Making Mistakes

 

We all make mistakes. After all we are only human even if we are pretending to be orcs, elves or goblins.

I have been beating myself up about a mistake I made in my league game on Monday. It was especially annoying as I made essentially the same mistake a few weeks ago in my first league game of the season.

Even more annoyingly, I lost both games 1-0 with the mistake most likely costing me the opporunity to score and therefore draw the game.

More annoyingly still, both games were against one of the Evil Twins who play in our league. They’re not actually evil, but as they’ve both beaten me this season, I feel the moniker is quite deserved.

I’m fairly sure I will not make the same mistake again now - although please if you see me looking like positioning my ball carrier on the side-line, do feel free to use strong language at me – but it made me think about one of the things that I think is great about the sport of BloodBowl.

Even though I learned to play over 20 years ago, and have been playing roughly every other week (if not more regularly) for the last 5 years, there is still so much for me to learn about the game.

I like to think that I’m a reasonably good player, although having played against Purplegoo (currently ranked number 2 on the NAF rankings) at a tournament earlier this year I know there is a long way for me to go still.

I’m also aware that I often don’t play what is considered the optimum strategy. There are many reasons for this – it doesn’t fit into my playstyle, I might do it intentionally to throw my opponents off as they’re not expecting it (especially if they do as Alex did at Octogre and tell me what they think I won’t do), I’m not good enough to realise what the optimum strategy is, it is the most fun thing to do… and probably a dozen other reasons.

It’s still good to learn from my mistakes and try to improve my game but BloodBowl is weird, though. As a large part of the game is random, even the best players won’t win every game as the dice won’t favour them. Sometimes the worst strategy possible might work out if your opponent triple skulls the blitz on your isolated ball carrier. It can be difficult to work out if you’ve made a mistake or if the dice made it appear one way or another – because even the most ridiculous 1% plays will come off once in every hundred times.

And this is one of the many reasons I love BloodBowl.

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