Felt a lot better this morning, had a decent sleep and no alcohol the day before. Still off by 2 hours, but not bad.
My first game was against another skaven player. He was pretty good, and had a good grasp of certain positional plays that helped him a lot. At one point he had “no way” of scoring a touchdown, but saw a push-surfing method of moving his ball carrier one extra square, and got the kick-off result that moved his guys one more square and pulled it off! Was very exciting to see, even as he pushed a solid win for me into a draw with it. Minutes later he had scored again, and I blame the fact that we were rushing to finish, since I didn’t have enough time to really protect the ballcarrier to create a draw.
After that game, I asked the primary organizer if models were going to be set up in the other room for paint judging, to which he replied that paint judging was only yesterday.
…
He apologized and I said it was ok, but I was crushed.
I went downstairs and stood at the base of the elevator wondering whether I wanted to quit the tournament or not. Randomly ran into Patrick and we went for food and I told him what had happened. After losing 4 games in a row, and then having my dreams broken, I kind of just wanted to do something else instead of losing another 2 games badly. Patrick told me he wanted me to go upstairs and yell CHOP and stand on a chair and win that tournament, but I didn’t have it in me.
I went back upstairs anyway, in the theory that I could still go play some demos during the last game and I could decide if it was worth continuing. My second game was against a Wood Elf player. He was ok at the game, but for the most part my dice continued to fail me. A hitting team that can’t take models off the table is really just a useless team – and I’d even replaced my dice the day before! Towards the end things picked up a bit – my continued perserverance in trying to take the S6 A10 treeman off the board paid off when my Mighty Blow Saurus casualtied him! Followed by no less than 3 skull/double-down rolls in a row for my opponent (who was out of re-rolls at this point) made me the victor of this game.
A win felt good, so I decided to stick with it. Last game was against an orc team, and finally I got to the kind of BB I remember playing – standing around hitting each other until someone won!! It helped that we rolled the rain again, so the ball was hard to pick up.
My opponent picked up the ball and made a standard orc cage. I put some saurus in front of it, put the skinks behind the saurus for block assists and then knocked off and/or stunned most of his models. I think my dice were feeling sorry for me, as at one turn I stunned all 4 of his Black Orcs. I won this game as well.
Lastly, I won the only award that team CHOP brought home from Adepticon — the Salter something award for most touchdowns scored in day 2. It came with a little certificate and my choice of models – I took home John Doe, the Faceless MVP from Dreadball. š
Blood Bowl Impressions
I left that tournament thinking that Blood Bowl is actually not a good game, as modern games go. There are two sides to it. The amazingly tactical, positional side which is tons of fun and is a great game. You have to think hard about where to put your model, how best to support and push your opponents models around, and what risks to take in what order. This is a game worthy of being played by a large community 25 years later.
Then there is the game where if you can’t break armour, ever, you fail. Or when your opponent breaks your armor and kills 5 of you guys, such that you have no models to even try to succeed with. Or when you roll 3 double-skulls in a row and lose 3 full turns. This is a horrific game. When your opponent gets a streaky roll of failures, no one can feel good about that. When (as in my first game) your opponent gets a lucky roll, that allows him to make a deeply positional play that nets him a goal – that’s amazing. But when 2 dice consistently screw your game over, all you have left is “I’m sorry” and to keep playing and keep trying to smile. Blood Bowl is absolutely brutal and it hates you.
I’ll still play it, and I still have a beautiful team of models to use with it, but I think I want to try to squeeze some more of the first game out of Dreadball. It could have within it the same sort of tactical play, but the dice are much less brutal – you have to do some crazy things to lose your turn or fail a non-opposed roll.
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