The Longest Game

During Season 1, end of Week 3 and well on the road to the finish, there was a fascinating game at the bottom table between rookie Chaos Dwarves and Orcs.  17(!) players lined up on the line, and all that strength and Block promised a bloodbath.  Game-long pouring rain guaranteed it.  And yet with a first half closing out 0-0 with zero casualties, and a second half closing out 0-0 with one casualty (crowdsurf), the coaches went into the first (and only) regular-season overtime hoping for, well, just about anything, really.  

Unbelievably, overtime ended still 0-0.  And zero casualties.  And the coaches finally called a draw in disgust, declining the roll-off.  It’s interesting how things panned out: this would be the only points of the season for the brutally unlucky Orc coach.  The CDwarves, however, would go on to win the next week at Table 3 and only this draw (as opposed to a win) kept them from Table 2 in the final week and a outside shot at the bronze.  Also, because they did NOT advance to Table 2, the Week 4 coaches there stayed there for the final week and all-in-all made for an especially anti-climatic setup for the finish.

I often look at games between rookie coaches as being wildly unpredictable, here’s a zero-casualty overtime game to follow two back-to-back games that retired the Orc coach’s dwarf team.  I chalk this up to the arbitrary decision-making of new coaches, and I’d expect these wild extremes to fade away as everyone gets games under their belt.  That would have to wait, of course, till after the Season 1 Championship.  

Chips Fall

 I should talk a bit about my quest to get tabletop BB going as cheap as possible.  If this deal was going to cost more than a designer boardgame (~$50), I wasn't going to do it.  I found a number of printouts on boardgamegeek done inexplicably by a gentlemen who intended them to be cardboard standups.  They are images of 3rd Edition miniatures with a unique, well-coordinated roster number prominently over each one.  I figured cardboard was pretty hokey and too much work honestly, so I printed these on light cardstock and mounted them to 1 3/8" wooden alphabet disks from Hobby Lobby.  After I was convinced they would actually get used, I would bite the bullet and buy the rest of the wooden disks I needed online, in custom sizes.

At any rate, these disks worked surprisingly well.  It was like having a top-down, tactical view.  Even better, they allowed us to use translucent bingo chips (pictured), which were a fantastic, at-a-glance system that honestly makes minis seem a bit clumsy.  For $1 /team I had a system I thought was much more elegant and much less work than minis, at the expense of an aspect of the game that I personally saw as a chore anyway.

The board is posterboard and a roll-up turf mat, again from Hobby Lobby.  I used this trick I found online with thumbtacks and string to denote intersections and hit each with a dab of White-Out.  Personally it's hard to imagine getting much more straight-forward than this, and for a small group it was perfect.  Pitches were 2/ $20.




The rosters are fan-made Excel sheets, and I’ve since looked for them and can’t find the file anymore.  Pretty fancy roster, team-value calculator, skill access look-up, in-game display, match history, we actually use most of the features on a pretty packed workbook.  It’s called Zen 7.1 LRB6.0, and there aren’t any major things I would change to make it ideal.  We share rosters and other league info on Dropbox.

Season 1 and the Flying Punch

Everyone can understand the argument that bad games can happen to good people.  It doesn’t help when you’re IN that bad game, but it was enough to get 8 coaches to adopt a “Ok, I’ll give it another chance to see how it goes” attitude for Week 2.  The pairings were unrecognizable, including two restarts facing off, but the games sorted themselves out in a relatively bloodless way.  Coaches began to see some of the depth of the system and getting their arms around calculating assists and dodging modifiers and the game started “clicking.”  The average # of games played at this point (not including myself) was about 4.  I had only scheduled a 5-week season, learning my lesson from my earlier Cyanide league when I thought SEVEN games was a short season, and I figured even this was asking a lot of people brand new to a game like Blood Bowl.  Unlike the PC game these games were still running 3.5 – 4.5 hours plus travel of course, with some of the slower coach matchups running long into the night.

Well, this was the best group of coaches ever gathered under one roof to play this accursed game, so they weren’t about to get waylaid by a time commitment even if it was far in excess of my empty promises.  Weeks started picking up and then flying, and just like that, Week 5 was upon us.  I had thought the Championship was guaranteed between my Nurgle and the game store owner’s Norse, regardless of Week 4 result.  As I learned before the final game of Week 4, I thought wrong.  My chance at a rematch (and revenge) was in the ex-Wood Elf coach's hands.

Chaff and the Wheat

In keeping with the theme of coach control, your initial ranking was based on Team Value.  This had the effect of sorting coaches more or less by experience, though you could game the system a bit by cutting, bloating, or restarting all together.  Because, unlike a true Swiss-style system, the Kaiser system weighs your schedule when calculating your ranking, starting artificially low was going to grant you an easier schedule but a more demanding win record.  The reverse is true with starting high.  Two coaches started with serious teams, the Norse and the Wood Elves. 

The Norse were an unusual build even without the obscene number of +AG boosts.  They had played the most games, mostly draws and loses against me, which I like to think was educational.  The Elves had played mostly brand-new opponents, complete with the typical innocent rules mistakes, to the tune of a long string of 4-0, 5-0 shutouts with serious casualties.  This had the effect of granting their wardancers in particular, more SPP’s each than every player on every other team combined.  

Regrettably, while the players were doing extraordinarily well the coach wasn’t taking a whole lot from the matches and he went into his first real game with a very loose understanding of the rules.

It was his first loss, with his star wardancer fouled to death and his ST7 tree niggled.  He was understandably upset, and I was very concerned he’d drop out altogether, but he ended up restarting to Lizardmen and a quick ruling said he kept his old record and we move on.  Our second league game was a casualty fest, and the team restarted.  Our THIRD game was a clobbering, and the loser flirted with restarting before dropping out altogether.  At this rate there was not going to be a Week2.

 All in all, of the losers of Week 1 we had one stay on, 2 restart and 2 resign.  Putting the next week’s pairings together, if there was a next week, was going to be a major struggle.  Definitely did not want to put people through a game they were just going to get frustrated with, and I was beginning to think this was all a bunch of wasted time.