These are the team building rules that were used for Super League Showdown, which were at the time of the event the draft Eurobowl rules for Malta 2022.

Tournament rules

Team value

The Tournament uses the Bloodbowl 2020 edition Exhibition play rules.

Each team has a total of 1,150,000gp to spend on roster creation and must hire a minimum of 11 players. Any gp unspent at roster creation is lost and all teams are considered to be of the same TV for the purpose of inducements.

This is a resurrection tournament, no SPP is gained, and injuries, casualties or deaths do not carry on from one game to the next.

Players added to a team roster mid game as a result of the Masters of Undeath or Plague Ridden special rule are removed from the roster at the end of the game and do not carry on to the next.

Inducements

Permitted inducements are:

• 0-1 Halfling Master Chef
• 0-2 Bloodwiser Kegs
• 0-3 Bribes
• 0-2 Wandering Apothecaries
• 0-2 Mortuary Assistant
• 0-1 Plague Doctor
• 0-1 Riotous Rookies (Riotous Rookies can never be hired post game)
• 0-1 Biased Referee
• Star Players – see tiers for rules permitting stars

All other inducements are not permitted.

Star players are limited in each squad, no named star may be taken twice.  In each squad of 6 players, Griff Oberwald for example, may only be taken by one of the coaches and no more.  Therefore, coaches will need to negotiate who will have which star.

Coaches must have 11 players on the team before hiring a star player.

In addition, if an opponent is fielding the same star as that coach then both may use him during that game.

Skills

Teams are separated into 1 of 7 Tiers and offered Tier specific skills packs. Each team is permitted to stack 2 Primary Skills on a maximum of 1 player.  However, the 2nd primary Skill added counts as a Secondary Skill. This can only be done once.

All skills must be chosen and cannot be random.

A player which is assigned a secondary skill may choose to take a primary skill instead.

Tiers

Tier 1

Wood Elf, Dark Elf, Lizardmen, Shambling Undead

Choose one of –

• 5 Primary Skills but no star players
• 2 Primary Skills and 0-2 star players

Tier 2

Skaven, Dwarf, Chaos Dwarf, Amazon, Orcs, Imperial Nobility

Choose one of –

• 6 Primary Skills but no star players
• 4 Primary Skills + 1 Secondary Skill but no star players
• 3 Primary Skills and 0-2 star players

Tier 3

Norse, Necromantic Horror, Nurgle, Human, Pro Elf

Choose one of –

• 7 Primary Skills but no star players
• 5 Primary Skills + 1 Secondary Skill but no star players
• 4 Primary Skills and 0-2 star players

Tier 4

Black Orc, Chaos Chosen, High Elf, Old World Alliance, Slann, Tomb Kings

Choose one of –

• 7 Primary Skills + 1 Secondary Skill but no star players
• 5 Primary Skills + 2 Secondary Skills but no star players
• 5 Primary Skills and 0-2 star players

Tier 5

Underworld Denizens, Chaos Renegades, Daemons of Khorne

Choose one of –

• 8 Primary Skills + 1 Secondary Skill but no star players
• 6 Primary Skills + 2 Secondary Skills but no star players
• 6 Primary Skills and 0-2 star players

Tier 6

Halfling, Ogre

Choose one of –

• 8 Primary Skills + 2 Secondary Skills but no star players
• 6 Primary Skills + 3 Secondary Skills but no star players
• 6 Primary Skills and 0-2 star players

Tier 7

Goblin, Snotling, Vampire

Choose one of –

• 8 Primary Skills + 2 Secondary Skills but no star players
• 6 Primary Skills + 3 Secondary Skills but no star players
• 8 Primary Skills and 0-2 star players

Scoring

Teams will get 2 points for a win and 1 point for a draw.  In order for a team to earn a win they must have more wins than losses across their 6 games.  If the wins and losses balance out it will be a draw.  If the losses outweigh the wins then they will of course have lost the round.

For individual coaches, there will also be 20 points for a win and 10 points for a draw, nothing for a loss.  In addition, there will be bonus points scored for touchdowns and casualties.  This will be one point per touchdown and one point per casualty, up to a maximum of 3 for each.

Individual scores will be used to decide rankings within the team and the individual standings at the end of the event.

Tie Breakers

The team tie breakers will be –

• Head to Head results
• Touchdown / Casualties difference for the team combined
• Strength of Schedule

Individual tie breakers will be –

• Bonus points
• Head to Head results
• Strength of Schedule
• Touchdown / Casualties difference combined

Having now used vampires in a tournament, thought I would stick some words down about them.  I went to the Super League Showdown, a squad tournament hosted by Wobert, one of the best Tournament Organisers around in terms of enthusiasm, swag and organisation.  6 teams of 6 from leagues near Cheltenham gathered at IncomGaming for 4 games using draft rules from Eurobowl 2022.

I took 5 vampires and 9 thralls.  One blodge vampire as ball carrier (stacked primary counts as secondary), 3 pro vampires and a leader (secondary).  2 block thralls, one tackle and one dirty player (I would have swapped the tackle for frenzy with hindsight, as you can get rid of the opponent’s dodge using hypnotic gaze instead).  We played that Pro could not be used while prone, which is (probably) the correct interpretation of the rule until GW say otherwise.

The two major elements of vampires are gaze and animal savagery (AS).  Gaze now works on a 2+ and removes (almost) all skills from the opponent, meaning for example I could gaze my opponent’s blodgestep blitzer and then blitz him with a block thrall, which felt very strange but is the way the rules work.  I also thought about surfing my opponent’s treemen as well, but there wasn’t actually a need (apart from the fun…).

AS means that if you are blitzing or blocking you roll a 2+ and if moving (and thus gazing) you roll a 4+.  If you fail you knock an adjacent team-mate down (thrall OR vampire) with the associated armour and injury roll.  If the armour is not broken then the knocked down player can then get up and move, if they have not already moved that turn.  Importantly, AS means that the vampire will always do the action that is required, so when my ball carrier was in scoring range and had someone next to them, there was no chance that they wouldn’t be able to walk it in, just that they might have punched their own player on the way (which didn’t matter in turn 16).

One thing I quite often did was keep my pro vampires isolated, if it didn’t matter if they moved or not (i.e. they were approximately in the right place) – it was then a 4+ to move, with a 3+ pro reroll, and so if they could be in a marginally better place that was good, but if they failed they didn’t actually attack anyone.  This is similar to the wild animal but with the lost tackle zone (which was usually irrelevant).

In terms of my games, there were 2 informative ones and 2 less so.  I started the day against a fairly new undead coach, who used guard well to protect the ball carrier but got worn down by the frequent attacks.  At this point I’d forgotten about removing blodge from the ball carrier, which would have made a bit of a difference!  He ended up getting the wooden spoon but it was a fun game.  One of my other games was against a starless halfling team with 6 rerolls and two frenzy trees, who managed to win two games in the day!

Of the other two games,  one was against Skaven with Glart and Hakflem, dropping 2 gutters and blitzer to fit them in.  I knocked Hakflem down a couple of times and put the DP boot in, but wasn’t able to remove him.  Glart probably blitzed 12 times in the game, doing a fair amount of damage, and the game could easily have been a loss, but finished 1-1.  The worst thing Glart did for his team was double pow on the one turn attempt!

The final game of the day was Elven Union with mass dodge, and this is where the Vampires’ box of tricks came into its own.  On my drive I had a S4 blodge carrier, and the elven column defence was fairly useless because it could just be gazed through.  Combined with the ability to remove skills and blitz, I can imagine it was fairly frustrating to play against!  On my defence it was very difficult for the elves to build an attack as they were short of players, making caging tricky, and if they threw catchers forward as receivers (hoping to make use of nerves of steel) then I could just gaze them, meaning they can’t catch the ball.

So, just a couple of very meaningful games, but the evidence is building that vampires at a lower tier are dangerous.  Fatboyslimming’s Thrud triumph was impressive (going 600 and 300 in sevens) and provides more evidence that multiple skills and stacking makes Vamps powerful.

The important thing about this tournament was that we were using draft Eurobowl rules, which had vampires in Tier 7 of 7, along with goblins and snotling, and below halflings and ogres!  If this does not change I would be amazed if all the Eurobowl teams didn’t have a Vampire team, which wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing, but it was certainly a very strange form of Blood Bowl.  A bit like playing against 14 players when facing Underworld or Snotlings, I guess.

The next lot of evidence will be interesting – how will they do in the first big NAF Fumbbl tournament, kicking off today (I’m using them, and would guess others are too), and then how will they fare in the big tournaments – Waterbowl, UKTC and NAFC I’m thinking primarily, though not sure if there are any at Chaos Cup this weekend.

Finally, were they fun to use?  For me it slightly reminded me of when I used a broken star to win Thrudball in 2016.  That star had been designed by an absolute madman to fit with a bonkers tournament that focuses on raising thousands for charity.  The new AS and Gaze has been designed by the core writers of the game.  I’m also not sure how much fun it was to face, apart from my sparkling personality of course!  I did come away with this shiny though, which is always nice.

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!