Blood Bowl Teams Strength

For many coaches, a part of what makes Blood Bowl so fun is that it is possibly the most unfair strategy game ever created. This unfairness at heart was introduced in Blood Bowl’s very first edition which had a very light tone, a fun snub to all those gamers who took themselves too seriously. Fortunately, after all the revisions to its game rules, Blood Bowl’s heart is still full of injustices.

But, by how much is this game unfair? Let’s look at the graphs below!

Teams Victory % under BB2020

In the table below, the NAF column details the percentage of each race in NAF-sanctioned tournaments. The statistics in this column are influenced by the additional inducements allocated to lower-tier teams.

The next three columns show a race’s victory % in the context of a league, at a given team value level (before the purchase of inducements).

These statistics come from the Fumbbl league, which uses BB 2020 rules. They have been compiled with the invaluable help of Gertjan Verhoeven, a blogger-analyst adept at programmatic black magic.

Équipes	NAF	1150K-	1150K à 1450K	1450K+
Amazons	54%	63%	62%	66%**
Black Orc	43%	43%	41%	48%
Chaos Chosen	44%	44%	45%	52%
Chaos Dwarf	52%	55%	53%	50%
Chaos Renegade	49%	42%	42%	36%*
Dark Elf	54%	50%	55%	58%
Dwarf	52%	54%	54%	56%
Elven Union	51%	44%	54%	60%
Goblin	40%	37%	39%	26%**
Halfling	45%	41%	42%	26%***
High Elf	55%	46%	53%	58%*
Humans	47%	55%	52%	52%
Imperial Nobility	47%	42%	46%	54%*
Khorne	48%	41%	42%	45%
Lizardmen	50%	48%	50%	51%
Necromantic Horror	50%	51%	51%	53%
Norse	51%	54%	51%	42%
Nurgle	45%	42%	42%	52%
Ogre	45%	41%	36%	39%
Old World Alliance	51%	44%	48%	41%*
Orc	51%	57%	58%	57%
Shambling Undead	52%	59%	59%	58%
Skaven	51%	54%	55%	54%
Slann	52%	0	0	0
Snotling	48%	54%	56%*	83%***
Tomb Kings	54%	52%	51%	50%
Underworld Denizens	60%	62%	64%	57%**
Vampire	46%	34%	43%	45%***
Wood Elf	54%	45%	51%	56%

* Unsurprisingly, some stats are rare at high team value – especially for races struggling to reach this level. Stats marked with an asterisk are not quite reliable and should be taken with a grain of salt.
** These stats are not reliable though they still could indicate a trend … or not.
*** These stats are included in the table so that there are no empty cells. Empty cells are distracting.

Rock-paper-scissors

At Blood Bowl, there are four main team groups. There are the Agiles, the Hybrids, the Bullies, and the Stunties. There are also some non-categorizable teams (ex: Vampires). If almost all teams naturally have what it takes to beat the Stunties, what about the others? Would one group benefit from a natural advantage over another?

The collective imagination often asserts that the Agile teams would benefit from a natural advantage over the Bullies by their ability to dodge the big bastards and circumvent them with speed. It is also of urban wisdom that the Hybrids would complicate the Agiles’ life since they reduce or cancel their speed advantage while being stronger. Similarly, the word also runs that the Bullies would see the Hybrids in their soup since they lose the advantage of strength while not being agile enough to confidently dodge away. In short, we would be in the presence of a “rock-paper-scissors” effect.

But what about it statistically? In 2017, we selected five “emblematic” races per group (yes, the notion of “emblematic” is debatable) and calculated whether any of these groups had a statistical advantage over another. Here were our results:

The Agiles (Elf, Dark Elves, Wood Elves, High Elves, and Skavens) had an average statistical advantage of 5% over the Bullies.
The Hybrids (Amazons, Humans, Undead, Necromantics, and Norses) had an average statistical advantage of 3% over the Agiles.
The Bullies (Chaos, Khemris, Dwarves, Nurgles, and Orcs) were statistically even with the Hybrids.

It is worth noting that, since then, BB2020’s ruleset seems to have been unfavorable to Agile races at low team values. As a result, it is likely that their statistical advantage over the Bullies has been eroded and that their gap with Hybrid races may have widened.

All these stats are (almost) useless. Here is why.

It is not because your chosen team is statistically better than your opponent’s that you will dominate. In the heat of a Blood Bowl game, several factors are compared between coaches, including:

The strength of their teams to their current values.
The efficiency of their team builds
Each coach’s ability to take advantage of their team.
Each coach’s ability to take advantage of the opposite team.
Each coach’s ability to generate “brain farts“.
Each coach’s dice’s performance in relation to their risk tolerance.

For example, even if Underworld Denizens are statistically one of Blood Bowl’s best teams, your ability to coach them may be abysmal. On the other hand, it is not out of the question that you could have the incredible magic touch necessary to successfully coach Nurgles. Yes, Underworld Denizens are statistically superior, but at Blood Bowl, any team can defeat any other under any circumstances with the right coach armed with good dice.

That said, if you magically coach Nurgles against masterfully coached Underworld Denizens, you will certainly row upstream. This leads us to…

Why injustices are good for your league

Imagine for a moment that you are your local league’s dominant coach and that you are masterfully coaching Underworld Denizens. It can be a disaster for your closed ecosystem if you are coaching these little mutants so well. You see, every human being aspire to great honors, but your outrageous domination forbids them any hope. Disgusted, your preys leave the league and the predator that you are runs out of sustenance. Your league is terminated.

This scenario is so common that every year, an astronomical number of newly created leagues collapse due to this recognized phenomenon. Fortunately, Blood Bowl can be unfair enough to give coaches of good will a chance to restore some balance. Thus, a conscientious dominant coach will soon choose a statistically weaker team to offer a more accessible challenge to his peers.

There are also some other reasons to love injustices…

Some coaches appreciate the challenge of digging into the game’s poorest teams to find the hidden golden nuggets. Other uncommon specimens reject any competitive spirit and prefer to throw themselves into the madness of fluff. For those, choosing a Stunty team is the pleasure of playing without the pressure of winning. In any case, as many Stunty coaches will tell you: “Winning is so overrated!”.

Also, coaching statistically weaker teams is a good source of new learning for coaches who master the game well. For them, it is an opportunity to practice extreme chaos management, serial risk assessment, mood imperviousness to bad dice, and the ability to take pleasure in insane game situations.

Conclusion

Having established that the above statistics are at least partially – if not almost completely – useless, it is understood that experimenting is the best way to get an idea of the strength of a team … at least in your own hands. Fortunately, at Blood Bowl, there is a team for every coach!