OctOgre Cup

This Saturday we ran our last event of the year, the OctOgre Cup.

There were a number of special rules for the tournament. The full rules are here however a summary is:
- Ogre pitch added 1 to all armour rolls and whenever the ball hit the floor, it bounced again. 
- If a team didn't field a ST5+ player, an ogre fan might take to the field in place of one of their players
- If a team didn't have 11 players at the start of the second half, they might gain an ogre fan
- Instead of a skills package, you were given SPP to spend which allowed primary or secondary skills including stacking and stat increases.
- Use of a special weather table.

The event itself ran quite smoothly and to time (which is important in the venue as they have a hard closing time). Whilst some of the rules were queried on occassions, everyone seemed to have an enjoyable event and the queries wouldn't have disrupted their playing experience.

Oli was tournament organiser (TO) and I was assistant to the tournament organiser, so I helped with getting things to the venue, setting up, checking everyone was there and all of the other Charlie work. 

As we had an odd number (we increased capacity slightly due to a slight administrative error) Oli was playing although would have preferred not to - as I learned from running Sunday Sevens last monthit is a lot easier to TO when you're not playing. You don't need to interrupt your game to enter results, answer queries or just generally check that everything is running smoothly. Unfortunately, sometimes the TO has to play otherwise someone else will end up missing out. 

12 of the participants were from the SKABB League, which is a great turnout and obviously helps to build the community feel we have got going on. I'm quite proud of how we are growing the community and I think switching to Discord for our communications earlier this year has really helped as it allows a lot more conversations over Facebook messenger which is what we were previously using. 

The last few tournaments we have played at Chaos Cards we have been upstairs on their tables in the open, among people playing other games. They have just reopened their games room which we had exclusive use of for the day. 

For the first time, we ran a feedback form after the event to gauge how everyone else thought the event went. There were conflicting opinions on whether the upstairs or the games room was better - some favour one, some favour the other! Personally I quite like the games room space being dedicated to Blood Bowl, however we have been limited in numbers competing there. This might become more of an issue if we are getting more people want to take part in our events.

In terms of the other feedback, there was sensible ones (e.g. tweaks to the ogre fan rules) and slightly less sensible ones (e.g. I'm not sure Chaos Cards would start selling alcohol). The SPP rules was generally thought to be a good thing as it is different to other tournaments and makes a nice change.

We are looking to have a few events that we run annually and OctOgre may be one of them, if only for the pun and so we will look to make tweaks to the ruleset if we run it again next October.  

In terms of how the event went for me, my undead team managed to draw all three games 1-1. I have now played 6 NAF games with undead, with four of them being 1-1 draws. I'm not very experienced with them but would like to be a bit better as they are a solid tournament team and make for an easy choice when determining which team to take if I can't decide. 

I think I could have played a bit better, but part of the beauty of the game is that it is always possible to learn. I started playing about 20 years ago (although only regularly around 5 years ago) and I'm fairly sure I've learned something from all of the games I've played recently, proving that you can teach an old coach new tricks. 

I did have two crazy plays during the day. Against Alex's tomb kings in my opening game, with no re-rolls left, I had a zombie pick up the ball to hand off to a ghoul in a tackle zone who managed to dodge away twice and score in turn 16. 

The other one was a brave skeleton who dodged away and die a one die block against the nurgle ball carrier to knock it lose and prevent a score at the end of the first half against Bob.

Whilst I do like winning, things such as this which will live long in the memory are really the reason we play BloodBowl and not other games.

I thought I might have been in with a chance of the most casualties trophy having got 4 in each game, however vulture squadron managed to get 14 against snotlings and thus outscore all other coaches in that one game alone!

Results

Winner: Marc (sparky73) with ogres
Runner up: Bob (Phuqster) with nurgle
Most TD: Saul (kanyo1owl) with black orcs
Most cas: vulture squadron with dwarfs
Wooden spoon: Pete (hissalives) with goblins