League Structure

Starting the league was a matter of running demos for people, leaning on the endorsement of the game store owner. I would quietly make a training team around 750k and just do my best. This was inordinately time-consuming; an initial training game takes 4.5-5 hours even with cutting out kickoff results and such, so most games were done over two sessions. Of course everyone quickly gets attached and wants to keep their stats, so tracking half-games became something of an art form. I quickly saw the need for a 2nd pitch, because getting 8 players up and running one 5-hr game at a time was going to take damn-near forever.

As an aside, you’d think you could pit new players against each other and start doubling your bird-stoning efficiency. Yet, without exception, one would chance into absolutely murdering the other one. This proved to be a perfect way of knocking players out of the game forever. They could get clobbered their second game on just fine, but not as a first impression.

Back to the pairing system. The cart sort of came before the horse here when I found: Kaiser Pairing which is essentially an ELO ranking system you can calculate by hand. I liked that this system gives you a fair amount of control over your pair-ups, and allows lower coaches to still have some influence over higher games, but most importantly like all Swiss-style pairings it generates pretty fair matches. The compromises are not having a fixed schedule to look forward to, and some pretty complex calculations that can be obtuse to casual observation. That said, nothing illustrated the need for fair matches better than Season 1, Week 1.

Kicking off the GGBBL

What led to the Galaxy Blood Bowl league was a combination of factors, as always I‘m sure. One, I was coming off what will be my last BGGCon, still loving the atmosphere of boardgames but excited about none of them. This left me with some free hobby time in general. Two, a friend had come back from GenCon with some cool BB block dice I wanted to take for a roll. Three, I had assembled some teams and a board to try to sell the game to my previous group, one that had fizzled to no one’s consternation 8 months earlier. I learned a lot from that attempt, and so when I sat the Galaxy Games store owner down for a demo it was a light, breezy affair just to try things on for size. We both agreed this was one game that was going to have to go full-time.