Foul Play

These are your baselines; unchanged from previous editions, we can see that Dirty Player is clearly the best thing for damage, while Sneaky Git makes no difference to damage at all, but is great for keeping you on the pitch. 

In Blood Bowl 2025, a new Devious skill has been added; Lone Fouler. For those who are unaware, the wording is:

So, what matters here is how this works in practice:

The obvious application of this is as a damage multiplier, re-rolling armour to get more breaks, however, it can also be used to minimise sendings off. This leads to two main applications:

• Re-roll any Armour Roll that doesn't break armour (max damage)

• Re-roll only Doubles that don't break armour (minimum sendings off)

Even better,  because providing an Offensive Assist is optional, you can use Lone Fouler even when you have friends; just watch out for the Defensive Assists, as they will still stop the skill working. 

So how does it measure up? Well, it's safe than a plain foul, and will also do marginally more damage, but even at its safest, Lone Fouler isn't as safe as Sneaky Git.

On the other hand, it's the best skill in the game for breaking armour. It's miles better than a plain foul, and slightly better than Dirty Player, unless you are attempting to Lone Foul a Treeman, which is both rare and silly. 

In terms of removals, it's not as powerful as Dirty Player, but again, it's much better than having nothing, and it's also safer than Dirty Player.

One interesting thing with the re-roll is that you start to see very different performances based on different Armour Values; it's brilliant at breaking at low levels, but not quite so good against higher Armour Values. 

So, on one level, it looks like Lone Fouler sits nicely between Dirty Player and Sneaky Git, not quite as good as either, but a credible alternative with the benefit of flexibility. For this alone, I think it's worth having. 

Unfortunately, that's not where this stops.

Goblins might just be a Tier 1 team now. 

A bold statement? Well, amongst all the other things they got out of Blood Bowl 2025 edition, they happen to have access to the best removal tool in the game. with just a single skill up.*

So why am I so excited about the Ooligan learning Lone Fouler? It's because of the interactions between Dirty Player and our newest (and soon to be most hated) skill.

There's some complex stuff about bell curves and conditional probabilities going on here, but if you re-roll anything that doesn't break armour, and prioritise armour breaks with Mighty Blow, this is what you get.

A frankly frightening sequence of numbers. 

In case you missed it, I am going to flag the probability of removal once more:

Those numbers are, frankly, nuts. And there's a reason.

Do you remember Dirty Player + 2? The scourge of Blood Bowl 2020?** Well, it's back, and worse than ever:

Combining Lone Fouler with Dirty Player gives you fouling which is:

• more likely to break armour than Dirty Player + 2

• less likely to result in a sending off than Dirty Player + 2

• more likely to do damage than Dirty Player + 2

Granted, you won't be able to improve your odds by adding in assists, so getting +2 on the Injury Roll against a downed Treeman is going to be impossible, but the point is that you can do this damage without repositioning half your team. 

No need to give up field position to maximise your foul. 

Just one lone Goblin Ooligan with a simple little skill up. 

Lone Fouler is very good, and I'd argue it's worth taking over either Sneaky Git or Dirty Player, but if you can combine the two? It's as damaging as a Sneaky Git Deathroller from BB 2020. 

This is all probably fine, as getting two Devious skills on a single player is really hard.*** After all, with the new rules for random skills in a league, you only have a 30% chance of randoming one of the two after only three Star Player Points, so I'm sure this will never happen.

So, is this a fair comparison?

Probably not. Ultimately, most fouls aren't committed without assists, which means that in reality, it's not fair to campare an AV7+ Dirty Player foul with an AV7+ Lone Fouler one. I mentioned before that one benefit of Lone Fouler is not having to give up your field position to foul, but in reality, it's quite normal to get one or two Offensive Assists. With that in mind, this might be a fairer comparison:

As soon as you add in even a single Offensive Assist, Dirty Player is looking better again:

• Dirty Player with one Offensive Assistis essentially as good at breaking armour as Lone Fouler at lower AVs, and much better against higher AVs

• Dirty Player with one Offensive Assistis much better at removing players across the board than Lone Fouler

• The Dirty Player is much more likely to get sent off against low AV targets than the Lone Fouler

However, even with all of that, Lone Fouler + Dirty Player is much better than  Dirty Player with one Offensive Assist, especially against lower AVs.

But what about two Offensive Assists?

Well, once you get two or more Offensive Assists, Lone Fouler is pretty much dead in the water:

Essentially it comes down to how many assists you're expecting to get. Ultimately, due to bell curves, Lone Fouler is much better at dealing with targets with low AV.

I think that if you're an opportunistic fouler, then the Lone Fouler/Dirty Player combination is absolutely worth the investment, especially if you have access to cheap Bribes. If you don't expect to have assists anyway, this is absolutely the place to be.

On the other hand, if you are fouling as part of a long term grind, it should be much easier to get a couple of assists, at which point Dirty Player on its own is all you need. 

Now go out there and kill something!

* So do Dwarves, but we all know that they got shafted.

** That an Mighty Blow +2 (I will hear no word said against my Grifflings)

*** It is not.