Tournament Director Blog – Aug. ’18

August in NAF Tournaments

August news in NAF tournament Blood Bowl mainly concerns cool stuff that is coming soon. GW have advertised that the next Spike! Journal will be Nurgle, and we’re all waiting with baited breath (and wrinkled noses) to see what new news will arrive. In America, the US Major tournament, the Chaos Cup, is almost with us, and the hype train is rapidly approaching its Chicago destination. In Europe, the build-up for the largest BB tournament of the year, the Eurobowl / Eur Open continues, and you can sign up NOW for the online sister event, the Europen Online 2018. Win and receive free beer, the finest of prizes! World Cup registration opens shortly (see a countdown clock here), so you had better be ready to go when the time comes! In Australia, the CanCon Australian Nationals tournament will no longer be the Oceanic NAF Major. Come 2019, the mantle will be passed to the ever-excellent Eucalyptus Bowl, and I can’t wait to see how that goes. The future then, is exciting and looking bright from any number of angles.

While mentioning CanCon, I have some sad news to report. Long time TO Gavan Pearce / Drakeular recently passed away. Gavan organised this Major tournament for many years and was a fine member of the Aussie community. I didn’t know him well myself, but he was always passionate and helpful when it came to BB matters we spoke about. I’m certain he will be a keenly felt loss, and our thoughts are with his family.

Summer Blood Bowl has been taking place all across the globe. Well, in areas where it is summer, at least! In August, you played in a total of 40 tournaments including 6 versions of the increasingly popular Sevens variant. It’s been going off all over the place – especially nice to see the great game once again showcased at Gen Con and for the Poles to continue holding cracking looking events. Well done, all! There are three great examples of lovely August BB discussed below with reports and write-ups of various kinds. Every example is from the Americas so far, although I hope to sneakily edit in something from a big French weekender in the near future…:

 

The Thunder Bowl

Firstly, over to Dan, aka Hotpanda40k, to talk Canadian BB in the form of the Thunder Bowl, where 28 coaches faced off for supremacy:

With a deep rolling rumble over the prairie landscape and several bright cracks of lightning, the Thunder Bowl announced its entry into the Alberta Blood Bowl scene, setting the record for the highest attendance for a 1 day Blood Bowl tournament in Alberta, Canada: 28 players!!! This feat alone put a smile on my face but it was only the icing on the cake. 

Needless to say this was the largest event I have run to date as it more than doubled my previous attempts.  Its success was not something I achieved but rather one that the community in Alberta achieved.  I have never seen a more welcoming and generous community of players then that which has gathered here in Alberta.  Everyone wants to help you out in some way or another.  From players being excited to support events to other Tournament Organizers offering a lending hand, you are left speechless and in awe.  I could not have put the Thunder Bowl together if it were not for the community as a whole. There are a few very special people that went above and beyond what anyone could expect.  In no specific order, I would like to say thanks to Lawrence Ashmead, the Alberta NAF rep and fellow Tournament Organizer for not only showing me the ropes but for gathering the support of the Calgary members and helping run the event.  Thanks to Lepko for lending me over a dozen teams so I could run demo games across the city. Damion Gilzean for helping run some of the demo games and for his assistance in running the tournament.  Jack Petrucha from Maelstrom Games for not only helping with the swag but for his extremely generous prize support and wisdom.  FFminis for sponsoring the tournament with several amazing prizes.  Roy Kim, the owner of Thunder Ground Comics for being an amazing host with the most and for being a most excellent partner in crime. Ward Kapach and Justin Gatner for lending me their pitches. Last but not least to all 28 of the players that showed up to the event to roll some dice while laughing together at the fickle nature of Nuffle herself. 

One of my goals when I set out to create the Thunder Bowl was to grow the community by introducing new players to the game we all love and to welcome back players of old with open arms. This was reflected in the tournament itself but also in the Renegade Blood Bowl League here in Edmonton which saw 8 new players sign up for the new season that started right after Thunder Bowl. Without a doubt, Alberta is experiencing a renaissance for Blood Bowl. With 12 tournaments spread out between Calgary, Edmonton and Lethbridge along with numerous leagues there is something for everyone.  Even though these cities are spread out across a large province the community as a whole works together to ensure that each event is a success.  No one is competing with each other, rather everyone is working together to make everything that happens the best it can be. Needless to say I am left in awe at what is taking place while extremely excited for what the future has in store.

Not so much of a report as an advertisement for an amazing looking scene there; I’m sure that warms the cockles of all Blood Bowl loving hearts. Lovely. Well done to jorj for winning with his Dwarfs, and to all of the other winners. Stories of how scenes are growing and taking off are just as good, if not better, to hear about as notes from 150 coach strong powerhouse events, and I hope to keep posting them here! Some photos of the tournament in full swing below. Your winner, George is sporting the fine Thunder Bowl helmet / trophy, and also note Best Sportsman and new scene member Judah C:

 

Nuffle’s Wyld 2

Something out of the ordinary here; a tournament report that was forwarded to me un-prompted! This is lovely stuff; it’s great to hear from those of you that are doing hard work out in the community and running tournaments. Josh letting me know how things had gone out of the blue was a lovely email to receive. I don’t think it was initially intended to be posted here (hence the conversational nature of the text), but I asked if I could include it because it represents the snowballing popularity of the Sevens variant and talks about the advantages of that format. Over to Josh:

Thank you for approving the tournament. I just wanted to give you a roundup of how it went:

12 coaches total (some local, a few 2 and a half hours out, some even further out, AND 1 new coach to the Blood Bowl tournament scene).

This is why 7s is really good for NAF recruitment and tournaments. The new coach Carlos said “I can see me going to a 7s tournament because you get lots of games and its quick (in case a player is a tool, you can just play quick and move on).” This was Rob Fenner’s second tournament and he actually said he prefers 7s and wants to make a weekly league out of it. Just some food for thought. I know there’s a lot of negativity around approving variants, padding NAF standings fears and whatnot. But there’s a lot to be gained from approving the variants as well as is evident in this tournament. It’s easier to get new NAF members and getting traditional “league only” folks into tournaments this way.

The Craps token wasn’t a great feature. After talking with a few of the coaches, they would’ve preferred it be the original design I had intended. They loved the “take it or leave it” Blackjack hand in the beginning where they stun a random player and try to win a hand of blackjack. if they succeed they get a reroll or bribe for the round. That aside, everyone had a great time. Jason Carter won his first tournament, Carlos came in second, and Jason York in third; certainly not our traditional top members which is awesome. Everyone is getting better and learning which means a steeper challenge is ahead for all in Florida. Even Alan Mann won his first 2 tournament games ever. Mickey Fox won most TDs (her first award ever).

This was a great raffle event for charity too. We managed to raise $885 for Mickey Fox’s surgery coming up. We had Hungry Troll and 2 Dice Uphill, as well as the Gamestore get Your Fun ON contribute items to be raffled off. That’s the wrap up and it was a great success.

It’s great to pick up news and reviews regarding Sevens and the positive effect / impact the variant seems to be having across different territories; several upsides to the format come to the fore in that report. I especially like the idea that coaches we may otherwise not see at NAF events get drawn in, it appears to be a gateway drug. To be clear, there is no negativity about variants taking off, quite the opposite. It’s great to see various different forms of Blood Bowl have room to breathe. Josh may be referring to a recent item in the committee minutes here, and I’ll talk touch on that in more depth below. Finally, yet again, it’s wonderful to see the BB community be so generous raising money, this time to support the health welfare of a fellow coach. Get well soon, Mickey. Some images from Josh featuring custom ball tokens and an excellent labeling system:

 

Leyendas de Montevideo II

Finally this month, to Uruguay. This is a really interesting tournament where it is mandatory for each team to build a legendary player. It was a big fish in South America too; being worth double points in the CUBBO tournament series! Over to ciao:

Leyendas (Spanish for Legends) is an annual tournament held in Montevideo, capital of Uruguay, organized by CUBBO (the Uruguayan Blood Bowl Community).

It’s a competition a little different from the others. The idea is to give local legends the opportunity to shine. Team TV is 1320, an odd number yes, but it comes from Montevideo’s population of 1.320.000 according to the last official census.

Teams are freely constructed (including stats increases), but with some restrictions:

1. One, and only one, player MUST be a legend (level 7)
2. Other players can be level 2 max on tier 1 teams, level 3 on tier 2 teams and level 4 on tier 3
3. Only tier 2 and tier 3 teams can include inducements in their rosters (except Star Players or Wizard)

This allowed our community to recreate in a NAF tournament their legendary players from the local league, the online game or just come up with a new one. This was very fun, because some coaches built old players from local leagues that go back into the late 90’s and got to share epic anecdotes with the new coaches.

As a special reward, the legend of the winner is added to the Hall of Fame and transformed into a house ruled Star Player for a year, available to all races, until the next Leyendas de Montevideo. The process of turning him / her into a Star Player is simple, they gain loner and a 50% cost increase rounded up. It was a huge success last year.

This time, sadly, attendance suffered a hard hit, mainly because most coaches here also play MTG, and the Uruguayan Nationals is next week. So several of them played qualifiers or just used the weekend to test their decks. Others spent a lot of money on the new GW game Kill Team, released last week, and where short of cash. As TO I warned the venue owners (a local store) but they didn’t want to change the date, because they have a tight schedule of events.

Anyway, the coaches that did attend had a blast. We played three Swiss rounds and spent a whole day throwing dice and background stories at each other. Some even role-played their legend important actions during the matches. Surprisingly, Khorne Daemons came on top, with a 1-0 win against Lizards, a 1-1 draw against

Dwarves, and another 1-0 win against other Dwarves. The Holy Khorneholios had Mike Judge as their star (just like in the tv show). It was a Blodge, Mighty Blow, Tackle, Leader, Break Tackle Bloodletter who scored 2 touchdowns and caused 2 casualties. Mike Judge will now be available to all races in CUBBO for a year, costing 320 k (also loses Leader and gains Loner).

Amazons were runner-up with Anne Phetamine as their legend. A killer Blitzer with +ST, +AG and the standard build for her position.

Maybe the best, because they were both crazy and fun, legends were:

– Godsama, a Saurus ball carrier (with +AG, Sure Hands, Break Tackle, Block, Fend, Dodge) whose coach role-played amusing conversations among it and the Skinks who wanted the ball.

– Goku, a Dwarf Dunner Dwarfdancer (Block, Dodge, Leap, +AG, +MA, Strip Ball). The sight of a Dwarf leaping into a cage was amazing, especially because his coach ironically screamed “no, what you doing? We don’t play that!” or similar things (in a Dwarven voice) at every attempt.

A mention of honor must go to Andraxxd, a new coach that was playing his first tournament with Norse. He didn’t win a match, but his Chupacabra Yeti managed to injure the rival legend in his three matches! Take that you non-believers!

Looks like a lot of fun and I like the idea of coaches really getting into the role-play aspect of BB. Some of those legends look properly fearsome, and the idea that the winner lives on through the year is a nice touch. It’s also interesting to see how different pressures and environments have impact on a scene; in the UK I doubt a big Magic tournament would have any effect on a BB tournament, but over there in Uruguay it appears there is a fair bit of crossover. As ever, lovely to see the scene ticking along.

I was in Bognor Regis, UK this month for Thrudball 2018. Read all about that here, if you have time and patience!

 

TD Notes

This month, at time of writing, we’ve sanctioned some 66 (sixty-six! With two days still to go, wow!) tournaments including 11 Sevens, 3 DungeonBowl, a Dungeon Sevens and a DeathBowl. Going over those DeathBowl rules was a blast – I can’t quite work out whether I need to try this immediately or run in the opposite direction to Canada at top speed! I think 66 is our record so far, yet more evidence NAF BB is in rude health.

In August, we continued the process of tracking back through the database and assigning the correct variant to games previously incorrectly captured as ‘Blood Bowl’. Now that we have the ability to label events as StreetBowl or individual rounds or games as DungeonBowl (for example), with the permission of TOs, we’ve been going back and changing game variant types, tidying up the database and more fully populating the variant rankings tables. Shout-out here to Notorious_jtb for his fine work in the Canadian area of the database; cleaning up the previous DeathBowl tournaments and helping with various other little bits. With every correction, the database gets tighter and more accurate. If you have a tournament you’d like to see updated, please get in touch.

The bulk of the August TD load has been facilitating the first stage of our 2018 Annual Review. Without repeating the news item or previous blog entries in their entirety, this is the NAF’s new review process that deals with any new changes we wish to make to our sanctioning document, appraises and incorporates new BB2016 rules and sets a stable NAF tournament ruleset for a calendar year. NCs from all countries and selected RCs from big regions have been invited to a forum where a really spirited chat is underway on a number of topics. This will serve as the basis for the discussion the committee will have about updating the NAF tournament documents going into 2019. That is if updates are necessary; I’m keen to impress on the group that we live in a pretty exciting and happy Blood Bowl world right now. No change is fine if that is the correct answer, change for the sake of change is off the table! I’m really impressed with the level of participation and input the staff have had; it is really helpful to get a handle on how different regions feel about different rules and initiatives, and I feel confident this will help us put together the best set of documents for the tournament community come Nov. 1. There is still time to have your say; check out the topics in the forum and if something moves you, contact your local staff member for them to reflect your views to the group. Wherever you are on planet NAF – a staff member near you has been invited and their view (as a reflection of your region or country) is valued.

Today, I sent Nate the final NAFC Blocksfam package to be donated to the Chaos Cup raffle. In the near future, Nate will be outlining how you can give to Blocksfam at the CC; if you want to get your charity on, keep your eyes peeled and trained on the usual channels! I’ll be taking donations at the upcoming Eurobowl and then DungeonBowl ’19, so Euro folk have a while to sort out what they’re going to donate and how they’re going to get those items to those fine events.

Finally this month, there was some passionate comment and discussion following the publication of our latest committee meeting minutes, and it’d be too ‘convenient’ for me not to mention that here. If you are late to the party – last month we discussed concerns over some regions holding substantially more tournaments than others, and talked about what this meant and whether there was an issue to be solved. Although there are no rules or guidelines currently in place on this specific topic, it’s nothing new for the NAF to have some thoughts around how much tournament Blood Bowl we sanction in one city or area; as long as I can remember, rules have been in place about not sanctioning multiple tournaments in one location on the same day or weekend. The logic here is that one big, quality tournament trumps two or several smaller get-togethers, and reducing direct competition improves the overall experience for attendees. Not everyone is on board with that thinking, I appreciate, but that’s how it’s always been, so far as I know.

To step back and speak generally, part of the reason I write this blog each month is that I think I should be as transparent and communicative about what is going on as is feasible. The membership like to know what we’re working on, and it’s good to have a space to open up lines of communication and big-up great community work or explain policies and initiatives more fully. The committee minutes have been progressing from short, one-line sentences to extended descriptions as time has gone along, again to increase our transparency. This (in my opinion) is the correct thing to do, but while treading this path, we are always liable to come across a controversial topic such as this one and occasionally trip over it. I don’t have too much more thinking to add to my prior post on the topic of ‘Too much Blood Bowl’, but in hindsight, I think the heading could have done with a revision (I am as much to blame as anyone for that – I had the chance to review the minutes before publication along with the rest of my colleagues). However, I strongly feel that the committee has done entirely the right thing here, so far. We were asked to discuss a topic, we discussed it and went away to think and talk with staff before making a decision, if one has to be made at all. We then transparently recorded we’d had the chat. I appreciate why this was controversial (at first glance, the topic appears at odds with what we’re about and what I celebrate here every month. Also the short, anonymised notes perhaps don’t help reduce concern or confusion in that they don’t add much depth to the topic), but I don’t think we’ll shy away from doing the same in future. I’m sure the membership would rather we not redact conversations just because they may provoke discussion? It’s always a shame when there is a bit of discord in an otherwise supportive and positive community, but it’s always because we’re all passionate about BB and making the best NAF that we can. I’m sure we’ll work to a conclusion with this in mind; watch the minutes in future for where this topic goes, if anywhere, and expect full, in-depth communications if anything ever changes. We are across all of your comments, and I don’t think anyone has to worry that we’re suddenly going to don fun police uniforms and lead an unwarranted crackdown.

As a postscript while speaking about committee minutes, the eagle eyed among you will note that Gavin / Valen has stepped down as League Director and has been replaced by Smilzo. Gav was always extremely helpful when I needed his guidance or assistance with something, and it’s a shame to see him go. That said, I’m looking forward to working with Smilzo, I’m sure he’ll do a cracking job, and it’ll be fun to see where he takes LD!

 

Why Didn’t I think of That?

Two ideas to think about this month. Firstly, do you want to be prepared for the World Cup? How prepared? Well, in Modina, Italy, five ‘It’s a long way to Dornbirn 1a TAPPA’ tournaments have popped up; ripe for practice. Turn up periodically between now and April next year to try out those rosters and tweak those skill packages. A great idea to hold an ongoing series; I suspect all of that prep has got to be worth a point or so come the WC..?

Secondly, how do you feel about playing at speed? ‘Speedbowl’, or a variant thereof, is slowly becoming a bit of a trend. Stress Cup VII in France offers 2 minute turns, IOWBBL Speedbowl 4 and Exiles: Speedbowl 5.1 (TO’d by Lunchmoney, perhaps the evil genius at the centre of this movement?) also sit at the 120 second mark. Fumbbl Speedbowl 1 went for one-minute turns, but perhaps that’s easier in an online setting! I know Lunch has spoken about variations such as a 24 hour Speedbowl extravaganza and a Deathclock version; I wonder how far the need for speed can go? Would you be able to cope with 24 hours of this madness?! For me, it sounds like a recipe for curling up in a ball and gently rocking back and forth, but I know some absolutely love it. Takes all sorts, and it’s nice to see the idea gently spread out. Any more hardcore examples I’ve missed? Comment below the line!

 

Holiday Plans

With Christmas done and dusted, it’s time for a diet, a detox and a fresh start to your tournament Blood Bowl in a new year. Why not try one of these three examples:

UK Team Challenge V 11 / 12 Jan. Bigger, better and closer to a bar than before, the UKTC is the perfect kickoff to the new year. York is beautiful, the BB following the WC ruleset and Brendan is freakishly tall – well worth a photo op. Make sure you’re there!

West Coast Quake 11 19 / 20 Jan. – The 11^th edition of the WCQ comes to you straight out of California. Not a bad place to visit at any time; but incorporating a long running, prestigious tournament into a holiday isn’t a terrible idea?

REVA ONCE 26 / 27 Jan. – Simply the biggest individual BB event of 2018 returns for its 11^th edition. I’ll be there to see what the fuss is about, and 200 coaches at a free bar should be all the incentive you need to make your way over to Valencia with me.

 

Next Time

I’m in Cologne, Germany for the German Team Bowl, and I’ll be covering all of the news, reviews and hype around the Chaos Cup and the ever-looming Eurobowl. See you then!