Tournament Director Blog – Nov. ’18

November in NAF Tournaments

With festive thoughts slowly creeping into our collective conscious, November was a super-busy month of Blood Bowl action as coaches everywhere tried to sneak just one more in before the end of the year. 73 (seventy-three!) tournaments took place, of which 9 were Sevens and one was Dungeonbowl. Colossal! All of the usual territories were hard at it, as well as the up and comers in the shape of Bulgaria and Mexico. Reports of November action from Italy, South Africa and the USA to follow, but first, the rest of the November news.

On planet World Cup – Dornbirn signups continue at breakneck speed. At last report, registrations have broken the 600 barrier and the fourth World Cup is already the second largest BB event of all time. How can you not be there?! Register via this link. We have a team in Africa forming; if you are an African and you want in, please contact Da_Imp via the NAF website and you could represent the continent in Austria. The online UKTC-linked World Cup ruleset tournament, the NAF Team Challenge continues over on FUMBBL, so keep an eye peeled and trained on that tournament to see what races are shaping up well in the early days of the WC meta.

Our friends at GW have been busy once again, and Shambling Undead have been previewed. All of that goodness should be released sometime around publication of this blog. I say this often but it is always worth repeating; if you want to use any new things that arrive in your tournament, just ask. You don’t have to wait until the 2019 Annual Review to include a new Undead star, but do make us aware. Talking Annual Review, all of your 2019 documentation is now live. Arm yourself with AR knowledge for your 2019 NAF tournament action!

Now, to tales and photos of November tournaments from across the globe.

 

Italian Open 2018

Hello Blood Bowl coaches and welcome to Italian Open 2018, the 15th edition of the oldest two day tournament in Italy, which is organized by Bolognabowl league crew (Beppe, Jericho, Corwin and Aramil). IO is held in Bologna, Italy’s food capital, and due to this fact, IO also attracts coaches from abroad. This year we had three foreign players from Austria (Turin), Germany (Tojurub) and Malta (Janninu), plus the rest of the Italian coaches. While the Italians focus on the BB games, the foreigners understand the spirit of the weekend and enjoy the food from Friday until Sunday and, thanks to their local “food guide”, they make a trip around food corners in Bologna: restaurants, ice cream shops, chocolate stores and so on. The most important tour has been the one icing on Saturday evening at FICO Eataly World, the world’s largest food park, covering an area of 10,000 sqm and embodying the wonders of Italian biodiversity with 40 eating points, several shops, food factories and other amusements related to food.

Yes, there has been also a BB tournament but that’s of secondary importance compared with the rest. I know that you BB coaches are interested also on games and so I’ll tell you that the tournament was held in a big gaming club in the city center, next to Bologna’s tourist main attractions. This year we had just 24 coaches from the North of Italy (of course we had also the foreigners) with many great coaches like Farina, Dirold, Phoenix11 and Spartako. This year rules were quite simple: 1.100 TV with no tiers and 60k to buy skills or characteristic increases. At the end Spartako’s Wood Elves won the tournament in the last match thanks to his ST4 Wardancer. The prize ceremony is quite unique because all the prizes are food prizes: cheeses, hams, salami and so on. Of course, there are also cups and medals for those who need a glittering prize to show.

We hope next year to have more foreign coaches, hoping they will enjoy Bologna like those who came did.

Sounds pretty great to me, anyone fancy combining some food tourism with Blood Bowl in 2019?! Thanks to Beppe for the write-up, and some images of the infamous coaches at the event (and food!) below.

 

Shaka Shield 2018

The Shaka Shield first emerged from the Badlands in the distant year of 2001. Having encountered the Blood Bowl tournament scene after a Waaaaagh in the Empire, the great Goblin King Shaka decided he too wanted a tournament to provide entertainment for his court. From these humble beginnings has risen the longest running Blood Bowl tournament on the African continent. The tournament gained NAF status in 2009, making it the first Blood Bowl tournament on the continent to earn that honour.

The Warzone club in Johannesburg, South Africa was host to the 2018 edition of the Shaka Shield, in their lovely clubhouse with food and drinks readily available. There was even space to enjoy the warm spring sun between games while drowning your sorrows or celebrating a crushing victory.

This year’s tournament was won by Stanly Loo (NAF name: psiclone) with his Necromantic team the Bloodmoon Howlers. A record of 4 wins and one draw placed them ahead of the Mortis Scorpions (Khemri coached by Jonathan Merry aka DaImp) in second place and the Terrible Tree-Huggers (Wood Elves coached by Gabriel Cross aka Stupid_Gabe) in third place.

In the minor awards, the Mortis Scorpions claimed the Most Feared award for causing the most kills in the tournament (6 kills from 15 casualties), the Bitterbeard Bulldogs (Dwarves coached by Ryan Young aka Greater_Fishy) were awarded the Fans Favourite award for the best comeback and the Bootybay Shrimpers (Humans coached by Dian Brits aka DeeBee12) claimed the Baby Bowl for last place.

We now look forward to Shaka Shield 2019 which will be held in its usual March date, where the best players from the Gauteng region of South Africa will once again battle over top honours. Maybe we will see you there!?

A lovely write-up and a really tempting trip, that. The images below really show the personality of the event and the participants. Fantastic! Thanks to Da_Imp for the report, and well done Stanley on the win!

 

Nuffleween VII

The 7th annual Nuffleween was held on November 10th to honor the Lord of Blood Bowl himself, Nuffle! Each year, the guys from Both Down (Scott and Steve) celebrate Nuffle’s sacred day with 4 rounds of horror themed Blood Bowl goodness. If you’re not familiar with the fluff of the game, Nuffle is the god of Blood Bowl and his sacred number is 11 (hence the 11 players on the pitch). Therefore, his sacred day would be 11/11 or as the Both Down guys call it, Nuffleween.

Besides a wild kick-off table that changes each year based on the event’s theme, Nuffleween also has a spceial “Trick or Treat” rule. This rule means that before the first round, everyone loses a random purchased skill. Then after each subsequent round, you either lose a random purchased skill if you won or tied, or if you lost, then you get to choose which purchased skill to lose. This means that if you took the max of 7 skills (you get 150 k to spend on skills) you would only have 3 of them remaining on that final round. 

In addition to the “Trick of Treat”, any team may also choose to induce any of the Nuffleween Stars made available. These are all the horror themed ones, whether they be Werewolves, Vampires, Skeletons or any other similar themed stars. Since the fans love seeing these stars come out and play, they also each come with the Fan Favorite skill for free. 

This year’s tournament ended up going to Dean Piper who not only won the tournament but secured his place as the Southern Central Amorical Regional Series (SCARS) winner for this year. The SCARS is the NAF tournament series for the central part of the United States and you can see more info at SCARSEvents.com. This is Dean’s second time winning the series and he was the only person to make it to all 12 events.

Of particular note this year was an amazing sculpture by Dustin Parsons and his daughter of our Nuffleween Orc / Pumpkin hybrid. It’s seen in the photo under our Casualty Beast that is tossed around whenever someone scores a casualty. Whoever ends their game with the Casualty Beast ends up getting their choice of monster cereal.  Wacky prizes, goodie bags with Nuffleween giveaways (including a new Nuffleween Kick-Off die), trick or treat bags with goofy stuff and a great group of guys means an amazing event each year. While this event will never (I assume) reach the size of Orclahoma Bowl Weekend, it is its own special beast and one of our best times each year.

It’s always nice to see a fluffy, thematic event get into the spirit of things, good work Steve and Scott! Particularly nice trophy presentation, that one. 🙂

I’ve also been busy Blood Bowling myself this month. Follow this link for a report of Cambridge Double Trouble VI, an event I both co-organised and played in this past weekend. If you didn’t know before what a Wotfudgoo was, this is the only way to learn!

 

TD Notes

This month, the approval team have sanctioned 76 tournaments including 3 Sevens and 1 Streetbowl. If that isn’t a record, it must be darned close! I reckon we’ve had a busy month as people want their 2019 tournament in the database before the packed festive period and the New Year. We’ve room for more in December, so keep ‘em coming!

As mentioned in the news above, the Annual Review 2018 was published on Nov. 1, and bar one annoying typo (‘old’ Lewdgrip has so far refused to be elbowed out by ‘new’ Lewdgrip in our Tournament Team List, but we will get him in the end and update this!), the documents were largely well received. Thanks to all involved once again for their time and passion, I think the positive end-point reached speaks well of the staff and how much they care. In more than one case, something made it through the review that I never expected to come up when we began the process, and in others, something I expected the staff to be passionate about didn’t get any traction at all. I think this is the strength of doing the review with representatives of the global staff (/ community) rather than doing it at them; what we end up with is more reflective of what people want and how they feel about how we go about things. The output is becomes more robust and representative of where the community is in 2018.

Now all of the Annual Review workload is behind us, we can continue to progress other projects. This month, approval staff member Oventa has driven through a really useful ‘How to Apply for NAF Sanctioning’ document. I keep a little tally of tournaments I approve, and how many I need to chat to the TO about before everything is fully signed off. It probably works out that we as approvers have to speak to TOs about roughly 40 % of submissions. Sometimes, this is concerning rules we don’t understand or geographical proximity issues, but more commonly, it’s because not all of the information we need has made it successfully to the NAF website, like dates, addresses or rules. We know that our submission form has seen better days. In an ideal world, we would update it to be more user-friendly and reflective of what we currently need (perhaps one for next year, depending on budget), but in the meantime, please do review our new document, even if you’re an old hand at submitting tournaments. I’m sure it will spark some debate (‘I’ve been submitting tournaments for ten years, and I’ve never done that!’), but this represents best practice and what we’d like everyone to complete as they submit an event. As ever, we’ll continue to work with TOs and approve as many tournaments as we possibly can regardless of how the form is filled in, but you can certainly make our lives easier by following these instructions. Good job, Oventa!

The Glicko ranking page should now be behaving itself; thanks to mubo / Nick for clearing up a couple of bugs. Those that follow NAF committee meeting minutes and other comms will notice we’re working on an issue with our PayPal link, but once that is defeated, we’ll look at the Glicko page and bringing the drop-down filter boxes back. In the meantime, please use the text boxes to serve the same purpose. On that PayPal thing – this is currently our number one concern. I know a few of you have been frustrated when trying to renew your account at how we’re struggling, but if you follow the instructions quoted in the September minutes (Any member who does not receive an activation email within an hour of making payment are advised to contact@thenaf.net with their Paypal receipt attached so that the membership team can manually activate their account), we promise we’ll get to you and get you renewed. Remember: the NAF staff are passionate, caring volunteers. We all have real lives and jobs, but we will get to you. Torsten and Massimo are doing a fabulous job of keeping us ticking along as we wrestle IT demons.

 

Why Didn’t I think of That?

A couple of goodies this month. Firstly, to New Zealand and WBBL: School of Hard Knocks. A really interesting idea here: to gain an additional skill, something needs to go wrong. Throw an Interception? Gain Safe Throw. Snake a pick-up? Gain Sure Hands. What I like about this sort of thing is that it’s not necessarily a method of evening out the field according to results, it evens out as misfortune befalls coaches and those that take a bad roll get a little something back. I don’t know if it’ll have an enormous impact, but the initiative is all the better for that, I think. I’ll try to remember to get a review of this one, I’m really interested in how it’ll go down and whether with additional skills, luck gets at least partially evened out.

Secondly – here is one that’s not quite finalised from Wales, the North Wales Carnage Cup II. At this tournament, there is no tiering. Instead of boosting lesser performing teams with additional skills or money (or both) as is tradition, the TO has come up with some home-brewed inducements and each race gets a budget with which to buy them according to how well they traditionally perform. So Undead get a small number of gold pieces and Halflings a large number. Moreover, the pricing of the inducements changes depending on race and historical use. This gets a little bit complicated, but the fluff and thrust of the thing is really interesting to me. A new take on tiering is always going to grab my attention, as I think tiers are now well explored and metas are quite settled. One to watch when it finally arrives!

 

Holiday Plans

Let’s see what April in the NAF database currently looks like. There seems to be a lot of World Cup build-up to get your teeth into!

Monkeybowl XIV 6/7 Apr. Not a World Cup event, but a personal favourite of mine. A really worthwhile trip if you’re in the UK; the Monkeybowl should be on most bucket lists as it features rather inventive team building / selection rules.

Star Bowl III – Road to World Cup 20 Apr. Hit Frederiksberg for some WC action with a slight twist – stars are encouraged and bring with them free cheerleaders. Who can say no?

SBBM Cup 2019 27/28 Apr. Why not check out the home of the World Cup in advance? Not a bad place to be, even twice in a year.

 

Next Time

Those of you that caught the last committee minutes will know there is a Tournament Director election in December. Between answering all of your questions during the election Q&A and a family Christmas, I’ll be short of free time so this blog will take the month off. Thank you for joining me and reading in 2018, I hope you’ve enjoyed these blogs. Have a super holiday season, and if I’m still your TD, I’ll see you back here in January 2019.