The Red Trophy II
One of the guys I know from years of playing Blood Bowl tournaments is Tom Cullerton - known as "nonumber" in the BB world as that's his NAF username. A little while ago he set up a game / hobby store in High Wycombe and he had started to run Blood Bowl tournaments - so as I was free this weekend I went along to take part. It's about an hour and a half away from my house and Tom was running a four-game one-day tournament so it was an early start to get there in time for the 9:00 dice rolling! I drove with my buddy Andrew and my other gaming buddy Gary attended too as it was a local tournament for him. It's always a good time when I get to spend the day with a couple of mates playing Blood Bowl.
I took Dwarfs to this one just because I've been using Wood Elves a lot recently and I thought it would be great to play something totally different for a change. The rules allowed 1.1 mil to pick a team from with six normal skills so my roster was :
2 x Runners
2 x Blitzers (both with Guard)
1 x Troll Slayer
7 x Blockers (three with Guard, one with Mighty Blow)
7 x Blockers (three with Guard, one with Mighty Blow)
3 x Rerolls
Apothecary
Apothecary
In my first game I was drawn against one of the local Blood Bowl players who was taking part in his first tabletop tournament - he was using Ogres. It was a bit of a bad match up for him really as his snotlings were at the mercy of the Dwarfs from the start but I didn't actually cause that many casualties on his team - only two actually injuries. The tournament rules said that anyone who finished in the casualty box counted towards the number of cas caused - and my opponent managed to put two of his own players in there by failing dodges (I'm not sure whether I was more shocked that an Ogre or a Snotling ended up in there through this! The game finished 2-0 and 4-0 on cas to me.
For game 2 I was facing the chap who was leading the tournament - Gritter who was using Lizardmen. He's in the ECBBL league and is a very good player - and a nice guy too as it turns out. We had a great game but unfortunately I didn't manage to get a win. It was a 2-0 loss and I even forgot to take a photo.
A quick break for lunch later and we were straight into game 3 where I was drawn against Gary and his newly painted High Elves. It's always a pleasure to play against Gary and I was hopeful that I'd managed to do well against his elves - but he turned me over pretty quickly and went 1-0 up on me. I had to try to do well to recover - which is when we got a pitch invasion result and four of my players were stunned including both my runners! I had to move a blizter back to pick up the ball and protect him. I eventually got my other blitzer loose and managed to throw the ball from one to the other - very undwarflike! The game ended a 1-1 draw which I was happy with after all the bad luck.
A quick break for lunch later and we were straight into game 3 where I was drawn against Gary and his newly painted High Elves. It's always a pleasure to play against Gary and I was hopeful that I'd managed to do well against his elves - but he turned me over pretty quickly and went 1-0 up on me. I had to try to do well to recover - which is when we got a pitch invasion result and four of my players were stunned including both my runners! I had to move a blizter back to pick up the ball and protect him. I eventually got my other blitzer loose and managed to throw the ball from one to the other - very undwarflike! The game ended a 1-1 draw which I was happy with after all the bad luck.
For my final game I was playing against another local chap who was using a Nurgle team. I'd had a bit of practice against Nurgle with my Dwarfs as I'd played a warmup game against Andrew earlier in the week where he was using the stinky chaps. I managed to stop him from scoring in the first half and then went on to do an outrageous amount of stalling to win this final game 1-0.
I'm happy enough with a 2/1/1 although I was a bit sad I hadn't done better in the 2nd game. Ah well - that's how it goes sometimes :) At least I got to bring the Dwarfs out for another run as it's been five years since I last played them in a tournament.