A Decade of Majors

This year, the world of Blood Bowl celebrates 10 years of Major tournaments. The NAF is proud to offer its continued support to these flagship events whose rich history and tradition is central to the tournament playing community.

The seeds were sown back in 2002 with the Blood Bowl Resurrection tournament in England. By the spring of 2003 this one-day pilot event had developed into the hobby's inaugural Major, The Blood Bowl. From here, other major tournaments from the game’s background were set up across the globe; The Spike! Magazine Trophy (Canada ), The Chaos Cup (USA), The Dungeonbowl ( Germany ) and the Australian Blood Bowl Nationals all followed soon after.

The Australian Nationals (at CanCon in Canberra ) were first held in 2003. In January this year they celebrated their 10-year anniversary and became the 50th major since Blood Bowl Resurrection. Organiser Gavan Pearce (NAF: Drakeular) has seen the event continue to thrive in recent years, with 2013's event being no different. This year's winner was Michel Poledri (NAF: mmm) who fought of all the competition to take the title with his skaven team.

Over the next year or so, all five Majors will be reaching this 10-year milestone. It's a proud achievement for the scores of volunteers who have been involved in making these tournaments happen, and of course the thousands of NAF members who have taken part. Thank you to everyone who has been involved.

As the majors continue to grow, the NAF are looking forward to the next 10 years with as much anticipation as back in 2003. Moving forward, we will continue our stewardship and expansion of the world’s largest Blood Bowl Major, the NAF Championship. We plan to develop our web resources to provide fast and centralised access to information about all five majors. We will offer continued support to major tournament organisers such as our funding of the magnificent new Spike! Magazine Trophy (right). And of course coaches can expect the usual increased NAF ranking points weighting!

At this timely point we are also able to release a new document which lists the winners in all categories for all five majors. We have also included a record of NAF World Cup and Eurobowl winners. These documents effectively constitute a ‘Hall of Fame’ of Blood Bowl and are located on the front page of the NAF website, or you can do directly to the Majors record or the NAFWC/EB record.

In future we hope to include similar data for AusBowl and the North American Team Championship, two other important world team events. If you are able to provide us with any more information about past winners (there are still some gaps) please email bloodbowlmajors@gmail.com and tell us about it.

The next Major tournament on the calendar is The NAF Championship, held at the East Midlands Conference Centre in Nottingham, UK on 25-26 May 2013. The NAF Championship is the biggest major tournament of all and will yet again feature a huge field of coaches from all around Europe. All information, including how to purchase tickets can be found on the NAF forum, including the rulepack.

Whatever continent you’re reading from, here’s hoping you’ll be lucky enough to get to at least one major this year!

Thanks

Pippy

NAF Tournament Director