Tournament Director Blog October 2023

Welcome to the October edition of the Tournament Director Blog, your prime destination for everything you need to know about NAF tournaments. Here, we offer you not just the newest updates from behind the curtain, but also essential information, previews of forthcoming events, and naturally, summaries of recently concluded exciting tournaments. For this month’s edition, our coverage includes OctOgre Cup, Aemona Bowl and the Berlin Open.

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 World Cup Data Upload
   1.2 Linking Your NAF Account to FUMBBL and Tourplay
   1.3 Most Travelled Coaches
   1.4 BB3 Online Tournament
   1.5 Gift Shipping Service
2. Report: OctOgre Cup (by Stewbacca)
3. Report: Aemona Bowl (by RedDragon)
4. Report: Berlin Open (by Volkajo)
5. Outlook

1. NAF Chatter

1.1. World Cup Data Upload

Habemus data! After intensive grooming, filling out gaps and correcting entries, the organizers have uploaded the detailed match results to the NAF database, and all of the World Cup participants will see their long awaited drop or rise in rankings.

Top NAF data cruncher Mike (sann00638), has already updated his Tableau tables. Browse around for further analysis. And share any interesting trends, conclusions or fancy graphs in the NAF Discord data mine.

It is super unlikely and not imaginable at all, but in the very improbable case that there is a remaining error in the more than 10,000 reported results, please reach out to me and/or the organizers so we can fix it. We’ll also update the NAF profiles with winners of the different categories in the next days.

1.2 Linking your NAF Account to FUMBBL and Tourplay

October brought significant updates to online NAF services. Let’s clear the air: rumors of the NAF renaming itself after the newly available Twitter handle for more traction are baseless. Our original intent remains: we’re holding out for Myspace to become available.

However, FUMBBL and Tourplay users might have noticed a novel feature. You can now validate your NAF data and sync your NAF account with these platforms. This not only allows you to proudly show off your NAF membership but also simplifies things for tournament organizers. No more mistyped NAF numbers, no more struggling to remember where you used Arag0rn, Aragorn91 and Arag.orn.

Linking the two accounts just requires a few mouse clicks. For the tech-savvy among you: it is based on the OAUTH2 authentication protocol. Only registered services (so far only FUMBBL and Tourplay) are able to access NAF coach data, and you’ll always know what’s being shared.

For developers interested in integrating this with their platforms or apps, please contact me. Also, thanks to Christer for bugging me to set this up and assisting in its execution.

As a reminder: there is also an additional JSON API available to validate NAF names, as described in the August blog, at https://www.thenaf.net/coachcheck.php.

1.3 Most Travelled Coaches

Many attendees of the World Cup seized the chance to collect one of the traveler patches from our esteemed president, Gaixo. Depending on the number of European countries they have played tournaments in, coaches could qualify for the 5, 10, or 25-country patches. Nobody was eligible yet for the latest, but the NAF is known to plan far ahead.

In case you are wondering who has travelled the most and furthest to participate in a Blood Bowl tournament, check out this list (which is constantly being updated!). It shows all coaches that have played tournaments in at least 5 countries (UK being counted as one, as our database does not discriminate tournament locations within the UK).

While sir_twist_089 has a few countries on the rest of us, it is not too late yet to catch up to him before he reaches the 25. Go book your flight to Lithuania now!

1.4 BB3 Online Tournament

NAF online tournaments have become a cornerstone over recent years, gaining substantial traction during the pandemic era. In fact, the EuroBowl trial tournaments on FUMBBL are currently in their last round, with more than 310 coaches!

After several years of waiting, the Blood Bowl 3 PC game is now also featuring its first NAF event! The inaugural tournament will kick-off on October 30th, with 64 players in weekly knock-out rounds. While the primary goal is to assess this new medium, the best-performing coaches can also expect some glittering prizes such as Warpstone, and the two finalists will receive automatic access to the qualification round of the Blood Bowl 3 Season 2 Finals.

Admins Arioso and olivierdulac (best known for his 2014 cameo in the French remake of Flashdance) are backing this tournament and are working closely with BB3’s developers. Stay updated via the dedicated NAF Discord channel to follow the event. Alternatively, if you are fluent in Italian or just enjoy some Roman mumbling in the background, check out Wild Thing Studios, who are planning to provide coverage and commentary.

1.5 Gift Shipping Services

After extensive planning, the initial few hundred NAF gifts were dispatched in October to EU coaches via a third-party vendor. Preliminary feedback (such as the striking lack of complaints) suggests a successful rollout. A huge shoutout to Twyllenimor for orchestrating this! We hope to make this our new standard.

A gentle reminder: If you’re awaiting a shipment after renewal or sign-up, please ensure your address in your profile is current.

2. Report: OctOgre Cup (by Stewbacca)

On the first weekend of October, the South Kent Area BloodBowl (SKABB) League ran the second iteration of OctOgre Cup. The first one was a smaller event run at Chaos Cards at capped at 18 players. This time we had moved to a local hotel’s function room in Folkestone which allowed us to both increase the capacity to 30 (we hope to be able to increase further next year) and to run it as our first ever 2-day event.

We aim to run the event again next year, although the exact date is pending the announcement of the dates for Eurobowl. The event was very kindly sponsored by Charlie Victor, Punga Minatures, Rule Book Tabs and Pogostick Productions.

The ruleset required teams to roster a strength 5 player if it was possible for them to do so. If after setting up for a drive, either team wasn’t fielding a strength 5 player then a random player would be knocked out and replaced by a Drunk Ogre Fan who was had the ball and chain, bonehead and animal savagery traits. There was also a violent crowd who added +1 for any surfed player, a hard pitch that made the ball bounce twice and a special weather table featuring gale force winds and ice storms.

The ruleset led to quite a variety of rosters. Despite there being only 31 rosters (the 30 capacity plus a spare player) there were 21 of the 29 races represented. There were 4 Underworld, 3 Vampire (we allowed the new vampire team), with 2 each of Amazon, Goblin, Lizardmen, Norse and Ogre with 15 other races being represented once.

To get around the strength 5 player rule, 28 teams rostered a strength 5 positional, 2 (both amazon coaches) had a star player to cover the requirement and 1 brave dark elf coach accepted his fate and played the entire weekend with the drunk ogre!

For my roster, after a lot of what I believe the youth call “banter” with my teammate David at the World Cup we picked each other’s team for this event, which meant I was playing Tomb Kings. They’re a team that would have been way down on my list if I’d been picking myself, so it’s nice in a way to be forced out of my comfort zone. After 1 tabletop practice and a couple online, I realised that there isn’t a wide variety of play styles for them. Due to this and my desire to shout “VILHELMMM!” a lot, I rostered Mr Chaney. My build was 4 guard Tomb Guardians, 1 blitzer with tackle, 2 throwers with block, 4 skeletons, Wilhelm Chaney and 2 re-rolls.

David had given me minimal advice on playing the team, with the main bit which stuck in my head being that if an opponent rolled an 8 for the injury roll on a skeleton that you had to tap on your head and shout “THICK SKULL BABY! BEST SKILL IN THE GAME!)

In the end I came out with a 1/3/1 record (sitting out one game as the spare player) and I had a lot more fun with them than I expected.

The winners of the event were:

Winner: howlinggriffon (Underworld)
Runner up: euhan (Undead)
Most TD: MiniMorg (Underworld)
Most CAS: fluffles (Norse)
Best painted: PaganAgent
Wooden spoon: busseltonwanderer (OWA)

Special congratulations to MiniMorg for winning the most touchdowns despite playing only 5 of the 6 games.

I had hoped to play one of the three Vampire teams to see them in action but it wasn’t to be. I managed to see snippets of games and have a chat with a couple of the coaches and have an idea of what they are like at least. They look like a solid tier 2 team. I have since spoken a bit more with two of the coaches and we discuss their thoughts on a new podcast focussing on BloodBowl in the South East of England, The Blood Bowl Tavern, which I am reliably informed is on all good podcast providers.

It was great to meet and play a few coaches that I’d not met previously, especially Tom (busseltonwanderer) who won the wooden spoon but was never seen without a smile on his face. Thanks to all for an enjoyable weekend, and hopefully we’ll see you all at an event soon.

3. Report: Aemona Bowl (by RedDragon)

On October 14th and 15th, we held our second annual Aemona Bowl a two day Blood Bowl international tourney in Ljubljana, Slovenia with coaches coming mostly from Slovenia, Austria and Hungary, but also from Sweden and the USA this year!

With a total of 22 coaches, it was the largest Blood Bowl tournament in Slovenia to date! The spread of teams was quite balanced with only Amazons being represented three times. Following were 2 teams each of Norse, Necro, Wood Elves, Undead, Khorne and Chorfs. The field was rounded off by a Pro Elf, High Elf and Dark Elf team, Dwarfs, OWA, Underworld and a Skaven team. Unfortunately (or fortunately for them;)) not a single Stunty team came to play.

Final standings can be found here: https://tourplay.net/en/blood-bowl/aemona-bowl/classifications

Below are a few pictures of the games, following by all of the winners. (btw. not even a flooded entrance on Sunday managed to spoil our fun!)

4. Report: Berlin Open (by Volkajo)

If you are a frequent reader of this very fine blog, you might have noticed that I am submitting quite a few of these reports. The reason is only partly that I’m sometimes rather bored at work, but more that I really enjoy the community part of our hobby. That is also the reason why I really like hosting tournaments myself. Usually I do two bigger ones (Berlin Rumble and Berlin Open) and a few smaller ones (Christmas, 24 Hour tournament, etc.). It is my way of giving back all the enjoyment I get from traveling and being welcomed by other communities and organizers. 

So, last weekend I held the Berlin Open 2023, this time with just 34 coaches since I did not advertise the event as much due to real life issues (usually I have around 50 coaches showing up). We were all looking forward to six games of fun Blood Bowl and the nice and chill atmosphere that usually makes the “Berlin Blood Bowl spirit”. 

Leading up to the event I had a BB thing that kept me a little occupied. We all sometimes joke about people and their dice, e.g. “if Dave is bringing his unicorn dice again, we are in trouble” or “has Steve rolled a single 1 all weekend?”. But it does not happen very often that we have serious issues. Sometimes people like to share dice to get any suspicion out of the way, which is totally fine. Dice towers, cups – whatever helps make both coaches feel more comfortable. Because what you don’t want is serious allegations about people cheating. It happens from time to time that people accidentally overspend on a roster or add a skill too much, sometimes people also misread rules. These problems usually can be solved by discussions, apologies and/or buying each other drinks. No harm done. When it comes to actual cheating, it is a different story. 

We have a coach in our local community where these jokes occurred. “Oh, most cas again, what a surprise”, which is, as said, what just happens. But when multiple of my close friends take me to the side and say “hey, I did not want to escalate things during the game, but I am pretty sure the coach did not roll these dice in that instance / at least two or three instances”, I begin to take things seriously. If one person says something, whatever. If two people say something, it makes you think. If three people you trust say something, you need to do something. 

So I actually talked to the coach in question, which in my opinion is the only option in this situation. Spreading rumors and talking behind someone’s back do not help anybody, and when I talked to the reporting coaches we discussed that a talk like this was in order. The coach – unsurprisingly – denied all allegations but after a long conversation we discussed that the only way to get rid of the rumors was a) stop talking / joking about it and b) being very obvious and clean about dice rolls. I replied to the reporting coaches that we had a good talk and agreed to solve the issue in the described way. 

Back to Berlin Open. Obviously the coach in question was present at the event, otherwise this detour in my story would have been rather pointless, right? When I host tourneys and play, I play something silly, Pro Elves in this case so I don’t need more than an hour for a game. In game five, at his halftime, a friend passed me on his way to grab a coffee and just said “the issue is still there” – sadly I knew what he was referring to. I finished my game and walked over to watch their game, which was one of the top tables and a Wood Elf mirror, so rather exciting anyway! Reporting friend was 1-0 up and had one more man on the pitch, the coach in question was driving to equalize. He left a gap so the reporting elves stole the ball and went off with a dancer carrying it. 

They both looked at a few things, discussed etc. – just what people do in this situation. Coach in question leaned over to move his pieces declaring a blitz on the ball (1d). While leaning over, he had his hand on the dice cup. The reporting coach said “mate, that’s a rush” and they counted. Yes, there was a rush, so the accused coach just rolled a D6 from his hand – 4, to afterwards lifting the dice cup where a straight pow seemed to be waiting all along. Did he really roll that die? I was not sure but I asked one or two more people over to come and watch. So it was 1-1, and the accused coach rolled the kick–off event: a blitz with a short kick to get his elves under the ball. The other elves managed to get it loose but nothing more. So when the accused coach declared his blitz, I had very good vision on what he was doing and he put an empty dice cup over two block dice (push + pow) and right away the person next to me called out “you did not roll those dice” – “I did!” so I, as the TO, said “no, I clearly saw it, you did not” – “well, I’ll just roll them again” and the opponent said it was fine. We let them play because the two coaches figured it out themselves. 

The game ended in a 1-1 and when I looked at the results and the upcoming draw the accused coach had a good chance to still win the tournament. So I had talks with both coaches and ended up awarding the win to the coach who was betrayed. The accused coach understood why this happened and agreed. The next round was up but obviously a lot of people had seen what happened. The accused coach’s next opponent refused to play him, and honestly, I can’t even blame him. So after a bit of discussion I suggested to the accused coach to go home and let the tournament roll on (I sat out as well to let everybody else play). Junior84 ended up winning on tie breakers, but sadly in a way it did not even feel important at that moment. 

In the hours and days after the event I had no other topic in my life. People constantly asked me about what has happened, why we made certain calls, etc. while I was trying to tidy up the situation, talking to the accused coach on one side and people who had raised similar situations about him before. It was a tough call for me personally because unless you are 100% sure – and it’s not easy to be 100% – you don’t want to do this to anyone. Especially not to someone who you like as a person and who’s a valued member of our little community. The situation still weighs hard on everybody involved. The accused coach, the people who played him, the people who raised situations they observed, the NAF, me, a lot of people. 

I handed this over to the NAF to deal with. Luckily three NAF representatives were actually present at the event, which helped in communication. I am pretty sure the NAF will give an update / a ruling on this rather soon and I can only hope none of you, dear readers, who have made it this far, will ever have to experience this. 

I still feel like someone punched me in the stomach, but I am sure with the help of the community, I can get back up again and set up more fun tournaments.

Commentary by Stimme:

As Volkajo pointed out, witnessing a lucky streak in a dice game isn’t uncommon. Every so often, and thankfully rarely, suspicions arise and accusations are thrown. In this particular incident, as saddening and disturbing as it was, we were fortunate to have several onlookers who witnessed the act of cheating firsthand. It wasn’t a matter of one person’s word against another’s. We didn’t have to ponder over win rates and probabilities or resort to measures like weighing dice in saltwater. I didn’t even need to rely on the testimonies of others since I was present at the venue. In fact, I was the individual who declined to play against the implicated coach in the final round.

This incident was a great shock for everybody involved and warrants a more comprehensive commentary about Fair Play in the near future. It is also bound to have further consequences. As of now, following discussions with the NAF committee and the German NC, and given the gravity of the situation, the culpable coach was stripped of his trophies, and all awards were removed from his NAF profile. Furthermore, he was barred from participating in all NAF tournaments, with the possibility of the ban being reconsidered, at the earliest, after a year.

5. Outlook

This November promises an exciting line-up with a staggering 84 tournaments on the horizon. Notably, the US major, Chaos Cup, makes its debut in its fresh Florida location. The global Blood Bowl community will carefully eye how many participants survive the hurricanes, alligators and trigger happy retirees from New Jersey. I will attend Stress Cup in Metz, but there might not be enough time for a report, it’s just too busy. Warpstone Cup with its ever creative ruleset makes a return for its 14th iteration. And, let’s not forget Pyhäinpäivän Mättö in Finland, the tournament known to boast the most umlauts among all NAF tournaments!