GBBL – The Geordie Blood Bowl League

Don Vito reports…

Hello fellow Bloodbowlers, and welcome to this short piece on the Geordie Blood Bowl League, more popularly known as the GBBL. We are a group of gamers who have played together since 2007. Currently there are eight players in our league, and we have another half a dozen that play on a casual basis and attend tournaments with us. We play all across the North East of England and are centred around Newcastle upon Tyne, although members live as far South as Darlington.

The league is currently in its tenth season. The league consists of two parts, a standard league first then a playoff with league position determining seeding. It uses a fixed format round draw where every team plays each other twice, standard CRP rules with all 24 teams (25 this season, testing the Khorne roster!), and recognises both the league champion and the play off winners every season. The league uses very few house rules mainly around inducements, and allows coaches to bring back previous teams or start from scratch every season with a new 110TV team.

League play is a big part of the GBBL, but we also are very heavily into tournament play. We’ve been lucky enough to have a relatively consistently good performance from our members at UK tournaments, and seem to have the team tournaments as our specialty. The GBBL has won Flame Bowl’s team event three times and Monkeybowl Tribes team event twice. Individually there have been five different members win tournaments in the last year, with others bringing home various other accolades such as most TD’s, CAS, Stunty Cups and of course the occasional Wooden Spoon!

As well as playing in tournaments the GBBL organise multiple events themselves every year. Stick holds PooBowl in January, a seven game tournament over a weekend in Loughborough with a no-holds barred rulespack. Pippy runs MonkeyBowl in April, which has varied the format several times. Most recently it was run as a team tournament, next year it is going to involve coaches playing individually but with a choice of races! He also runs a more traditional one day tournament around July named MonkeyBowl’s Little Brother. Winkle_Picka is crazy enough to offer the UK’s only 24 hour tournament Block Around The Clock in May. And finally Don_Vito organises GeordieBowl in Newcastle upon Tyne city centre in September.

One of the things the GBBL are most proud of is the continual improvement of newer and returning players’ games and level of ability. Since beginning around 2007 several tournament regulars started playing with us and have raised their game to now be serious contenders. The GBBL are happy to welcome any new members and are eager to help them improve. As a group we have several very talented painters and modellers who are always keen to try and help newer hobbyist as well. Between the league we have multiple painted teams of all 24 (25!) races, and can also boast one member who has played all 24 races at tournaments too.

These are just the very basics for our group. If you’d be interested in playing with us or attending or travelling to any of our tournaments we’d love to hear from you. Contact Don_Vito (Dave) either through the NAF, TFF, or by visiting and posting on our league forum – http://bgbbl59.runboard.com/

Thanks for reading, and we’ll leave you with a recent photo of our happy bunch. These seven GBBL’ers travelled to Nottingham in May for the NAF Championships. From left to right we have Hana_666, MrHannah, Robsoma, Stick_With_Poo_On_The_End, Pippy, Winkle_Picka and Don_Vito. Also known as Hannah, Paddy, Matt, Ian, Brendan, Stan and Dave!