Blitz Bowl is a new Blood Bowl spin-off that takes under an hour to play

Blood Bowl is a fantastic miniatures game filled with tension, excitement and drama, but it can still take a while to play through an entire match of its bloody and brutal take on American football.

That could soon change, however, with the news that Games Workshop is bringing out a Blood Bowl spin-off designed as a first step into the fantasy sport that will take less than an hour to play.

Blitz Bowl, as spotted by BoardGameGeek at New York’s Toy Fair, seems to be a more board-gamified version of Blood Bowl, with a smaller pitch (with the scoring board and round timer built in), a greater reliance on card-driven gameplay and half the number of miniatures on each side – six, rather than the 12 included in the 2016 starter set.

How it actually plays versus the full-blooded miniatures game is unclear, with Games Workshop seemingly due to properly announce the set ‘soon’.

Still, the idea of being able to wrap up a match in 40 minutes and immediately dive into another sounds like an offer we’ll be interested in taking up when it's released later this year.