Tournament Director Blog March 2023

Welcome back to the March edition of the Tournament Director Blog, where we keep you updated about things that are going on behind the scenes, highlight interesting tournament-relevant content, give an outlook on upcoming events, and, most importantly, publish reports on a few recent tournaments. In this month’s edition, these are Spring Open in Prague, the German Dungeonbowl major and the Italian Fulginium Bowl National. We are also brushing over the newly published Blood Bowl 3. If you are interested in a more in-depth review, check out our page with podcasts, as a lot of the recent episodes are covering this newest edition by Cyanide!

As always, if you want to contribute any content to this blog (e.g. a report of a recent tournament you visited or ran), reach out! Contact info are available on our NAF staff site.

Content

1. NAF Chatter
   1.1 Return of the Tournament Series
   1.2 24+2 Badges
   1.3 Printable Pitches
   1.4 Database Spring Clean-up
   1.5 World Cup Update
2. Report: Spring Open in Prague (by Volkajo)
3. Report: Dungeonbowl (by Stimme)
4. Report: Fulginium Bowl (by Volkajo)
5. Report: BB3 Review (by Arioso)
6. Outlook

1. NAF Chatter

1.1. Return of the Tournament Series

With the tournament scene exploding and numbers being back to pre-Covid times again, we have restarted the NAF tournament series program! In a nut shell: there are two different options to hold a tournament series, an open series that will include all tournaments in a certain geographic area, or a closed series that will encompass only certain pre-defined tournaments. The idea behind is to encourage coaches to attend more tournaments in their larger area, foster local communities – and gain more chances for bragging rights!

You can read all about the requirements for holding a tournament series on the respective NAF page. Up to date we have 16 tournament series world-wide that have registered in our forum. The year is still young – if you would like to setup a tournament series as well, post in the forum or reach out directly to me or a NAF member. As in previous years, the NAF will provide again prizes for tournament series winners and runner ups!

1.2 24+2 Badges

As the 24+2 program from pre-BB2020 times has now officially come to an end, we are working on providing the coaches that managed to play all Classic teams (as well as Khorne and Bretonnians) with the respective badges. There is a sign-up thread in the forum. It doesn’t hurt to post there, but we have also used advanced SQL magic and queried our database to identify all eligible coaches. So you will not miss out. The badges are all hand-crafted by Gaixo’s visually impaired great aunt, so it takes some time for production. But our aim is to have them available for the World Cup in Alicante, where we then can hand out a large number of them directly,

At the moment, there is no immediate plan to setup a similar program again. But we already have several new additions like Black Orcs, Snotlings or Imperial Nobility on the menu. And if, as many suspect, GW comes up with more races like Sea Elves, Gargoyles and Ice Cubes, this might be a good incentive to initiate a new badge program.

1.3 Printable Pitches

If you read the February blog post, you might remember that I covered Deathbowl and uploaded a Deathbowl pitch that you can freely download and print for maximum mayhem. Three years ago, Scisco similarly created a regular Blood Bowl pitch and kindly made it available to the general public. This pitch still has the pre-BB2020 kick-off events, and as Scisco seemingly had no plans to update it, I took the liberty to generate an updated version based on Scisco’s work. It is available for download here on the NAF site as a 30MB JPG file. Use it as a template for your own pitch. Print it on vinyl, styrofoam or fabric. It also makes a great custom-made bed sheet as a present for your wedding anniversary.

1.4 Database Spring Clean-up

The large majority of tournament organizers uploads their match data promptly and shortly after the tournament has finished (likely also due to friendly reminders by sometimes very impatient participants). But some match results never make it into the database – be it that the laptop caught fire, the dog ate the game sheets, or the the host simply didn’t know how to submit the results. Sometimes, especially during Covid, the tournament simply didn’t take place, but was never cancelled or removed. I am going through the last years at the moment, identifying these orphan tournaments and contacting the hosts if the latter was the case, or if they simply did not upload any data. If you know of tournaments that you participated in as a player, but that never made it into the database – this is a great time to nudge your TO to fix this issue before the tournament becomes erased and the world will never know how great you did with Nurgle.

1.5 World Cup Update

Only a bit more than five months left until the fifth NAF World Cup in Alicante, and already more than 1800 coaches have registered and fully paid! Remember that the registration will be closing on May 1st. Roster changes are still possible until July 15th.
For any immediate questions and support, head to the World Cup section of the NAF discord, where the organizers have installed a life-like and ultra-responsive AI, UlvaGPT, that will be able to dish out info and address any issues.

2. Report: Spring Open in Prague (by Volkajo)

To start off the newly found tournament series “Ostmark Cup”, the Spring Open were held in Prague. Their community has grown quite a bit over the last few years thanks to the efforts of Grom and Coewolf, so coaches from Hungary, Slovakia, Austria, Germany, Ladonia and of course the Czech Republic found their way to Ogri Dupe, their local games store. The venue is located close to the city centre, so if you want to visit the city, this tournament is perfect for you. 

The lovely Coewolf always offers a little tour through the city centre on Friday night, where he shows all foreign coaches his favourite downtown spots. Saturday always has an organized dinner, so plenty of time to socialize. 

Personally, one of the reasons I like to travel for the game is that you get to see how differently people enjoy the game. A couple of weeks ago I was in Valencia where loud music was constantly blasting out the speakers, coaches were shouting, dancing, yelling and here it’s almost the exact opposite: Everybody’s very chill, people are very much focused on the games and everything’s running smoothly. The Spring Open always has its own ruleset with special weather tables, extra points for big wins, etc. so it’s nice to see a bigger tournament that is very different from the World Cup meta. 

The tournament gave me a chance to bring my Snotlings and I had six very nice games against good opponents. Turn 15 and 16 in game six I just needed a single Snotling dodge to win the tourney but it was not meant to be – which is good because this gave the title to the Coewolf on tie-breakers. The first Czech coach to ever win a two-day tournament in Prague! 

So if you are looking for a chill time, fun Blood Bowl, friendly people and good beer, Prague is the place for you!

3. Report: Dungeonbowl (by Stimme)

Germany’s eighteenth annual Dungeonbowl tournament, organized by Docmaxx, took place this month in Düsseldorf, with coaches from all over Europe participating. As in previous years,, Spain had a strong presence at the event, with many coaches from the country showing up to compete. The tournament also had the pleasure of seeing seven next-generation players who played like real pros during the six games of Blood Bowl.

Sunday morning started off with a birthday celebration for Traveller, whom many of you might know as the creator of https://blood-bowl-miniatures.de – the number one compendium of any official Blood Bowl miniature ever published.

Dungeonbowl, despite its name, is a regular Blood Bowl tournament. However, the final match at the top table (as well as the Stunty final) is played as a Dungeon Bowl match. This year, it was Siggi’s Amazons that squeezed out a tight win against Candlejack’s Necromantic Horrors in a dramatic showdown and took home the title of overall winner.

A lot of talking has been going on recently about ranking, with Fumbbl introducing a Glicko ranking and Blood Bowl 3 setting up a similar ladder based function. While some consider rankings interesting and important and others irrelevant and secondary, it is still worth noting that a new record has been set at this year’s Dungeonbowl! OldManDraco’s Ogres are now leading the world-wide NAF ranking! From behind, that is. Now officially the worst team in NAF history, his Ogres will be accepting dice donations at the World Cup.

4. Report: Fulginium Bowl (by Volkajo)

This might be a long one, apologies in advance! Fulginium Bowl just got awarded the “National” status by the NAF so it basically counts as a major. Just like REVA, the Spanish National, the event is not purely about Blood Bowl – but more about that later. 

The venue is located in the heart of Umbria, so there are no airports close by. Technically, Peruggia might be closer, but I decided to go to Rome where I spent a few days before the tourney. Highly recommended! It’s a fantastic city with plenty of good bars and restaurants. But honestly, I don’t want to imagine the masses of tourists in summer time, so I think this might be the perfect time for a visit actually. We got a direct train to Trevi from where it’s a nice 30 minute walk to the venue, Borgo Ulivo, a hotel in the hills. The scenery is just magnificent. The valley is on one side, the village of Trevi up on the hill in walking distance. We added an extra day after the tourney just to get some more hiking done – and it was very much worth it. We met up with the Maltese delegation of about 20 people on Friday night and they invited us out for dinner to the town of Foligno, which was a great start to the weekend. 

Everybody showed up on Saturday morning and grouped around the small bar in the entrance room to get coffee and shots (they make  their own Amaro) in. The tourney started rather quickly, and after game one we went straight into game two. Everything ran very smoothly. I played the organizer, the great Leonida in game two. He had Wood Elves, and in turn three he looked at me “Are you hungry?” – “Sure, I could eat” – “In that case, I will score.” He runs it in, gets up and shouts to the room “Everybody: end your turns and move over to have lunch.” Usually you try to adjust breaks and food to the schedule of the games, not at Fulginium: Food is king. A few minutes later I found out why. We all moved over to the other room where a massive table was already set for all of us with plenty of red and white wine. We had a fantastic meal and in the middle of it my travel companion, the lovely kfoged looked at me: “There are two more sets of silverware, you know what that means.” So fully stuffed we went back to finish our game. Followed by game three and – another food break. Cake, sandwiches and coffee were served before game four, which concluded the Blood Bowl day. 

What followed is actually hard to describe with words. We went over to the food room and it felt like the family running the restaurant (great people, helped out in every way possible and showed absolute passion for their hotel and their food) swarmed us with plates of food. Every five to ten minutes they showed up with something new. Salami, cheese, bruschetta, mortadella, pasta, meat, veggies, more cheese, more paste, truffle, truffle, more truffle. It was hard to keep up with the speed they were serving things. Despite being slightly irritated by the concept of not eating meat, they even went out of their way to prepare a vegetarian alternative for me (and I think one other coach). All of this was included, and it was great to talk to so many new people over dinner.   

Needless to say, the food and the wine were great, and even though it’s still early in the year and the World Cup is still coming up, this will 100% be one of the absolute highlights of my Blood Bowl year.

The following day we started with round five, followed by another great lunch. And even between game six and the award ceremony they managed to feed us more snacks. Due to the sheer amount of prizes the award show took quite some time and it ended with the legendary Rolex winning it all! Personally, I finished the tournament at table two where my Pro Elves were demolished in the second half by some Khemri, which led to a draw. 

I am very tempted to lie to you all and say that nobody should ever go there, to keep this a secret! But if you are into food, Italian landscape and great people, Fulginium is an absolute must. Funny enough it felt very much like REVA with everybody being extremely welcoming and Blood Bowl being secondary to the social parts of the event. Already booked my ticket for next year.

5. Blood Bowl 3 Review (by Arioso)

Blood Bowl 3 from Cyanide Studio, the latest iteration of the computer game adaptation of our beloved hobby, was released in February 2023, with a slight delay of two years. Originally planned for release in 2021, it was announced in 2020. However, it is currently impossible to review the game as it was released with many bugs, and many of the features that made its predecessors successful are still missing. At present, a “pre-season” is ongoing, and there is not much else to do except play online. On the positive side, it adapts the new ruleset to the computer game and comes with 12 races at launch, along with really nice graphics. The races included are Ork, Nurgle, Imperial Nobility, Human, Old World Alliance, Black Orc, Dwarf, Dark Elf, Elven Union, Skaven, Chaos Chosen, and Chaos Renegades, providing a certain variety to play with. The developers promised to bring the missing races in time during a “season pass”-like event where players can unlock them after playing for some time or buy them immediately in each new season pass. However, the cost of the season pass has not yet been published.

The developers have communicated that they are trying to fix the game, and the first real “Season” is supposed to start at the end of May, which will unlock the first new race and finally bring the open ladder play that most people are waiting for. However, the ongoing pre-seasons show some problems with the matchmaking and ELO that is used and show that in online play, some teams could reach very high TV quite fast, so it is an interesting test field to see how the new league rules adapt in the end. They published the planned roadmap for 2023, so we can expect a better playable game by the end of the year. However, Metacritics are understandably not very happy with the game in its current state, and I cannot blame them. It has not been a good release.

If you want to jump in for a quick online match with the actual ruleset, Blood Bowl 3 allows you to do just that, but sadly, it doesn’t allow you to do much more. Let’s hope the developers don’t lose interest. On the bright hand side, they have already deployed several patches fixing some bugs and crashes, so there is still hope! The base of the game looks fine, and it has potential, even though Cyanide has a long way to go.

6. Outlook

As I am finalizing this blog, with the last hours of March fleeting, I am actually on my way to the exotic city of York, where the UK Team Challenge is being held on the first weekend of April. Meanwhile, the online Tilean Team Cup is happening on Fumbbl, with an impressive 276 coaches playing in the squad event, and another 22 coaches in the singles.

We got tournaments in 20 different countries that have been submitted for the month of April, including events in emerging countries such as Bulgaria, Slovenia and Colombia. Among the total of 84 tournaments are classics like Twyllenimor’s KlingenCon LII (great chance to practice the Latin numbering) in Germany, Grither’s Rocky Mountain Rampage XII events in the US or Schnitzelbowl in Austria. Find all of them in the listing in our members area.