Fulginium Bowl

By Beppe

Hi guys, here we are at the second step of my 2016 Blood Bowl Tour. The dates are February 27th and 28th and the tournament is Fulginium Bowl, also known as “the food tournament”. It’s held in an agriturismo (a sort of farmhouse) in the hills next to Foligno, a town not so far from Assisi and Perugia, in the center of Italy. The tournament’s formula is the “all-in-one”, the one I prefer, also because the venue is really beautiful: a big country house with a very big room where to play and eat and the bungalows around the main buildings where to sleep.

Once again I won’t bother you with match reports, standings or Blood Bowl games, because Fulginium Bowl is really more than a 7 games BB tournament, is a very big party and one of the biggest tournaments in Italy.

Usually most of the people arrive on Friday evening and we catch up at a pub, not so far from the venue. After a good meal, few beers and some hours spent with friends, we finally get our rest before the battle begin: wait, I’m not talking about the BB tournament, I’m talking of the battle against the food! The morning awaits us with a good breakfast: this has been the only moment throughout all the weekend in which I’ve been hungry. We start playing, while in the next room the cooks are preparing the “light lunch” and so the real battle begins with a course of bruschetta (bread “roasted” in the oven with garlic and olive oil), a deceitful mean to weaken us, then a dish of tortellini (pasta stuffed with meat) followed by a second round of pasta and finally some meat and vegetables. That’s what a normal human being would eat in a day, but you know, BB players are not normal human beings and are tough opponents for this man vs food contest. So we start playing again, after this easy victory, but not without casualties of course, because some of us didn’t manage to finish the lunch, despite our help to save them from the defeat. At 5 o’ clock an alarming announcement from the organization: “the snack is ready”. We look on the other side of the room and we see: pizza, chocolate cake, cheese and vegetables pie. This is a trap! They want to lure us into this because they want to see us fall for dinner, but BB players are heroes and they never retreat from a battle, so we face our enemy and fight it until the last slice of cake is slain. We do not take prisoners: this is our motto, and again the food is beaten.

So we finish the matches and the clock shows us that’s 9 o’ clock and we feel a ring of a bell inside us: a sort of alarm that awakes us and alert us that it’s time for the final battle: the dinner. We look into ourselves: none of us is hungry and there are gonna be difficult moments ahead us. We sit down a bit worried, starting to drink a very good red wine and try to talk about Blood Bowl, just to distract ourselves from the real battle which is about to begin and finally an army of waitresses gets out from the kitchen, carrying out a tremendous amount of dishes. So the battle has begun. The appetizers are the food’s mean tactic to defeat us: I count at least 10 of them! Ricotta cheese with truffles, mozzarella with olive oil, roasted mortadella (baloney), ham, salame, bruschetta, toasted bread with spinach and sausage, black olives and more. Some people is starting to waver, but we cannot look back at our falling mates, we have to go on and fight our enemy. The waitresses do a second rounds of appetizers and they seem like the bullet of a submachine gun, hitting every last one of us. But we never surrender and we go on with the pasta dishes. We start with a ravioli (pasta stuffed with ricotta cheese) with butter and truffle, followed by tagliatelle (egg made pasta, quite similar to spaghetti for the shape) with meat and mushrooms sauce. And again there’s also a second round of that. The casualties are heavy, more than the half of us are fallen, but we don’t look back and we’re ready to face our enemy again. The second course is made by roasted meat and is accompanied by all sort of vegetables, beans, and the famous potato baked under the ashes of the fireplace. We’re not prepared to face the vegetables and the food sweeps us with this final blow. We’re finally beaten, but we face one last enemy before the retreat: the dessert. This is an easy catch for us: everyone seems capable to fight it with strength, so we finish with a coffee and with some liquors: the only medicines against such a foe. We bring our casualties to bed because they need rest and we discuss about the plans for tomorrow’s fights because the war isa not over even if we lost this battle of 26 courses. We finally go to bed after some good time spent with comrades and we wake up the day after, ready to start again our fight against the breakfast, the “light lunch” and the 5 o’ clock snack.

At 6 o’ clock the war is over and the food is the winner again, like every year. But we are BB players and we never give up, so we’ll be back the next year, ready for a new battle, always filled with high hopes.

Next stage: Dungeonbowl, Apr 9th and 10th