Welcome back to the April 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 the Canadian Gladiator Cup, the legendary Turncoat, Lusobowl in Lisbon and the UKTC in York.
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
- NAF Chatter
1.1 Last Call for the 2023 World Cup
1.2 Inducement of Star Players
1.3 Women in Blood Bowl - Report: Canadian Gladiator Cup (by seanh1986)
- Report: Turncoat (by Volkajo)
- Report: Lusobowl in Lisbon (by Ironbreaker)
- Report: UKTC (by Volkajo)
- Outlook
1. NAF Chatter
1.1. Last Call for the 2023 World Cup
Only a few more days left to register for the fifth NAF World Cup in Alicante. More than 2000 coaches have now registered and fully paid. The deadline to do so is May 1st! So, even if you haven’t found a squad yet, have no roster ready, or don’t even own a team yet – register now! All other things can be taken care of later, and this allows the organizers to properly plan important details. Like how many cans of pineapple to order for the paella.
Roster changes are still possible until July 15th. For any immediate questions and support, head to the World Cup section of the NAF discord.
A large number of Spanish coaches are taking advantage of such a big event right in front of their door, and maybe not very surprisingly, Spain contributes the largest number of participants, followed by France and England.
1.2 Inducement of Star Players
I’d like to take the opportunity to remind everybody about the current NAF rules for Star Players. Up until January, there was an all-or-none policy regarding the use of Star Players. Tournament hosts had to either allow all Star Players, or forbid them all together. This has changed with the 2023 guidelines. Now, organizers have much more flexibility and can ban certain Star Players or allow only a few. Of course, as before, the creation of custom, tournament-specific Star Players is still allowed. This can also be used to recreate classic Star Players, like Deeproot Weakbranch, who lacks the punch of his more famous brother, and has only MB(+1). For the exact ruling, please have a look at the respective section in the NAF approval document.
1.3 Women in Blood Bowl
Oil rig workers and Blood Bowl players share a common feature. Not the fact that they often have stained hands and regularly share a room with their colleagues. But rather that both fields have a comparable percentage of women actively involved. I find it hard to imagine why Blood Bowl, with its love for Elves and beautifully painted little toys is not more popular among girls. However, there appears to be something about our hobby that makes it more appealing to male players. Still, there is a number of active female players; and in fact, the most recent tournament in Germany was won by one!
I was recently asked whether it would be a good idea to introduce a reward, similar to the “best Rookie” or “best Stunty,” for the best female coach, as an incentive to attract more women to our hobby. Although it was a well-intentioned suggestion, when I asked a few female coaches for their thoughts, the feedback was a resounding “absolutely not.”
I agree that creating special awards for female players is not the best solution to increase the number of women in Blood Bowl. It may unintentionally reinforce the idea that female players need special treatment or incentives to participate, which can be counterproductive and alienating. Lots of tournaments feature only one or two female coaches. I am sure that filtering them out and putting them into the spotlight would make many of them feel awkward and lead to the opposite effect.
In my personal opinion, toning down the sweat- and booze-fueled rowdiness often associated with Blood Bowl tournaments will be more successful in attracting not only female, but also young players. Ultimately, the key is to focus on creating an inclusive and supportive community where all players feel valued and encouraged to participate, regardless of gender, age or number of hooves.
2. Report: Canadian Gladiator Cup (by seanh1986)
Canadian Blood Bowl is at its best when beer, miniatures, and dice hit the pitch together! On March 25, the Gladiator Cup 2023 was held in Guelph, Ontario, Canada at the Royal City Brewery. Royal City is well-known in the area for arguably being the top microbrewery, and maybe slightly less so, for their willingness to host an annual Blood Bowl tournament!
This year, we had the opportunity of playing in their newly constructed/renovated dedicated event space. The beer and food were delicious and the Blood Bowl was exciting! It was our largest Gladiator Cup yet, with +30 coaches battling it out in squads of two for four rounds using the World Cup ruleset! The event also acted as a beta test for the newly developed Amorical web app, which allowed for all participants to view/submit match-ups and view rankings, etc.
The end of round 4 was very exciting, as the round came to a close, all matches were finished and results were submitted with only one match remaining, kikurasis vs. KidRichard on table 3. With an audience watching the final turns, the outcome of this match would decide both the squad and individual winners of the tournament! In the end, kikurasis pulled off the victory in the final turns.
As a result, the top squad, finishing with 7 points, was Pitch Invasion (kikurasis, tlawson) from Hamilton, Ontario (3 wins, 1 tie, 0 losses as a squad). Individually, kikurasis finished 3/1/0 with Shambling Undead and tlawson finished 2/1/1 with Norse. There was a three-way tie among squads for second place, with 6 points.
Individually, there was a three-way tie for first place between kikurasis, Duke_of_Edmund, and CoachMcGirt, all of whom played the Shambling Undead and finished 3/1/0. As the first tie-breaker was squad score, kikurasis was awarded the top individual.
The most touchdowns was won by codered with 11 touchdowns in 4 games as Elven Union. Most casualties was won by oat in his first ever NAF tournament with 16 casualties in 4 games as Khorne. Best defense was won by coachMcGirt and his Shambling Undead allowing only 2 touchdowns in 4 games. Catleesi won best sport with Amazons, while BrainSap earned the wooden spoon with Chaos Dwarves.
As the top individual, kikurasis took home the beautifully painted Gladiator-themed NAF shield. All winners were awarded custom 3D printed and painted Gladiator miniature trophies.
The event was a great success, the Royal City Brewery are awesome hosts. Their staff love hosting us and always enjoy going around and checking out the beautifully painted miniatures! We look forward to next year!
3. Report: Turncoat (by Volkajo)
Okay, this is going to be a very special report because this is something that should be on every Blood Bowl coaches bucket list: A 24 hour tournament. Madness, you say? It gets worse, because every other game you switch roster with your opponent. And because this is still not mad enough, the tournament is followed by another four game tournament the next day! But let’s start chronologically. I think it’s pretty much the same for most European countries, but strikes are a big thing right now, be it train, plane or autobahn tunnel personnel – which makes traveling for Blood Bowl quite hard, since these trips have to be rather well timed. So, dodging strikes left and right, I made my way over to Belgium, to the lovely town of Ursel, where Magictobe sets up this very special event, the original Turncoat, once a year. His family is kindly assisting him and took great care of us throughout the weekend.
You felt that this was somewhat special right from the start, and as the night and the next day progressed, you could feel that it was less and less about the results and more and about the feeling of unity between the twelve coaches (Stimme’s note: except for that dirty Griff coach, he was excluded!). The rule set gave you a lot of crazy options, but you could see that many coaches asked themselves: do I really want to play against this roster five times (Stimme’s note: except for that dirty Griff coach, he obviously didn’t mind)? So not all the rosters were the most powerful options, which made it quite interesting.
To my surprise, eleven games of Blood Bowl in a row within 24 hours was not as bad as I expected it to be. There were hardly any power naps amongst the field, even though there were a few points where I could really feel my 10 hour train trip getting to the venue. I actually ended up playing Elven Union for the main tourney, and Ogres for the second one (which had a lot more coaches) but looking back I can say that I very much preferred the Pro Elves. The Ogres (with Griff ) were just a pain to play against. And Griff-offs are one of the worst experiences in Blood Bowl.
Speaking of the worst: being sleep deprived and playing this game does bring out the worst in you. Either you stop caring half game, or get impatient / angry even with people you have faced plenty of times and usually enjoy playing. The odd thing is: the entire experience is still fun and special, mostly because of the great organization and the positive atmosphere Magictobe and his family are setting.
I am 100% coming back next year and this should be on everybody’s bucket list!
4. Report: Lusobowl in Lisbon (by Ironbreaker)
And so it was that on the 25th & 26th of March, once again Blood Bowl players flocked to the Palácio Marques de Fronteira, a 350 years old nacional palace in Lisbon (because the current Marques is an awesome guy that also plays with us, paraphrasing a famous saying “It’s good to be the Marquis”), to participate in the 4th Lusobowl, the Portuguese prime tournament.
Thanks to efforts from Stingray and Lord_Kln, 54 players coming from all the corners of the country and from abroad were set to play 6 matches of this wonderful game that brings us all together on a pitch with a design inspired on the gardens of the palace and dice on the Napoleonic invasions. We had old players return to the gridiron after decades away as well as new stars emerging. There was joy and laughter, as well as tears and many skulls (seriously, so many skulls, you would think it was a commemoration to Khorne and not to Nuffle). We had Treemen intercepting, bombs exploding, teams getting pitch cleared, so many frogs, you might have thought that it was a French kitchen. We had Griff leading a team of Old World Alliance all the way to the top tables and redneck gators coming out of our childhood memory TV shows to win the best painted competition.
In the end, the first prize went to OldOne who is the top ranking Portuguese NAF player and one of the best Dark Elves players in the world, who led his (finally finished painting) team, the Bham! to victory without conceding any touchdowns.* I think Khorne is calling to me as I was always gifted with a triple skull on the first block of at least one match each day.”
5. UKTC (by Volkajo)
The UK Team Championship, together with the NAFC, feels like the one tournament everybody in Blood Bowl everybody (at least in the UK) agrees to go to, which leads to a very competitive field. Quite a big number of international teams showed up as well, which created a great atmosphere. As in previous years, the tournament was held on the campus of the University of York. The town itself is just gorgeous, so walking around, being out with friends, meeting up with other coaches is just great. It’s a massive Blood Bowl party!
The tournament was also very special for me since my mate from Australia actually came over to play with us, so our team consisted of an Andorran, an English-Danish, an Australian, and me from Ladonia. Plenty of meet ups were organized, especially since most of us started the game online, and this was the perfect opportunity to meet everybody at the same time. In fact, there was quite a number of participants coming from the online scene for whom this was the first, or one of the first table top tournaments.
The tournament itself was very smoothly run, fantastic job by the organizers and the refs! We even ended up playing the final round on table 1, me even playing board 1, but sadly we lost the round to a very nice team from France who also took home the entire thing.
It is nice to see how different tournaments do different things for you. Some focus on providing competitive games with a balanced rule set, heavy on tier 1 and a smaller number of coaches. Others you attend for the social aspects, and the UKTC 100% delivered in that regard. A great city with a nice venue and perfect organization lays out the ideal ground for the biggest Blood Bowl party of the year (apart from World Cup/Euro Bowl), so if you are a social being, go!
6. Outlook
We got tournaments in as many as 24 different countries that have been submitted for the month of May, including events in Lithuania, Chile and Hungary. Hopefully, your travels won’t be as affected as ours were last weekend, where a double whammy of train and airport strikes made travelling impossible and let my squad miss participating in Maule Bowl.
There is a total of 74 tournaments to choose from, including established tournaments like grant85’s Brewhouse Bowl, the 19th iteration of Madhobbit Massacre hosted by Jelmer, the Hammabowl in Hamburg, and the Tilean Team Cup (currently also running as a squad event on Fumbbl). Find all the upcoming tournaments in the listing in our members area.