Waking Dead

Myself, Radders, Chris and Dan went down to GW’s annual Blood Bowl GT a couple of weeks ago. This was mine and Radders’ first time at the GT and neither of us had played Blood Bowl for at least a year or two. In fact, I think Radders had only ever played a handful of games in his lifetime! Still, being the Cocks that we are we thought we’d give it a go, and having expert Dan on hand to prod for advice was very useful.

But before we get into that, I thought I’d update you on the other things going on around here. Radders has signed us up for the Northern Warlords GT in September. It’s our first major independent Warhammer tournament, and although the other three have top-tier armies, I know I’m going to get smashed. Still, it’s a good opportunity to finish off the Tomb Kings, rock up with 2250 points of the bad boys, and have a good time. The list I’m playing with at the moment has most of the toys in it, but even a tricked-out Tomb Kings list is still only good in an expert’s hands. Should be a good crack, though.

Anyway, back to Blood Bowl…

So, game one saw me taking on a sneaky Skaven team with my no-nonsense Dwarfs, and against the odds I pulled a 2-0 victory out of the bag! The general Dwarven plan of ‘hit them until there’s no one left to stop you scoring’ worked a treat, and by the end of the first half I was 1-0 up and he had 4 players left on the pitch. The second half followed largely the same pattern, and another scored sealed the victory.

Game two put me further up the field and facing off against – unbeknown to me at the time – the #1 NAF ranked Dwarf player in the world. I think the fact I didn’t know this at the time helped me give a good account of myself, and get close to a 1-1 draw. In the end I just couldn’t quite pull it off, and he won 1-0, but it was a very good game, probably my favourite of the weekend.

Game three was against another Skaven team and I just couldn’t get his players off the pitch. Every time I went through the armour the best I could do was stun them.  He even turned my cage tactic against me and rumbled down the pitch to score twice. The game finished 2-0 against, and i only managed one casualty.

Dropping further down the tables for game four saw me get some points back on the board with a 1-1 draw against another Dwarf team to finish the day on more of a positive. I was leading at half time, but he basically played the same game against me and a draw was probably a fair result.

The next game on Sunday was against yet another Skaven team, and once again I didn’t have quite enough to catch his far quicker players, eventually losing 2-1. Being thoroughly depressed at this point, I was languishing on table 72 and up rocked an Undead player featuring no less than Count Luthor von Drakenburg himself. After coming to terms with how I wasn’t going to beat him, I set about in a much more relaxed fashion. It clearly worked, because I managed to win it 2-0!

This was also the game that saw the play of the weekend from my runner, ‘Wee’ Jimmy Jones. I could have easily come away with a 1-1 draw as Luthor had the ball one square away from my endzone, and I had no tackle zones on him. Queue the wee fella making a blitz out of someone’s tackle zone, down the pitch to throw a two dice block against the vampire – that’s two dice in his favour – wherein I rolled the only thing that mattered: double flash. After I’d stopped smiling I threw the armour roll down, somehow beat it, then managed to stun him on the follow up. I had a couple squares of movement left out of Jimmy, but decided to push it twice to get as much distance between him and the scary-looking vampire dude as possible.

What followed then was a mad dash up the left side of the pitch, pushing it twice every time just to keep the Count from being able to throw a blitz at me, all the way to his endzone. I swear I could have married ‘Wee’ Jimmy Jones right then.  Sure, I felt bad for my opponent, but just to see a play like that come off is something special. He shook my hand and, even though we had two turns to play, decided to call it. Great bloke, great game, and well done the wee fella!

In the end I finished in the top half with a NAF ranking of 138.05; that puts me at 5278th in the world