COSH Bowl II - the aftermath
COSH Bowl II was my final Blood Bowl tournament of the year; a year in which I've played a lot of Blood Bowl. After painting my Orcs fairly quickly after completing the Goblins, I had plenty of time to get a couple of practice games in against my friend Andrew. Both of those games I'd won fairly well so I was hopeful that they would do okay at the event.
The roster for Orcs was that you could pick 1.1 mil but you had to buy skills for players out of that. So I ended up with a 990K league roster and adding four normal skills for the Black Orcs and a double for the Thrower.
1 x Thrower (Dodge) - 100K
2 x Black Orcs (Block) - 200K
2 x Black Orcs (Guard) - 200K
4 x Blitzers - 320K
2 x Linemen - 100K
3 x Rerolls - 180K
Andrew was playing at the tournament too - he was using his Amazons from our practice games but he'd tweaked his skill choices a little.
At the tournament, my first game was against a guy from new Zealand who'd travelled over to Italy for the Blood Bowl World Cup the weekend before. He then came over to the UK and wanted to play in another tournament while he was over here. You have to give extra kudos to someone travelling to the other side of the world to use Ogres! In this game I realised how hard it is for Orcs to cope one they lose a couple of players. I still managed to win the game 2-0 but I could not hurt a single snotling!
Game two and I was playing Sam who was one of the guys running the event. He wanted to play but not use a good team (as it's bad form to win your own event) so he was using a Vampire team with nothing but thralls and a wizard. It wasn't too bad an option actually as he could afford a stack of skills to put on them. Luck went against him though and all the hurt that I couldn't give to the snotlings in the previous game went into his thralls. I ended up winning 1-0 and causing six casualties on him.
By now I was starting to feel confident. I'd won two games and I was up against Underworld in my third game. "This was going to be easy!" I thought. From the first block of the game when his Underworld troll killed a Black Orck, I quickly realised that I was in trouble! His team just smashed me apart in reality. I did some damage to his players at the end of the game but they won 1-0 and I wasn't in the game at all. Alas!
For the next day, I was playing against Humans coached by my friend Jim who I see at most local tournaments. He's a very good player so I tend to judge how well I'm doing on whether I can get close to beating him or not. Out game was brilliant - both of use did some good tactical moves and it took him to score on his last turn to bring the game to a 2-2 draw.
Game 5 and I was playing against Khemri. This was another game where I just had terrible dice rolls and I got smashed to pieces. I played my best but lost 1-0.
Game 6 and, as these things tend to turn out, I was facing Andrew and his Amazons. He did an outstanding job coaching his team and I wasn't in the game at all. My thrower kept fumbling the ball and soon got surrounded by Amazons and I had to try a desperate long bomb to get the ball to the other end of the field - which worked. As my lineman receiver ran up the field, one lone Amazon linewoman could get to him and she did a 1-die blitz on him to push him next to the sideline. I just needed a push to equalize - but as I had no rerolls left the dreaded skull came up and it was game over. I lost 2-0.
The results of the weekend were two wins, one draw and three losses which was disappointing as I really had thought I'd do much better than that. Ah well - these things happen! My final position was 7th out of 10 players.
That's me done with Blood Bowl tournaments for the year then. I've played in nine of them including Bunker Bowl which I ran. Pretty good going for me really! My plan to play all twenty-four approved teams is a lot closer now as I've used seventeen of them - only seven left to go. The first of these will be High Elves which I'll be using at my next tournament in February 2016. Until then, I'm going to be playing some league games and some Judge Dredd.
