outset, these guys are unstoppable!
In addition to all this, there are also Star Player cards, trophies, templates and counters for the new rules and a pad of league rooster sheets.
Overall, no player of Blood Bowl (Third Edition) should be without DeathZone!
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Rob Bradley
United States
Belleville
Wisconsin
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Blood Bowl was great but it needed League rules to thrive and ooooh did it. It turned a very good game into one of the best league-type games of all time.
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Tommy Dean
Australia
Earlwood
New South Wales
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An excellent history lesson
I agree all the fun was in this expansion...but I also understand that with the upshot of a better league and skill system that the cards could be ruiniously overpowered.
Now we have LRB 5.0...which makes the league system even better...and still has an updated use of special cards which work a lot cleaner.
But still my #1 game!
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Paul Reinerfelt
Sweden
Hörby
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ozjesting wrote: An excellent history lesson
Thank you!
ozjesting wrote:
I agree all the fun was in this expansion...but I also understand that with the upshot of a better league and skill system that the cards could be ruiniously overpowered.
I think the main problem was that the cards were pretty uneven, some were only useful in limited circumstances but others made huge differences almost all the time.
ozjesting wrote:
Now we have LRB 5.0...which makes the league system even better...and still has an updated use of special cards which work a lot cleaner.
So I've heard. I've only skimmed the 5.0 rules but they look interesting. Inducements looks like a much better handicap system. We kept the third edition rules in our league because we didn't like the fourth edition but the new one looks promising.
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