SKABB League

Last night, was the playoff final for SKABB Season 11. This was been my vampires (Pitchfork Pines Preschool) and Oli's khorne (Stonefolk Skullhunters). Before I get into talking about the match, I want to add some context. Oli is the person who got me into playing Blood Bowl much more frequently and seriously. He was at the first tournament I ever played in 2017 that two school friends had convinced me to go along to. I took ogres as I thought I'd do badly anyway, and ended up with the wooden spoon. A week or so later, I go to collect a parcel from the post office and he's working there. We have a good chat and I say that I'll try to join up the league after my wedding is out of the way as that plus a long honeymoon meant I couldn't put a lot of time into playing the game for a while. We have played far more times than I can remember, both in person and online, in both competitive and friendly games. We've had games before tournaments where we've talked abou...

This Saturday, I made the trip up to the Big Smoke to play my first event in the London series. The series began this year after the spate of series that started in 2024 and it's great to see so many events and interest being created in the London scene, which is one of the busiest in terms of leagues but has perhaps been a bit underserved by tournaments in recent years. The Condiment Cup was the first tournament run by SaltyMurcutt (aka Rob from the Channelled Fury podcast ). Rob has run the SaltBowl League for many years which bans tier 1 teams, and it was no surprise to see that for his first event whilst they weren't banned, they were given a package such that they wouldn't be very inviting. Only one player took one - Dinlo with orcs - whose focus was to knock the opposition down and foul them every turn if possible to win the most fouls prize. I took the opportunity to try out khorne which I'd just recently finished painting, accidentally in World Eaters colours. I...

I found myself with this Saturday unexpectedly spare and a tournament within reasonable driving distance so I headed off to Egham. I had no idea where Egham was before I left - it's a good job I have a semi-reliable satnav in the car to help me get there. Despite them being my favourite team, I'd only ever taken wood elves to a tournament once before - NAF Championship last year , and so I thought I'd give them another run out to see if I've learned anything from playing them online a fair bit. One big change from my NAFC roster is dropping the tree. I really like the mobility of having eleven elves, compared to 10 and a tree that will stand still a lot. It really suits my style of play. I went for 2 wardancers with strip ball and tackle, a leader thrower, 4 catchers with no added skills and 4 linemen - three of whom had dodge. Round 1 v Paul (stelthelf) Of the 22 players at the tournament, a large number of them have just started playing the game with Egham starting up...

  The NAF Championship, formerly known (many moons ago) as The Blood Bowl is the English National event and one of the 5 Majors. This was my 5th year attending since my first in 2019, and it is an event I will always try to make. Not only is it expertly run by deeferdan and the team, it is the largest singles event in the world and is like a Blood Bowl party. Pre-NAFC Sevens The Friday night traditionally has a sevens event at Warhammer World. Whilst the experience was slightly dampened by Bagman's Bar being temporarily closed, it was still fun nonetheless. For the last few years, eldritchfox has been running this and I have been the spare man, although a Dayday volunteered to do this and I was guaranteed to be playing. 52 coaches attended this year, equalling the record for the largest sevens event held in the UK (with last year's Thrudball Sevens) and the joint 5th largest sevens event ever. Round 1 v Sean (monkeyrage) I've chatted to Sean a fair bit before but this is th...

This was the first even tin the South East Tournament Series that I was able to play in this year, due to being ill for the Greedy Goblet and running the Kent Team Championship. I was quite excited, although extremely indecisive about what team to take! This is me back to my usual self- my plan of playing through all the teams last year definitely helped make decision making easier! For this event, every team had to take a star player and there was 1200k gold available to spend, but with limited skills. I looked at the teams that I thought wouldn't need many skills and could fit in a star player without compromising on positionals. I tried a couple of games with amazons and Dribl and Drull but it didn't suit my playstyle, so I switched to Norse with my favourite star player - Rumbelow Sheepskin. It meant that I got to use in earnest the amazing model that I was gifted as a Secret SKABBer gift at Christmas 2023.  With the skills I added guard on both ulfwerners, dodge and wrestl...

...how do I know if you're good value for money? I haven’t got a good ending to that joke yet. If I think of one, I’ll come back and amend this. I decided to spend a bit of time looking at all the ways to keep your players in the game through the use of medical sideline staff. I wrote about tge effectiveness (or lack thereof) of Bloodweiser Kegs here. You may want a read through that as well as it is on a similar theme. Apothecaries An apothecary will cost you 50k and let you do one of two things: 1. Keep a KO on the pitch as a stun 2. Re-roll the casualty die Let’s talk about each of these in turn.  Turn a KO into a stun The first, colloquially known as a “power apo” is probably more common in tournament play than league play. In a league, you might hold the apothecary back in case your blodge-stepping additional movement wardancer gets a stat bust. In a tournament, you are probably more concerned with keeping players on the pitch than with the actual result of the injury As such,...