May in NAF Tournaments
May has all but gone, and it’s been another month packed full of NAF tournament news and excitement. The first Spike! Journal has arrived from GW, we’ve had more exciting World Cup news and the NAF Championship has been and gone for another year. The Eurobowl closed it’s doors for registration last week; we will see 22 countries contest the European Championship in Cardiff come October, and an enormous 392 coaches attending in total when factoring in the EurOpen. Wowsers! Many records smashed there and a fine example of the great game going from strength to strength.
Let’s start with that Spike! Journal release. I talked about this last month, and now we’ve put the official word out. Our annual review process will be the tool with which we deal with ongoing GW releases, and everyone should know where they stand from here on in regarding new newness and NAF tournaments. Questions? Ask! Hopefully this makes life clearer and easier for the whole membership.
Now, let’s move on to that World Cup news! Exciting times at the NAF Championship as the official NAFWC ’19 pitch was revealed. I got the opportunity to get up close and personal with the pitch and take some rubbish photos; luckily there are better ones that I can steal from the internet! Stay tuned to the World Cup comms for details of how you can make one of these yours. Speaking of World Cup comms, we’ve got a new World Cup podcast for you to download and enjoy. I must confess, I’m yet to listen to this myself, but the feedback I read online is strong. Good job, team!
Your NAFWC pitch. Phwoar
A bit more of a 3D view – check out those trapdoors!
This month, you have played at a total of 41 different tournaments (including one Sevens event – I’m feeling the variant love in Uruguay!), but there is one that jumps out. The third NAF Major of the year, the 2018 NAF Championship, was contested in Nottingham. As ever, it was colossal. More than just a Blood Bowl tournament, the NAFC continues to be a huge BB party, attracting coaches from far and wide. I can’t overstate that aspect of it enough; the real strength of the thing isn’t the games played on the pitch, it’s getting 200 coaches in one room (one bar!) enjoying the great game. From grizzled ten (twenty?!) year veterans to a bus load of school children, the tournament is all about the mix of experience and a celebration of our hobby. Anyway, over to Andy, Tournament Organiser and head of a wonderful team of organisers, refs and other helpful bodies.
So lets talk NAF Championships…
This year was a special one for me. I first joined the NAF 10 years prior at the 2009 Blood Bowl GT at Warhammer world. it was a Birthday gift, I saw some guys (Lycos and Geggster) selling Red Block dice. I thought, ‘These look cool, and only a £5! Bargain…’ and there began the journey. Each year this a particular highlight on my calendar. Having not missed one since it become the NAF Championships, I’ve see it change venue to the Conference Centre and, three years ago, I was given the opportunity to be the head organiser of not only the event that by chance started my NAF involvement, but the biggest single coach event in the world. Just wow.
So, enough reminiscing. Lets talk NAFC 2018. A year of planning and hard work all comes to an end at 08.30 on the Saturday when I walk through the door to the main room. Nothing can be done or changed other than reactive and improvisational management. Oh wait! I’ve left the League Champion shield at home! The team jumped in, your usual suspects, your UK NAF Staff and non-playing refs and they took to the floor like a well-oiled machine; letting me flap like a chicken ready for take off! This event for me is the most important one, people pay hundreds of Pounds and Euros to be here and I’m a perfectionist. This is a bad combination. So the games started a little late, and with 192 coaches waiting this was where my part in planning is done and I handed over too the reffing team of Landrover, Glowworm and NortherKnight.
For me, the two days went as smoothly as can be expected. Other than the normal complaints (the tables and the apples in the food bags), all was good. The playing refs were exceptional between rounds, the team dealt with issues behind the scenes such as the printer running our of ink, no shows and even the Laptop deciding to update as a round was finishing and so needing to restart… Technology huh!!?! We had the pleasure of two big reveals over the weekend, the Euro Bowl to be held in Wales showed of their giveaways (from pitches and bespoke dragon models to trophies) and Torsten had a big reveal for the World Cup; the pitch and dugouts. We also had a tour T-shirt for the World Cup team and other merchandise. These are an exciting few years in the Blood Bowl world! So, the weekend happened, dice were rolled, casualties were caused, dodges failed and the curtain eventually fell. We had a result. We had boos from the crowd as the five top placed Wood Elf teams reached received a Wood Elf model from an upcoming Kickstarter, then we moved on to the main prizes:
Champion: Podfrey (Dark Elves)
Runner-Up: Purplegoo (Humans)
League Champion: Hawca (Wood Elf) – to celebrate my 10 years in the NAF, this has to be a highlight for me
Most Cas: Fredator (Orc) 26 CAS – This for me was a highlight, seeing this young man in I believe his first event but definitely his first Major pick up this award was great. He looked so overwhelmed. This is why I organise tournaments!
Most TDs: Macejedi (Wood Elf) 18 TDs
Stunty Cup: Gorgoroth (Halflings)
Best Newcomer: wwe2015 (Necromantic)
Best Painted: Stig’s Wood Elf team “Plantopia”
Duel Painting competition winner: Goldeneye
AndyDavo won the lottery for the team painted by Spubbba
For me, the standing back and watching people pick up prizes and awards for their own personal performances and watching and hearing the crowds cheer their friends is what organising tournaments is about. Especially the NAF Championships. Giving back to the community ,to 200 traveling nerds is my way of saying ‘thank you’ for the years of enjoyment it’s given me, for the friends I’ve made. And then there is the ironic personal high of winning the very trophy I left at home… Karma or fortune?
I love Andy’s text there, because it captures the feelings of every NAF TO when the punters first come through the door of a morning. Will this run smoothly? Will people enjoy themselves? I get stressed over a pub of 20-30, let alone 200! Thanks to all involved for a monster weekend, we never seem to be able to thank those that volunteer to run these things enough.
There are all kinds of images and reports from the NAFC online, but I like this folder of photos compiled by Lunchmoney, knock yourself out! I usually try and fill this section with wonderful images of coaches enjoying their BB, but that link is better than anything I can copy / paste. Warm congratulations to Geoff Porritt / Podfrey, who as Andy noted took home the trophy, besting someone in the final who’s name I forget. Here he is, trophy aloft.
Podfrey, NAFC 2018 winner!
Of course, there were other great tournaments that took place in May. Two good examples are the Little V in Australia and the Tilean Team Cup in Italy. Johnny Wilkinson takes us through the Little V below.
Little V 2018 came about to fill a void in the middle of the year in Melbourne and Victoria’s Blood Bowl Calendar, and to cater for the great community we have here in south-eastern Australia.
Following on from the success of 2017’s The Big V (named after the unofficial name of Victoria’s State of Origin Aussie Rules team), I decided to organize a sister tournament six months later and build on the momentum of the original. It seemed only natural to name it ‘Little V’.
Employing a ruleset including starting cash of 125k gold and a skills package based on the tier of each team, there was a helping hand to Stunty teams which resulted in a respectable four Stunty teams out of the final total of 27 entrants. Out of those four, we had the obligatory ‘Flings and, rather surprisingly, three Ogre teams!!!
Little V enjoyed a healthy mix of young and old players, including a father and son combo! We had youthful newcomers, grizzled veterans from the Melbourne Blood Bowl League and an up and coming crew from the city’s north.
The venue was the ever excellent The House of War, in the suburb of Ringwood in Melbourne’s east. More than just a local hobby store, The House of War is fully licensed and capable of running multiple tournaments side by side, making it the perfect Blood Bowl venue.
Even before round one was complete, the bar was open and the craft beers vied for position pitch-side, with ciders and Jack and coke!
Over four rounds the coaches battled and jostled for position, with early advances made by Humans, Wood Elves, Vampires, Skaven, Dark Elves and to everyone’s surprise, a couple of the Ogre teams.
The first touchdown of the tournament (and winner of the first spot prize in round one) went to Melbourne Drizzle, Robbie’s Halfling team who executed a textbook perfect one touch TD (all of which was recorded on camera)!
In the end, all the challengers fell by the wayside and the final match at the top table came down to the Humans and the Woodies. The experience of Jonno prevailed and he took the championship courtesy of a Net TDs tie-breaker. Could not have been closer!
Final results as follows:
Champion: Jonno Delacy (Human)
Runner-Up: Michael Coulston (Wood Elf)
Third: Andrew Strazzeri (Skaven)
Fourth: Steve Merlo (Ogre)
Fifth: David Splatt (Dark Elf)
Most TDs: Adrian Stacey (Skaven)
Most CAS: Daniel Watson (Norse)
Stunty Cup: Mark Bishop (Ogre)
Best Painted: Nicholas Heading
Most Valuable Coach: Adam Lang
Here’s hoping the excitement and success of Little V carries over to its big brother later this year, when The Big V lives up to its name and returns for a two day tournament in Nov 24th and 25th 2018!
Visit us at www.thebigvbloodbowl.com or our Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/TheBigVBloodBowl/
Lovely stuff there, I really liked the Magic Item card gimmick in the rulespack. None of these were too powerful to outrageously change a game, but they were a fun and fluffy addition to the action. Get to the website listed for some fab pictures including some ace dugouts. Gallery here.
TILEAN TEAM CUP SIX PISTOL EDITION 2018
The Tilean Team Cup is Italy’s big team tournament, and what an event it is. I attended last year in Florence where the Six Pistols were victorious. As tradition dictates, they hosted this year in Imola. 168 international coaches attended including an intrepid English team, and I very much enjoyed following the trip on Dan’s (@theTackleZoneBB) Twitter. He really captured the essence of a foreign Blood Bowl tournament trip, and it was great to follow the travels of the English guys in near real time. The World Champions, Masters of Tilea were victorious, and they are looking pretty tasty prior to the big dance next year, aren’t they? As ever, photo stolen from the internet (thanks, Dan)!
The masterful Masters of Tilea!
While all of this wonderful stuff was happening, I was lucky enough to visit a new country for me, Hungary, and play in the Palinkabowl in Budapest. Read some (extremely) vaguely coherent nonsense about that here.
TD Notes
This month, I’ve sanctioned 54 tournaments (53 Blood Bowl, 1 Streetbowl), and we’ve had some updates to the international staff list. Firstly, TheHurricane has joined us as RC for the Upper Midwest in America. Good to see the team over there continue to be bolstered under Nate’s guiding hand; our American friends are well looked after. Welcome!
Secondly, we’ve had a slight rejig in the Netherlands. Long standing, super-experienced NC Lucy is going to step aside as he plays less Blood Bowl these days, and Jelmer is going to replace him. Jelmer effectively acts as one half of a team with ex-VP (Dutch) Dave, so we’re going to list Dave as RC. Lucy has kindly agreed to stay on as a floating consultant of sorts; it’s good to retain such a wealth of experience incase we need to call on it. Between these three fine fellows, Holland is in safe hands. Thanks to all.
While the plates I often tell you about in these blogs are up there and spinning, I have nothing completed to tell you about this month. We’re making progress on a number of projects, but I’ll leave them until they’re finished to talk more about them.
That being the case, I’ll risk dipping into my big bag o’ controversial topics. Feedback about these blogs seems to be that you like the transparency I try to bring, so I don’t mind touching on the controversial stuff every so often. It would be a little bit of a fudge to portray that everything always runs perfectly smoothly and everyone is happy all of the time and in all cases. In February, I talked about the NAF sanctioning procedure; why I think it’s important and why we have red lines of sorts that we don’t cross. But what about cases where the lines aren’t red, they’re dotted, or orange (or something, this analogy is falling over!)? What about, for example, kickoff and weather tables?
The section of the sanctioning document that relates to the topic reads: Modification to kickoff or weather charts is allowed, as is the addition of Star Players, but organizers should not take these changes lightly. If any of them are thought to be too transformative or unbalancing, the Tournament Director may ask you to alter them or refuse sanction. Now, in certain territories, you could go months or maybe a year without someone submitting a ruleset with a house-ruled or modified kickoff or weather table. In others, such modifications are common additions for TOs trying to add personality to their events, and I might get a couple or three in a month. I know that in some quarters, this is a controversial topic. These are core rules, these tables. When house rules go from slightly fluffy, minor changes to big (albeit still thematic), sweeping alterations, some love the novelty, others hate the interference, the shift in balance and additional / different sort of randomness. Is a free Deathroller instead of Changing Weather (not a real example!) a fun, crazy addition or an unwelcome guest that helps reduces the game to a flip of a coin? The sanction document sort of helps, leaving it up to my experience to decide, but also it sort of hinders in that everyone thinks they’re on the right side of the line when it comes to ‘too transformative’. So, it is a pickle, and as you can imagine, I have some interesting discussions about what is a good change and what is too much.
It took a little while to settle upon a means of dealing with this when it comes up. Having spoken to a fair few of the international staff along the way, I now try to employ a little common sense (insert your own joke here!). If changes are very minor and consistent with the tournament theme, fine, I let them through without comment. If they’re less minor, in all but the most extreme cases (where I ask for alterations), I have resolved to ask TOs to include an ‘opt-out’ clause in their rulespacks, such that one coach can ask pre-game to play with the core rules tables and have that wish granted. I took the idea from a tournament I played where the BB2016 cards were mandatory, but by about halfway, cards had caused some profound impacts on several games. Organically, every table had begun to have a discreet conversation pre-game to decide amicably and fairly between themselves whether or not to include them. In every case, where one coach didn’t fancy it, the other was fine and the game quickly got underway without. It struck me that formalising this sort of amicable chat would be a decent idea. Generally speaking, everyone attending a BB event is laid back and willing to talk about this stuff and make their games fun for both participants, although I concede that the nuclear option of an argument is also possible.
In general, this has gone down quite well. TOs seem amenable to putting the clause in (in most cases – I’ve had the odd very robust discussion), and I’ve had positive feedback from coaches where this clause has been there as an option. I’m yet to hear of anyone actioning it, but there again these pre-game chats are pretty discrete in my experience, so I may not expect to. That said, I don’t know if I’ve come across the optimal way of dealing with this. Should the sanction document be more clear and set out well defined rules? Should tables be fair game for alteration in all but the most extreme examples? I’m not sure if I know for definite quite where on the spectrum we should sit, yet. When we assemble the global NCs to review the sanction document as part of the annual review process, this is an example of a topic that will be on the menu. Perhaps between us we’ll solve it.
I hope this kind of thing is interesting and informative – I’m happy to stoke a good debate about such matters, please share your view below. Being TD is often all about negotiation and finding a reasonable compromise in a non-black and white world, and this is one such example. I freely admit that I’m only human and I don’t get everything right all of the time, but I do my best to come up with fair and reasonable solutions!
Why Didn’t I think of That?
Two interesting themes this month. Firstly, GW have again been running their Blitzmania initiative, and with that has come some NAF tournament crossover as TOs have submitted events that act both as NAF tournaments and as games that can be uploaded to Blitzmania. This gives us a chance to look at progression tournaments and gimmicks or ideas they use to run. Progression can be a tough nut to crack. There is always the danger that in game one, both of your Wardancers die, while next to you a coach wins and rolls +ST and Block Mummies. With the event being potentially so swingy, what do TOs do to even the scales a tad?
Well – one answer is nothing. There is the school of thought that progression is progression: deal with it. Another answer is a ‘magic sponge’ mechanic – once per event you can bring a player back from the death between games. Another potential gimmick is offering one skill per game as per an old school resurrection event, rather than let SPPs accumulate as they would in a league, keeping teams relatively capped. Perhaps you give lower tier teams more starting gold or an extra MVP?
It’s all very interesting, and I’m looking forward to seeing how this recent flurry of progression activity ends up. The UK’s traditional progression tournament, the Albion Coast Cup 14 is pretty strictly progression without a gimmick and seems to be brilliant every year – maybe blissful simplicity is the answer! Please leave your progression ideas below.
Secondly, we have the The Hornswoggle Cup 2018 coming up in the UK. There is a low starting treasury: 850 k! When I first saw this I did a double take. But thinking further about it, it’s actually quite an interesting idea; playing Blood Bowl at a super stripped back TV. In these times where starting treasury and skill packages seem to get get larger and larger, it’s cool to see the other side of the coin. I guess this will be all about risk reduction and RR management (even more so than normal!) and I am fascinated to see what sort of builds do well. Maybe not a tournament I’d like to attend every week, but what a fun innovation.
Holiday Plans
What’s going on in October? Good question. Dust off the passport and check this stuff out…
Berlin Open 2018 – 22 / 23 Sep.
Yes, this is in September. But when you hassle me on Twitter, sometimes good things happen for you! Never been to Berlin, but I’m told it’s a terrific town. Go visit!
Rocky Mountain Ringers Rebellion II – 13 Oct.
Grither is running a really interesting one-dayer here, check out those ‘Ringer’ rules. Must be worth a visit if you’re in the area?
Ghost Bowl 21 – 13 / 14 Oct.
The 21st Ghost Bowl takes place in beautiful Bavaria in October, and it’ll be a lovely one to attend. I can taste the beer when I close my eyes. I believe there’s a festival on that concerns beer roughly around this time..?
Euro Bowl Wales 2018 / Euro Open Wales 2018 – 27 / 28 Oct.
No apologies for banging on about this even further; I’m sure there will be dropouts and you can attend just for the party if not. Get to Cardiff, a lovely party town, and enjoy!
Next Time
June is now the month of the Spike! Magazine Tournament, the fourth NAF Major of the year. If you are in Canada or near Canada, get thee to Spike! I’ll be back this time next month with more NAF tournament news, hopefully with some more pictures of you guys having a great time!
Holy cow what a long read! Very informative for sure! Thank you for all your thankless time and effort.