Welcome to the February edition of the Tournament Director Blog! This issue marks the one year anniversary of TD blog publications, with news and views around the NAF tournament scene. As usual, we showcase interesting tournament-related content, provide a preview of upcoming events, and, most importantly, share reports on a few recent tournaments. For this month’s edition, we cover the Emerald Bowl and REVA, as well as the Spanish tournament series Rey de Reyes.
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 is available on our NAF staff site.
Content
- NAF Chatter
1.1 Treasurer Election Open
1.2 Structure of the NAF Administration
1.3 Most Successful Races - Report: Tournament Series Rey de Reyes (by Dreamscreator)
- Report: Emerald Bowl (by Coewolf)
- Report: REVA (by Volkajo)
- Outlook
1. NAF Chatter
1.1. Treasurer Election Open
The elder amongst you will remember the 2024 presidential election that swept Shirokov and our new Vice President Dreamscreator into office. Now it is time to fill one of the few others elected positions. Long-time NAF committee member Geggster is leaving the position of treasurer, a position he has reliably held since shortly after the invention of paper money. All active members are invited to partake in shaping the future of the NAF by electing one of the candidates: georgiechristo, Melifaxis, Ulvardar (in alphabetical order) have announced their interest in running.
Voting is now open and will end on Sunday, March 3rd 23:00 CET.
If you want to read up on the ideas and plans of all candidates, check out the Q&A section in the NAF forum. To head directly to the voting booth, follow this link.
Alternatively, if all these letters hurt your head, head to this blog post by our friendly neighborhood AI Stew, where the positions of all three candidates are summarized.
According to the NAF Charter, the elected Treasurer:
- Collects any enacted club dues
- Maintains club finances
- Keeps records of finances (for public viewing if requested)
- Protects the organisation against fraud and theft, ensuring safe custody of money, and prompt banking
- Ensures that sufficient funds are available to meet all ongoing operational requirements
- Keeps up-to-date records as well as an audit trail for all transactions
- Presents the accounts of the organisation to the committee each January
- Ensures safe/secure means of payment for our membership
- Ensures that the organisation’s outgoings do not exceed our subscriptions
- Makes sure the committee understands its financial obligations, particularly appropriate and inappropriate expenditure/revenue
- Is an active member of the NAF committee
- Advises on NAF strategy and planning
1.2 Structure of the NAF administration
All of you are the NAF (and if you are not yet, sign up already). But there is often confusion who is and who isn’t part of the NAF administration. In light of this, I would like to give a quick summary of the NAF structure, as depicted on the NAF staff site.
The NAF committee
The steering committee of the NAF is made up of four elected positions: the President, the Tournament Director, the League Director, and the Treasurer, up for election every two years. Appointed positions include the Vice President and the Membership Director.
National, Regional and Online Coordinators
National and Regional Coordinators are representing the NAF at a local level and serve as an interface between NAF and tournament organizers and members. They take care of sign-ups, membership renewals, gift distribution and, depending on region, also enter tournament info and results. They also assist in coordinating tournament schedules and are often the first point of contact for questions and help. These tirelessly working minions are appointed in a well defined process that includes bribery, personal references, nepotism and the roll of a D40. Online coordinators (e.g. for Fumbbl and BB3) have a similar function.
Importantly, the coordinators are also providing regular feedback in the NAF Annual Review process.
Support functions
There are also several additional appointed support functions. Some are permanent, like media officer or tournament series coordinator, some are temporary, like coordinator of the annual NAF review, which is held together with National and Regional Coordinators.
Tournament approvers
A group of volunteers supports the Tournament Director with review and approval of the soon one thousand annual tournaments. At the moment, these all happen to be members with double functions as National and Regional Coordinators.
Ethics Committee
This very recently formed and thus not yet listed unit consists of appointed members that have volunteered to support the NAF by developing a new code of conduct, setting up new guidelines and addressing ethical issues.
World Cup Voting Committee
This temporary group of global representatives is put together once every four years to elect the winner of the World Cup bidding process.
Who is not part of the NAF administration?
If you have made it thus far down the list, you might wonder who is left. Well, there are multiple steering committees and organizing bodies of large regular tournaments such as the Eurobowl, the NAFC or the Amorical Cup and other Majors, that work closely with the NAF administration and often feature members that have also official NAF functions. However, these are independent bodies working largely outside the NAF administration. The NAF can not be made responsible if the Amorical Cup only provides Coors Light. Like your local league commissioner’s 8-person Kitchen Bowl, all of these tournaments will have to adhere to the NAF approval guidelines, though.
1.3 Most Successful Races
NAF data cruncher in chief sann0638 and me recently discussed which races were nowadays winning the most tournaments. Everybody familiar with the NAF statistics page will immediately shout out “Underworld Denizens”! But surprise, well, there is no surprise. Fine, it is Underworld Denizens. But who is next? And I find there are indeed some surprises, as shown in the following table that lists the races played by coaches that won a regular 11s (BB2020) tournament in 2022, 2023 or the first weeks of 2024.
Orcs are unexpectedly high up, considering that this is not that much reflected in their overall win percentage. They share the second place with the ever successful Dark Elves. For me equally surprising were Dwarves. I assumed they remained in Tier 1 due to general disdain for playing against them, with them, or even near them. But when it comes to winning tournaments, they perform as well as Skaven and Amazons.
Overall, the distribution is much more homogenous than one would expect, especially keeping in mind that the number of participating teams and played matches vastly differs. E.g. there were nearly three times as many played Undead matches than Ogre matches, which happens to also be the relative difference in tournament wins between these two races.
I will leave it to others to make more wild interpretations. Until then, head to sann0638’s respective tableau to find more related data.
2. Report: Tournament Series Rey de Reyes (by Dreamscreator)
About this tournament series
The Rey de Reyes is the Tournament Series that brings together all the Spanish tournaments to decide who is the best Spanish coach. Managed by dreamscreator, the Rey de Reyes was born in 2022, using as its original basis the system created by lunchmoney for the Southwest Tournament Series in the UK. Over the years, it has evolved with its own scoring system looking for a balance when deciding who is the best coach. However, it maintains some of the original ideas.
The Rey de Reyes kicks off every year with the REVA, the biggest individual tournament in Spain, which this year has gathered more than 250 players, at which time the prizes for the previous season are also awarded. In the 2023 season with a total of 70 tournaments counted and a total of 1096 participants, the winner was javin23 with 66 points, closely followed by Shirokov with 63 points and Pacho in third place with 58 points. For his part, the champion of the Rey de Reyes Stunty was bubba who had a great year with Snotlings, which has allowed him to place third in the world in the NAF ranking with this race.
How does the Rey de Reyes work?
In the Rey de Reyes, each coach receives a number of points according to his ranking in each tournament, with 15 points for the first, 12 for the second, 9 for the third and reducing one by one until the eleventh coach receives one point and from then on, all the remaining participants receive half a point.
This score is then multiplied by a coefficient. This coefficient determines the level of the tournament. Three factors are used to calculate the level of the tournament: number of participants, tournament rounds and the average NAF ranking of the participating players. By means of a formula these three factors determine the difficulty of the tournament between 1 and 10, and according to this difficulty the points given for the ranking are multiplied by a different coefficient.
Then with all the points scored by each coach in the tournaments he has played, the final score is calculated. For this purpose, the six best tournament days played by each coach are chosen, this can be three two-day tournaments, two two-day tournaments and two one-day tournaments, one two-day tournament and four one-day tournaments or six one-day tournaments. In this way we try to avoid that those who attend a lot of tournaments win for sure, although they have more chances to get good results, it is a reward for playing a lot of this wonderful game.
Masters Cup and Stunty
The Rey de Reyes has three trophies. The main one which determines the best coach of the year, the stunty which determines the best stunty team coach and the Master Cup, which is reserved for those tournaments that have made a financial contribution in order to present the champions with the magnificent trophies made by Kowalsky.
3. Report: Emerald Bowl (by Coewolf)
It’s nice to start the year with a good tournament. And it’s great to start the year with a fantastic tournament. Since January 2023 I’ve identified such a tournament for myself. Ladies and gentlemen, it’s Emerald Bowl in Leipzig – an amazing event organized by Kuei-jin and Yaghul. It’s unbelievable they organized this tournament in 2023 for the first time with great attendance of 60 coaches and this year for the second time with 90 coaches! I hear you asking if they did some sacrifices to Nuffle or are somehow involved in dark magic. Well, I can’t say for sure, but I know they have an amazing recipe that just works.
So, what is Emerald Bowl? It’s a 2 day/6 games tournament with a few twists. One is that it’s a tag team tournament, so coaches play as squads of 2. Important is, these squads need to align on roster creation as the total of their tiers provides some extra gold that can be spent on team creation or extra skills. And of course the higher the sum of tiers the more extra money you get. This already makes Emerald bowl very interesting and fun as there are not that many (or at least not in our Central Europe region) squad tournaments. And honestly, a squad of just 2 is great as it’s much easier to get a team (just find some random person, no one can say no to such an amazing event). Apart from that there are some special rules for each game which are (like the whole tournament) connected to the Cthulhu mythos. Great, if your dice drive you mad: Cthulhu has you covered!
Emerald Bowl is quite friendly to travelers. The tournament is in an A&O hostel (but don’t be afraid, it has classic hotel rooms), very close to the main bus and train stations. Also, you can book a room directly in the hostel which is then very convenient as you can just grab your team and go to the top floor where the tournament is happening in 2 big rooms (first year was just in one, but with the increase of coaches both rooms were needed). As these rooms are on the separate floor there are no other hostel guests that could be in danger of getting hit by some misbehaving dice! And when I mention dice, there are always great goodies! Last year a cardboard box where you could fit a Feldherr inlay, a very nice pair of d6, cheat sheet + small card version and notebook. And this year? Great again. A small cardboard box where you can store your dice and other accessories, a set of block dice, a special miniature, a postcard (to let your friends and family know you are getting crazy) and a classic notebook and cheat sheet.
It’s always great to meet old friends and create new ones, and the social aspect is always an important part of any Blood Bowl tournament. There are 3 games each day, and on Saturday evening there is also dinner where everyone can participate in an Irish pub in the city center. And as you can imagine for a few hours that place was taken over by a large group of fantastic Blood Bowl coaches.
And now to the tournament. This year we had 8 coaches from the Czech Republic (last year we were 4, so 100% increase) and had a lot of fun (again). Three out of our 4 teams started at quite top tables, but unfortunately most of us went quickly down the standings. I have to be honest and admit that I brought our team down. But my wingman, Grom, was brave enough to punch his way to the Most CAS trophy! What a success for our team. But what was much more impressive was that the winning team was another Czech team! Kubusta and HLiNiC courageously paved their way to the trophy for winners. And if you check the list of coaches at Emerald Bowl you’ll see it really wasn’t an easy task. But these guys that jumped into tabletop Blood Bowl last summer are in Czech BB community like Deathrollers rolling over the rest of coaches!
Kubusta and HLiNiC
Vito
Ekogon
Grom
Majasaurus
Ralph
Bisam86
In case you want to learn more I definitely suggest checking out the Emerald Bowl group on Facebook where you can find more pictures from the tournament and all the news from the awesome organizers. This tag team format is very cool and refreshing. You don’t care just about your game, but now there are two games that can go wrong because of bad rolls (it’s always bad rolls, I don’t make mistakes :D)! And if you add the Cthulhu theme…that’s just crazy good!
Hope to see you next year in Leipzig!
4. Report: REVA (by Volkajo)
Readers of this blog might know by now that I travel quite a bit for this game we play. Hence, I promised my girlfriend to actually cut down on tournaments. Looking at the calender, January already made this task impossible. REVA is a tournament I just can‘t skip. Not only for the weather (20+ degrees and sunshine, Blood Bowl by the pool), but for the great community and organization behind the tournament. My Spanish is barely good enough to order food and drinks at the restaurant, but even when I play against someone who does not speak English or German, it feels like the REVA participants go out of their way to make the foreigners make welcome.
It already starts at the “getting there” stage. Usually the organizers try their very best to get everybody a personal shuttle to the hotel where the tournament takes place. The setup is unusual and the regulars don‘t even call REVA a tournament, it is more a “social gathering”. Friday night you can choose to play your first game if you have a “teto” with an opponent who agrees to play you. If you don‘t have a fixed opponent or time to play, someone will show up, matches start between 2300 and 4am. The advantage of playing late is you don‘t have to get up early for the 8am match. Considering the free beer, this helps a lot of coaches.
So I got to sleep in and have a relaxed breakfast with some friends, before something special happened. The tournament was paused for a wedding. Yes, you did not misread: two people actually got married at a Blood Bowl tournament!!! Given Ako and Ulvadar did not only meet through Blood Bowl, but also were the two main people behind the NAF World Cup V last year in Alicante, this feels a little less surprising. The ceremony was beautiful, next to the pool, conducted by the almighty Santo, who hosts REVA. Ulva had the guts to actually pull out a dice to roll a 2+ before he said “Si”, before drinks were had, rice was tossed and some tears were shed. To no one’s surprise, 40 minutes later Ako was punching in missing results, handing out goodies and Ulva went to meet his next opponent, both with an extra ring though…
The tournament just felt like a celebration of love and community, the atmosphere was fantastic throughout and just like Friday you can elect to play your 5th game on Saturday, rather late. So everything feels very fluid. There‘s always people playing, people socializing, trading goodies and minis. Shirokov made a small announcement about the NAF presidential election on Sunday morning and we talked a little bit about his suggestions. Our talk was interrupted by the next round starting. Luckily we faced each other so we were able to continue talking throughout the game (he played very well and after some bomb madness we ended up drawing). That last game changed my personal REVA stats after three consecutive years to 18-0-0 in fantastic opponents.
REVA is family, party and fun. Special side note: living in a freaky queer Berlin bubble I usually don’t really look at gender, but this was a nice surprise: There were probably 20-30 coaches who were non-male, which shows that by creating a fun atmosphere, everything becomes more welcoming and inclusive. And maybe it also works the other way around? Disclaimer though: if you have a problem with loud music, screaming, dancing, drinking and more food than you can eat, REVA might not be for you. If you don‘t have issues with the above: Go!!
(the better pics were kindly provided by peterd and n3rk)
5. Outlook
March is picking up a lot of speed, with 99 tournaments in 22 different countries – a plus of nearly 50% compared to February! Scotland is having their eagerly expected first National in Edinburgh, and the Stupor Bowl weekend in Illinois will see as many as four events, a Sevens tournament, Dungeonbowl, and two one day tournaments. The South African Shaka Shield is back in its 14th year, while Andorra is on its best way of setting up a similar tradition with the second iteration of Tamarro Bowl.
I myself will be at Bash Roulette in Germany’s West, a fun squad tournament where three coaches rotate their rosters over six games, and the long-running KKnD in Berlin.