Adepticon 2013 – Day 4 – Blood Bowl!

I haven’t really played Blood Bowl in a few years. We once had a strong, thriving league happening in our old GW store, but it fell apart at one point and I hadn’t played since. When I decided to go to Adepticon, I wasn’t feeling in the Fantasy mood so I thought I’d played a number of different games to make up for it. Blood Bowl was available for a 2 day tournament and I leapt on the chance! I converted a whole new team, one which I’d wanted to do for while and applied all of my latest painting techniques to it, to create something that I thought was pretty cool.

The people there were as hardcore as the people downstairs! Many of them had custom boards made, which were very cool looking.

My first game was against a super nice guy, playing Undead. Watch out for the S5, Mighty Blow mummies! He’d obviously played a lot of BB and knew the rules and tactics inside and out, but wasn’t at all rules lawyery. He killed a skink early on. Then he killed a saurus (that requires two 2d6 in a row to roll 10+). His comment “that was game changing”. Then he killed another saurus. My comment “and that kind of seals it…”. I was having a good game, and he was nice, so even though I was horribly outmatched in both tactics and in dice rolling, this was a good time.

In this game, I was shown part of why people still love Blood Bowl. It is an incredibly tactical game. I watched some of his positions, and they reminded me of people studying Chess positions.

I was pretty hung over from the night before, something that I deeply regret at this point. I’m not a BB wizard, but I feel like I have a solid grasp of the basic tactics of the game and how to move models to achieve my goals, but in this game everything was sluggish. He felt sorry for me, and I felt like I needed a drink and something to eat.

I came back after the break to find out that the painting competition had happened in my absence.

Consider a sentence above, wherein I claimed that these models are the pinnacle of my current skill. Several people over the rest of the weekend mentioned that they’d seen them, and were looking for them during the paint judging. And I missed it, because I was hungry and thirsty and hungover and hadn’t paid attention to when the judging was. Frustration.

My second game was against skaven. I knew at this point, since I’d been crushed absolutely in my first game, that I was now playing someone who had also probably lost quite badly. He was great, but his knowledge of the rules was about mine. We had a good game, and I saw him numerous more times over the weekend, and it was nice to meet and talk with someone who I hadn’t traveled with. He won that one.

My third game was against a goblin player. I’ve never played against goblins, but I would do so again in a heartbeat. My opponent was pretty gruff at first, but he warmed up as the game went on. I like to think he got more friendly, the more that his fanatic, chainsaw wielder, pogoer and bomb-thrower did random things. I laughed my ass off that game! We had rolled -1 to pick up the ball for weather, so most of the game was spent trying to pick it up, and hitting each other. Highlight of the game was when his bombardier thew a bomb at my krox. It stuns the person hit by it, and stuns people adjacent on a 4+, a brutal weapon. But my krox…rolled a 6 and caught the bomb. This meant that he got to throw it back! So I tossed it at one of his trolls. I thought I needed an accurate pass to hit, so I used a re-roll when it failed. When the re-roll failed as well, it scattered 3 times and finally came to rest in a clumping of 3 of my guys. Bad spot, but hilarious to watch!

I had to run very quickly after this last game as I had a photography class at 5, so we called the game when he had scored a touchdown and it looked like I wasn’t going to be able to score any back. My third loss of the day.

I wasn’t disappointed about 3 losses, but I was surprised. As I said above, I feel like I have a solid grasp of how to play basic BB. But at the same time, my hitting team couldn’t remove players from the pitch at all. BB is about managing risk, and I got a ton of solid 2 dice blocks every turn, but I couldn’t roll an armour break except rarely, and when I did, it was rarely more than a stunned result with very few models being taken off. I’m not certain what I would do different, except that certain skills might be necessary to put on my team to deal with dodgy teams like skaven and elves.

Before I left, I asked if there was any other opportunity for paint judging. One of the two judges said that the two days were two separate tournaments and that there would be tomorrow. I left feeling like a fool, but ok since I’d have another chance.

The next few posts will be about the two classes I took in the evening, as well as some general commentary. Later!