Fun debate at 8am this morning with players who hadn’t had any sleep and were on their 10th game of the tournament!  Can Pro be used by a Vampire to reroll Animal Savagery if prone?  I posted to Twitter and you can see the thread here.

The relevant parts of the rulebook are:

• p44 a prone player can do nothing without first standing up.
• p74 a player that is prone cannot use any skill unless otherwise stated.
• the errata expands the list of skills that can be used when prone.  Pro is not mentioned.

Animal Savagery says “when this player is activated, even if they are prone, immediately after declaring the action they will perform, but before performing the action”.

So while it is clear that Pro cannot be used when prone, it could be argued that the player stands up then tests for Animal Savagery, and so is no longer prone when taking the AS test, so can use Pro.  If the AS test is failed and there is no one to attack, however, there is nothing to say that the player is left standing with no tackle zone, and it would be consistent with other negatraits that they are left prone.

I think those are the relevant facts, but will edit if I have missed something!

Gutted not to be able to play Coffee Cup this year, but don’t think my back would thank me for 11 games in 24 hours!  Luckily Enderman has stepped in to make the numbers even, as asking a TO to hang around for that long without playing is a bit much.  Jip was in charge of herding the cats into the scout hall, and I popped along in case any technical support was needed (bringing a laptop lead with me, as it turns out…)

The ruleset was pretty basic – 115TV, maximum one star for stunties, none for others, 3 tiers for skill packages.  Each player plays 10 others, randomly chosen, with no Swiss and the schedule decided in advance.  5 stunty teams (3 halfling, 2 goblin) and 2 vampires, then a mixture of others.  The vampires were FatboySlimming, fresh from his 9-0-0 with them at Thrud weekend (7s and 11s) and CeeTee, a great coach who was the first of those 9 and was obviously bitten…

The attendants’ experience ranged from 2 tournaments (Vindaloo) to 267 (Lycos) and ages from 16 (Enderman) to 106 (Lycos, probably).  Raging82 will be recording his games for his YouTube channel, so that should be some entertaining viewing later.  There will be some great madness in the early hours with vampires v goblins game 10, so I’ll hope to pop back for that one!

Round 1 in full swing in the photos below.

Another great weekend at Thrud, so time for some thoughts from me as roster checker/ deputy results guy/ participant.  Bit of a brain dump, but hopefully interesting.  Massive congratulations to Thor, Glowworm, Landrover, Nazgob, Lunchmoney, Widram and the rest of the team for a fantastic event.

Another people have other written stuff, so check them out (will add more as they appear)

• Twelfman on the state of the meta

The Auction

Amazing as ever, the boys spent their own money for the first time, buying in to the event by spending over the odds on fancy dice and a nice old pitch.  Raised £8k from the room and online bids, in a big step up from previous years in terms of slickness of presentation.  Still room for shortening the actual evening, but all in a good cause!

The Venue

Swindon Supermarine is the new home of Thrud and is literally 10 minutes drive from my house, or 50 minutes running as it’s actually half way round my standard 15km running route!  Excellent space, bar, camping space.  Slight lack of mobile service and wifi, but something to work on for next year.  We had just under 100 people, which pretty much filled the main space and the “top table” room, so not sure how much room there is to grow, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.  100 is a good size, especially including campers!  The showers and facilities were also a step up from the previous venue – available 24 h and people were certainly showering at some strange times.

The Rules and Rosters

People were asked to fill in rosters on Google Sheets, which I thought would be straightforward, but the rules were too complicated for about a quarter of the people – is a skill a single or double, how much do we have to spend, and so on.  Also the tech failed as when they got sent through they came through as pdfs, bizarrely.  Will go with Excel in future I think, or do some testing with instructions on how to submit them.  The rules were probably overly complicated I think, but maybe they should be kept the same now that more people have got the hang of them!

The Games

Game 1 I faced Stowelly’s flings with Griff and Karla.  Would have been scary except I managed to remove all the flings and then my wrestle ghoul (I was using Undead) managed to take down Griff.  Boot to the head solved that problem.

Game 2 was Bron’s Imperial Nobility – great opponent and my closest game against him as I sneaked a win.

Game 3 v Gerdleah’s Necro.  A new opponent for me, experienced BB2 player.  Really tight game with a crazy number of necessary 3+ dodges which all came off until his critical win, which was the difference between the teams.

Game 4 was still in the top room, playing Sparky73 and his Nurgle.  Great game against a super opponent, again experienced BB2 and newish to tabletop.  Stand Firm spam was an absolute pain, as it’s designed to be!  He made the critical 3+ dodge and went in 1-0, but then it was 8v8 for the second half because of terrible KO rolls and sweltering heat.  I demolished his team and scored in my turn 6 to go for the (tournament) win, and was rewarded with more bad KO rolls and a Blitz.  Unfortunately I played like a muffin and nearly let one of his 5 players in to score!  Got away with it and drew 1-1.

Game 5 v Gimli’s Underworld was going very well until a 4+, 3+, single dice pow on a blodger, 3+ pickup, 3+ gfi, 3+ gfi meant that his gutter had the ball and I couldn’t get it off him.  Then in the second half the snots meant that he could pick up his cage each turn and put it somewhere else. I’m still playing back in my head whether my wrestler could have gone for the 4+ dodge into the snot cage because of titchy, but I forgot that rule for most of the half.  Lost 1-0.

Game 6 was raging82 and Chaos Renegades, which would have been on YouTube if he had pressed record.  He smooshed my mummies with his Claw Mino, and would have had a comfortable win if he hadn’t left me a one die blitz on his ball carrier!  He had to settle for an uncomfortable win instead.

The Tiebreakers

One interesting facet of the weekend was that “Tier” was used as a tiebreaker after score but before opponent score, which meant that stunties faced other stunties.  I wonder if the star player threat would have manifested itself more if this had not been in place.

The Technology

Nazgob built a lovely website for the event, which contained all the info needed.  Other big tournaments have done the same, with the notable exception of NAFC, but hopefully this will change soon!  We used a Google Form to submit the results, which would work really well in a venue with good wifi and/or mobile signal.  The results appeared as they were submitted into a Google Sheets file and could then be quickly entered into Score and checked.  Results entry was super efficient and could be quickly checked back to what was submitted. No allowing for fat fingers though!

The Sevens

A bit of a personal reminder for me possibly not to play 7s next year – Friday evening good for socialising!

In Summary

See you there next year – first weekend in August!

It’s been a good day!  The sun has shone, people are playing tabletop BB in tournaments again, and I have been bought some pints, so apologies in advance for any typos.

Interesting things have been happening.  Vampires coaches by FatboySlimming won the 7s last night and are winning the 11s at the half way point.  Lots of pro, managing animal savagery, and 2+ hypno gaze removing all skills from the gazed player is a potent combination it seems, leading to a current 9-game winning streak by FBS.  Top 30 are below, and the full standings are on the website.

There were worries beforehand (by me!) of a halfling tournament win, but that doesn’t look to be manifesting itself, possibly partly due to “tier” being first tie breaker after total score, which is an interesting way around the “stars problem”.

The orc teams did not have access to stars, Gimli is using “Drunken Thrud”, a ball and chain star, and Sparky is using Gymir, who is basically a fouling goblin.  Top stunty is current Kismet’s Snotlings with Morg and Varag, so will see how they perform tomorrow!  All the rosters can be found here.

One of the highlights of day 1 was Nazgob setting up with 13 players and his opponent (as per the rules) choosing to send off Morg and Griff.  The game was not close.

The auction is about to start, after everyone has filled themselves with meaty goodness.  Follow Thrudball on Twitter tomorrow for latest updates!

Half an hour to kill before daughter gets home and we can deposit her with friends and head to Thrud, so time for some quick thoughts about rosters and rulesets!

You can see the summarised rosters on my Tableau Public and the full rules on Thrudball.org.

The tiers are these.  You had to pay for skills – 20k primary, 40k secondary.  No “duplicate” skill choices, so no two players just given guard, though you could have block+guard and just guard.  Max 2 skills per player.

• Tier 1 (1200k) – 4 Skills: Shambling Undead,
• Tier 2 (1200k) – 5 Skills: Dark Elf, Wood Elf, Skaven
• Tier 3 (1200k) – 6 Skills: Amazon, Old World Alliance, Norse, Black Orc, Elven Union, Human, Dwarf, Chaos Dwarf
• Tier 4 (1250k) – 7 Skills: Imperial Nobility, Necromantic Undead, High Elf.
• Tier 5 (1250k) – 8 Skills: Chaos Chosen, Underworld, Lizardmen, Orc.
• Tier 6 (1250k) – 9 Skills: Chaos Renegades, Daemons of Khorne, Tomb Kings
• Tier 7 (1300k) – 10 Skills & up to 1 Star: Nurgle, Slann, Vampires, Skinks*
• Tier 8 (1300k) – 12 Skills & up to 2 Stars: Goblins, Halflings, Ogres, Snotlings, Undergobs**

And the main thing to notice is that only tiers 7 and 8 can take stars.  As a result, and also because people quite enjoy playing stunty, we have a large number of stunty teams!  13 Halfling with 7 Morg between them, plus 5 Snotling, 3 Ogre and 2 Goblin for near enough 25% of the field.  The top two tiers took a beating, with only a few hardy souls making do with the meagre number of skills and TV.

Apart from the Mighty Morg, Deeproot also features heavily, and the human trio of Griff, Zug and Karla also put in appearances.  Griff is less popular than sometimes because he is basically 50k more expensive, as teams are only “stunty legal” if they don’t have any S4 players, and “stunty legal” teams get 50k more.

The full list of stars are these:

So expecting to see lots of damage this weekend – we have a 7s tournament on Friday night, but lots of the weekend might be 7s games if Deeproot and Morg keep firing.  Will the deadly duo be enough to bring Halflings to the title though?  They have never (I don’t think) won a 6 game individual tournament of significant size, so is it time for BB2020 to smash that stat?  Follow me and @thrudball on Twitter for updates throughout the weekend!

Streaming this week on Twitch (21 UTC Thursday 22nd April), Matt Slater’s Ranked Amateurs hit their 400th game on Fumbbl and Matt’s using it as a Fumbbl fundraiser before the team retires into Blood Bowl 2020.

The 400th match will be against Gary Gygax, and you can see the two teams below, and can watch the match through Fumbbl or on twitch.tv/sann_bb.  The Ranked Amateurs are a team that only ever hires linemen!

You can support the fundraising effort on this forum post, which also has links to the two teams.

Fun few games in the back garden today as the weather smiled on us coming out of Covid lockdown for our first Blood Bowl 2020 games.

Teams were (1100 TV, 5 primary and 1 secondary):

• Halflings with Deeproot and Karla
• Underworld with Hakflem
• Black Orcs with a bribe
• Lizards
• Wood Elves
• Undead

Highlights of the day:

• Undead mummy not getting any benefit from Brawler all day
• Underworld taking saurus off the pitch so outnumbering them 14 to 8 at one point (yay swarming!)
• Deeproot chucking prone halflings all over the place
• Quick snap not helping one turners as much as only open players can move
• Sun shining!
• Doughnuts
• Having to re-learn the Throw Team Mate numbers
• Making up new names for GFI.  Push?  Rush?  Dash?
• Learning not to predict a winner until all the scores are in
• Enderman’s first tournament win over me!

It’s the same old game, just with a few tweaks!

BBTS first review here.

This is a look at the teams done by Vergond for BB2020.  Will say up front that this is an amazing achievement for a community resource, and anything here is not a criticism, just things to bear in mind when using.   I finish with a “tier list” of which teams I would choose to use when playing.

Amazons

Slightly underdressed catcher for me, but otherwise brilliant!

Chaos Dwarf

Really good, massive weapon on the Bull!  Small weapons on the CD and hobgob.

Dark Elf

Big sword on the blitzer, otherwise spot on.
High Elf

Perfection!

Humans

A few weapons on these guys.  Serious ogre!

Khorne

Big fat weapon on the herald, and smaller ones on the other ones, but good otherwise.

Necro

Scary stuff! Sword on the ghoul and fat cleaver on the flesh golem, but the others are brilliant.

Norse

Almost perfect except for the swords on the ulf.  I think I would swap in the Necro wolf above, then this might be my team of choice (while being slightly underdressed, but there are lots of fully dressed men around!)

Slann

One small weapon, but otherwise spot on.

Tomb Kings

Shame about the massive sceptre!  Skeleton has a good Jason and the Argonauts vibe.

Underworld

The skaven here definitely got lost from a Warhammer battlefield!

Vampires

Solid.  Shame the team is so bad currently…

Wood Elves

Our first bows on the pitch!  Scary knives mark out the wardancer, I guess no-one was brave enough to take them away.

Chaos

Great big guys, scary little guys with weapons.  Nice team!

Chaos Renegades

The crazy gang come together really nicely, unique figures easily identifiable for each position.

Dwarfs

An actual BB team!  Wonder what the story is of why these guys exist… Love the T-poses, as the kids say.

Pro Elves/ Elven Union

Not a big fan of these, but very usable.

Goblins

This lot are suitably bonkers.  The Doom Diver in the bottom left is wearing a top hat, the bomber has a clown mask, and altogether they capture the craziness of this team!

Black Orcs

In with a bullet to #1 team.  Awesome stuff, and one of the teams you can’t play online at the moment, so definitely a contender.

Kislev

Another perfect one.  I love Kislev!

Halflings

Weapons on the positionals, but in this case I think that’s quite handy to identify them (didn’t say I was consistent!).

Imperial Nobility

Worth playing just for the Ogre.  In fact, I think I’d play a team of Ogres with the Ogres from each of the teams, that would be awesome!  Pretty good, unfortunate blitzer weapon, but will forgive it.

Lizards

Perfect, again.

Nurgle

Suitably disgusting.  Maybe the massive halberd explains the foul appearance?

 

 

Ogres

The actual Ogre team, Runt Punter on the right.  If I were to play Ogres I would use the Ogre figure from each of the different teams, and it would look amazing!

Orcs

Solid team.  I’d swap the blitzer (bottom right) for the lineman (bottom centre) as I don’t use linemen (go gobbos!).  Love the thrower (bottom left) who just wants a hug.

Shambling Undead

Awesome mummy and wight. Solid team.

 

Skaven

Few too many weapons for me on this one, doesn’t quite capture the BB vibe.

Snotlings

Interestingly, this one had some error messages flash up, which would get annoying if using.  But snotlings are meant to be annoying, so maybe that’s part of the charm?  The stilty runner is floating…

 

 

Tiers

So for me, if I was looking for an immersive experience, this is how I would rank the teams:

1 – pretty much perfect, I would use these as first choice:

Dwarf, Lizard, Slann, Kislev, adapted Norse, Black Orc, adapted Ogre, Amazon, High Elf, adapted Orc, Renegades, 

2 – perfect unless you’re picky, use if you like the teams in particular:

Vampire, Halfling, Nobility, Chaos Dwarf, Chaos, Dark Elf, Human, Nurgle, Khorne, Necro, Undead, Wood Elf

3 – I would only use if I was a superfan of the teams:

Skaven, Elven Union, Goblin, Snotling, Tomb Kings, Underworld

Sharp eyes might have noticed OWA omission, they’re made up of other teams.  Silly team…

Summary

Again to reiterate, an amazing community efford by Vergond, and I can’t wait to get stuck in with playing – videos to come later.  Will be great as a training resource as well, with more flexibility than other online platforms.  Will be my training video resource of choice from now on, and there is already talk of leagues, though I’m personally somewhat overcommitted with Fumbbl and BB2!

 

First experiments with playing Blood Bowl: Second Season (aka BB2020) in Tabletop Simulator (TTS), from a completely standing start, ably assisted by Jip and Domfluff, providing enthusiasm and expertise respectively.  Any consequent wrong or missing info is mine, and this is a description of what we did, not necessarily what is best, we’re muddling through!

Update June 21 – jump on the Discord for the latest update!

Why would you do this?

At the time of writing, Cyanide are working on Blood Bowl 3, but just indicated that it is not due imminently, and Fumbbl volunteer devs are also working on implementing the new rules, due Q1 2021, but again it will be ready when it’s ready, and that’s cool.  Our league (SAWBBL) has seen a massive influx of new players on the back of the new box set, as has the BB community in general, but the pandemic is limiting the amount of tabletop that can be played (to zero, usually…).  So it would be great to have a way of playing demo games, tutorials, and full-on competitive games using the new rules, which is where TTS comes in.

What is it?

TTS is a PC game available on Steam.  I paid £15, but there are frequent sales, so I should probably have paid less.  It has various workshop downloads, either free or paid that allow virtually any board game to be played online.  When you buy it, there is a tutorial, so I won’t cover the basics here, just the stuff I had to ask.

How do you play BB2020?

Once you have downloaded and installed TTS, if you have someone you know who has it already set up, then that is all you need, and they can just invite you to a game and you can start playing.  The set up is a bit like this:

You can drag players to their places, roll dice, show prone players, stunned, rooted, bonehead etc.  You have to do all the moves and “state changes” yourself, so in that sense it is just like tabletop, nothing is done for you.

If you want to set it up for yourself, there are a few more steps needed, which I’ll summarise now.

Click Games, then Workshop (ironically).  That will take you to a search window.  Click Browse, and Steam will open.  Search for Blood Bowl 2020 Pitch w/Teams, then click Subscribe.  That will give you the pitch components I used above, and more.  I have deleted some as I won’t use them (range ruler), and moved stuff around so it suits my preferences.

You then go back to TTS, click Games, Workshop and the Blood Bowl 2020 Pitch should be an option.  It comes with cardboard cut-out style figures, that you can drag out of the brown bags by right clicking and then clicking Search.

To get the 3D figures, you go back into Workshop, and Browse, and search for Blood Bowl, and this time look for an item by Vergond.  If you click on the user’s name, it will take you to lots of 3D teams, all of which are ready to click.  If you hover over a team then a green square with a + will appear, and if you click it then it will add it into your workshop.  Do this for as many as you need.

Go back into TTS, then Workshop, then the three dots and expand.  You can then drag the players onto the pitch, and if you unlock the bags you can drag them into the appropriate bag for that race.  You will also need to make them slightly smaller!

Once you are set up, you can click Games > Save and Load, give it a name, and this will save your set up on your machine.  You can then use it to play against other people, who will only need TTS installed.

Next Steps

I am going to play some games, then look at publishing a set up that the local league can use, to avoid having to go through the faff described above.  At the very end of typing this, I also got to thinking why we didn’t just use Vergond’s complete set up, which is at Blood Bowl Table (Second Season), so perhaps more on that later!

Extra Things

When I was streaming, TTS crashed when I used Alt-Tab to switch windows. Google says that putting TTS out of full-screen mode should stop this, so fingers crossed.