The introduction is a humorous timeline of the history of fighting cattle, starting at the Garden of Eden and moving to the near future of 2034. Owners of the 2nd edition will note that this is a cut-n-paste job up to 2026 with the only new material being the added dates of 2030 and 2034. Next comes the boot camp section that is again just culled from 2nd edition and is less funny the more times I read it.
And now to the meat of the game where you get to create your Battle Cattle (and yes, you guessed it, more culling from previous editions). You have a limited amount of money to spend on your cattle, which is agreed before play with your opponent. Your cattle have stats (moo-vement, health, tipping defence etc) depending on the type of cow you buy and what equipment you load them up with. The only discernable change from previous editions is that the Udder weapon mount has been changed to Turret mount, no doubt to tie in better with the miniatures range that Wingnut have released. Good news is that there are not 8 new breeds of cow to choose from under 3rd edition, and a change to the way in which you load up weaponry onto you cattle so that rather than having a Max Weight stat for the cow there is a limited number of slots per mount dependant on the size of the cow.
And now to weaponry of which there are 32 to choose from (sadly on 3 new weapons feature in 3rd edition, the rest are culled with only slight re-writes to the descriptions) ranging from Auto cannon to Lasers and the infamous Mini-moo. Still cost some spare cash? Then load up you cattle with armour and equipment/modifications to make your cow a more potent killing machine.
The rules remain little changed from previous editions. You can play on a square or hex map, or even using rulers to measure range if you are using miniatures rather than the counters provided at the back of the book. You will need 2d6 to play the game, rolling to hit and adding or subtracting appropriate modifiers to the result of the dice roll. The rules are laid out quite clearly and all the charts you will need during play are located in the appendix at the back, along with the colour cow counters and bovine record sheet.
There is not much new in this edition of Battle Cattle other than the counters, which you can download and print out from the Wingnut web site. Most of the text seems to have been taken directly from the 2nd edition rules with only minor changes having been made, but at least this time they have actually proof read the text and avoided the mistakes they made during the transition from 1st to 2nd edition. If you are new to Battle Cattle this is probably the most accessible edition to date since it includes counters but for owners of previous editions there is little new to material to warrant the purchase price.
