V NAF World Cup, Alicante 7-10 September 2023

This month, I went to the BloodBowl World Cup for the first time ever. I would definitely want to go back again if it is feasible. It was an incredible experience. 

Firstly, let's talk about what it is for those who don't know. The World Cup of BloodBowl requires no qualification. We were not representing our country - nor would we have been in the conversation if that was a requirement. Anyone can put together a team of 6 (or 7 if you want a spare) coaches and enter, as long as you are able to pay the entry fee.

Then your team will play the team that you get drawn against, and whichever team wins the most matches among the 6 games will win the match up. If you both win the same number of games then it will be a draw. At the end of the event, whichever team has the most points is crowned the team champion. There are also individual standings but they are less important in a team event. 

We had a team of 6 including 5 members of our league and Ian from Devon who had been looking for a squad. Aside from me we had Ross, Marianne, David and Alex. We were taking dark elves, lizardmen, amazons, tomb kings and norse with Ian taking khorne.

My roster was very slightly different to at Thrudball. I dropped dodge on a blitzer to take leader on my runner for an extra re-roll, but it was otherwise identical. 

This was the fifth World Cup, with the event taking place every 4 years. I'd not been into the tournament scene enough to consider going to the last one in Dornbirn, or any of the earlier ones either.

This iteration was held in Alicante in Spain, a place that I knew had an aiport and was hot but pretty much nothing else. Not liking the heat, it is not a place that I would have chosen to visit had the World Cup not been hosted there. I booked an extra day either side of the tournament to have a bit of a holiday. Mainly I just went to the castle twice - I blooming love castles - and wandered around and ate food. It was quite a nice city although I've seen it enough to not feel like I'd go back. Here's hoping the next world cup is somewhere nice and cold. One thing that I will remember about Alicante is that it had amazing trees.

An event of nearly 2,300 BloodBowl players is almost unfathomably big. I think the biggest tournament I have attended previously is UKTC with around 350 coaches, so this was around six and a half times bigger. If there was anyone in BloodBowl you wanted to talk to, they were most likely in this room. 

Aside from my opponents and people I already knew to talk to, it was nice to meet new people - some of whom came up to talk to me having noticed the name on my back. This included Chicken23 who has recently joined the BloodBowl South East Discord and to whom I had spoken to a bit online, and referee Sjape who had previously been over from Belgium to Kent for tournaments. I hope to bump into both of them at events in the near future. I also did the same myself to say hello to people I knew of but hadn't met in person. It might be a silly thing but having shirts with your name on really helps to convert friendships from online to in person.

After that preamble, onto the event and how it went for the SKABB Scoundrels. 

Round 1 v Purplechest (Team FUMBBL)

We were drawn against Team FUMBBL. The team features Christer, the man who runs the whole of the FUMBBL website and helped to keep BloodBowl alive when it was abandoned by Games Workshop. He is hands down the most dapper chap that I've seen playing BloodBowl and I was too overawed to say anything but a short "hello" to him.

I was playing against renowned Jagged Alliance player Purplechest who it appears stumbled into a BloodBowl event, perhaps by accident. 

The first round is drawn ahead of time, which allowed me to send smack talk messages to him on Discord in the week before getting on the plane. I wouldn't have done this had I been drawn against almost anyone else, but we had conversed recently and he seems from his podcast, One World One BloodBowl, that he has good a good sense of humour. 

My taunting is limited to football chants and this is the best I could come up with. 

Mental note: must work on my insults.

Nothing particularly remarkable happened in the game. It was a dark elf mirror match and extremely cagey. It is possible to view your opponent's roster in advance and we were mainly using Sann0638's tool to do so. Purplechest had gone for 2 wrestle witches, 3 dodge blitzers, 1 leader runner and linemen to 11 with 3 re-rolls and an apothecary. Personally I'm not a fan of dropping a blitzer but based on how the game went, I can't criticise too much. 

I kicked to him and set up to provide a big wall for him team to attempt to break through. I managed to get a casualty on one of his blitzers which I was excited about until I realised he had an apothecary allowing him to come back later in the game. I made a slighty mistake in positioning my wall, leaving one player isolated. PC blitzed through and set up a vengabus the other side of my line allowing him the opportunity to stall out. 

I desparately sent a witch elf in to hit the ball carrier with the goal of being able to knock the ball out of play, but unfortunately the dodge failed. With no chance of getting a hit on the ball carrier, I instead opted to try to surf a witch elf, but she ended up falling on the ground one square short of being pushed out. 

My attempts to score a one turn touchdown failed, despite extensive studying in the weeks before heading to Spain. It's much simpler to work out when there is no pressure on.

When receiving for the second half, my blitzer caught the ball and I edged my way up the pitch. Hemmed in at my right flank, my opportunity to score involved knocking a witch elf back to make a 4 dodges into and through tackle zones to equalise (the sequence would have been something like 4+, 4+, 3+ 2+, so maybe around 45% according to Bloodbowl Dave), however I failed one of the early dodges with my dodge re-roll and fell onto my back. With the game lost and every casualty counting, I encouraged Mr Chest to kick the living beejebus out of my blitzer to teach him a lesson.

The team also struggled in this round, with David and Ian also losing but Marianne, Ross and Alex picking up draws, meaning we lost as a team as well.

Round 2 v apotre (Bearded Bruisers)

After lunch we were paired up with the French team, the Bearded Bruisers. They are based just south of Lille and had not been to many tournaments previously. My opponent was a lovely chap who I spoke to a few times on the other days of the tournament and we had a really great game. 

Two games in and two dark elf mirror matches, although this time with a coach with much less tournament experience playing them. Purplechest's NAF record with dark elves prior to our game was (22/5/0) whereas apotre had only played 1 game previously which was a 1-1 draw. 

In this game, my opponent pushed into my half as I was trying to push some of his players off the pitch. He committed possibly a bit too heavily as when I made the decision to cage dive, I was able to run away with the ball out of range and go 1-0 up on his drive.

Receiving in the second half, I surged up the side of the pitch in a vengabus. My opponent did try to dive in for what would have been an uphill block on my ball carrier, but fortunately for me his attempt to do so failed where mine had previously succeeded. When in range of scoring, I opted to do so with a rush to effectively put the game to bed. A few removals had helped me and whilst my opponent managed to pull one touchdown back there was not enough time for him to attempt to get an equaliser and instead I encouraged him to attempt to kill my witch elf instead.

As a team we picked up four wins (me, Ian, Marianne and David) with Ross drawing to easily secure the victory in the match up.

Round 3 v KaduC (Turone)

For the first time I was drawn against a team other than dark elves and it didn't take long before I wished that I had been, as the damn dirty rats tore me apart. 

Hailing from near Toulouse if my memory serves, KaduC is a very experienced coach with over 500 NAF games to his name. In comparison, I have under 150. I've only just now found this out as there wasn't time to check between games, but I am not surprised now I have discovered this. Kadu was a very solid coach although now looking at the rankings I have discovered that I ended up ahead of him. 

This was the first time I really appreciated having started to take a notepad with me. This was mainly for recording our team's scores but noting down information about my opponent's players (e.g. base colours, skill bands) to allow me to plan during their turn is really useful and I will try to remember to do this for every tournament in future.

I kicked to the rats and they scored reasonably quickly, allowing me enough time to try to get one back. I attempted to score after my half was flooded by rats but failing the throw, it was wildly inaccurate and landed in a good place for the skaven to blitz a player away from it and send a gutter runner in to pick it up and dance off into the endzone to put me 2-0 down at half time. 

Receiving at the start of the second half, my only chance to get something out of the game was to score quickly and attempt to turnover the ball. I think it took around 3 turns to score and I set up exceptionally aggresively and sent some of my team through to force my opponent to move the ball. They managed to successfully get it upfield but I still had a shot at a knockdown blitz, recovery and thow to get an equaliser. 

My blitz failed but worried that I still had an opportunity on my final turn, the ball carrier tried to hand the ball to a gutter runner who could get out of range. The gutter with butter fingers dropped it, but it was caught by a teammate next to him. Fortunately the teammate had activated so I still had a small chance at recovering the ball for an equaliser. The dice didn't play out for this and in their final turn, the skaven ran in for a third making the scoreline perhaps slightly flattering for them at 3-1.

My team mates all struggled this round as well, with just David and Alex getting draws and the rest of us suffering defeats. At the end of day 1 we were 1/0/2 as a team.

Round 4 v Elestor1 (Escuadron Inferno)

For the first time in the tournament we were paired up against a Spanish team so my 250+ day streak on Duolingo was going to be put to the test! I very much enjoyed speaking Spanish to the four Spanish coaches I played during the tournament, and some of them seemed really grateful that me (and a couple of my teammates who had also been learning) were trying to speak their language. I often feel that we assume that we will be able to get by speaking English everywhere we go and English speakers should put in more effort when they go abroad. 

The main problem I had with trying to speak Spanish was that (especially as I had a few more drinks) my brain knew I was meant to be speaking another language but with it being more familiar with French, it was inadvertently giving me French words to use rather than Spanish words.

Elestor was a lovely chap and this was my third dark elf mirror out of four games in the tournament - which also turned out to be my last. 

There isn't too much to say about the match because, unfortuantely for elestor it stopped being a match fairly quickly. I kicked and he scored mid-way through the first half, having removed one of my witch elves. Despite being a key player down, I was able to equalise by half time. Elestor had given me a lovely set of red dice as a gift which kept removing his players when I was doing their armour rolls. It got to the stage where I had eleven elves against his five, and it was basically no longer a contest. I took the ball down to score 2-1 at the end of the second half giving him no chance to score back. 

As a team, Ross, Ian and Marianne also won with Alex drawing to give us the team win.

David lost 3-0 but his game had one of the most enjoyable moments of the whole weekend where he, myself and one of his opponents team mates were all trying to show his opponent how to chainpush to be able to score yet another touchdown. We were all cheering on his opponent, but David has still not let me forget about the fact that his captain was wanting his opponent to score against him! As penance, I will be playing Tomb Kings in our upcoming tournament so I can see how difficult they are to play.

Game 5 v Eyeball Paul (Little Gitz)

Aside from SKABB Commissioner Oli who I flew out with but was on a different team, I don't think I could have been drawn against anyone who lived nearer to me than Paul. In fact, I'd driven to his house one evening this summer to play a practice game in his garden! On that occassion we had drawn 1-1 with his son Josh (minimorg playing Snotlings on the team) noticing an error I made before I did. 

For the rematch, it was raining all throughout the game, something that had apparently been a feature of the halflings matches to this point. 

Paul had a flings with Deeproot roster and marched up the pitch with the three trees caging around the ball. I picked my moment for a cage dive which succeeded however the ball ended up bouncing to a treeman. The tree handed off to a fling who managed to get round my defence to put the stunties 1-0 up. 

I didn't have much time to score back and I needed a bit of luck and a hand-off down the right flank to go in level at half time. The bit of luck came from a re-roll that Paul had graciously unstolen, as we realised he had set up too many players and also incorrectly picked up the ball as it would have failed due to the weather. Rather than sending any of his players off (as they hadn't activated) we just removed them and put them in the reserves. After an experience at NAFC last year, I feel that if my opponent hasn't gained an advantage, there's no point sending off his star player as I'd much rather have a competitive than one where my opponent is a few hundred throusand down in team value for no real reason. 

Receiving in the second half, I pushed up the pitch and was planning on stalling out whilst I was getting a good number of removals on the flings - they ended up with 6 in the casualty box. However, I didn't see the long fling uphill blitz on my blodger which pushed me in the endzone forcing me to score. I was 2-1 up with a massive numbers advantage but had wanted to not give Paul that much time to score back. 

Unfortunately for Paul, we rolled the officious ref on the kickoff table who promptly sent off Deeproot. Any hope that Paul and his few brave flings had started to vanish and I was even able to exploit the big gap left by Deeproot to put pressure on the backline and a failed fling pick up even allowed me to score a third. The game end 3-1 and 6-5 on casualties. 

Marianne pulled off an impressive win against Mike Davies (sann0638) who has already grudged her for Thrudball 2024, and Ross and Ian picking up draws meaning that the match up was drawn.

Round 6 v Allorolorito (Mezquita Team Beer)

We were drawn against our second Spanish team of the day and they were very enjoyable lively opponents. I'm sure Marianne won't forget the mantra "Dodge is a trap!" which her opponent chanted during their Amazon mirror match. The team was from Andalucia and named after the mosque, Mezquita de Cordoba which I looked up pictures for and is rather stunning.

My opponent was playing orcs and he kicked to me. I managed to knock out a big un and made my way up the pitch whilst suffering several removals. I needed a rush to score but unfortuantely failed it and didn't have a re-roll left.

Kicking to the orcs, I used my re-rolls on surfing his frenzy blitzer and then with the orcs driving down the sideline, I worked out the perfect way to surf the ball carrier. I managed to succeed in three knockdowns on one die blocks, which should have allowed me a 2 dice block to surf the ball carrier. Unfortunately I had forgotten to follow up on the final block meaning it was just a 1 die blitz. This turned up a skull and I was out of re-rolls. My opponent was able to drive down and score, giving me two turns to score back. 

He knocked the ball out of the hands of my blodging ball carrier who was then out for the rest of the game. An orc picked up the ball and all I could do was to blitz them and hope. I managed to get the knockdown on the 1 die block, which resulted in the ball going out of play and being thrown back in just in front of my blitzer who needed a 2+ dodge and 2+ pick up to get the equaliser which paid off for me on this occassion, ending the game 1-1.

Ross, Alex and David all drew but the other games were losses meaning we had a team loss.

After day 2, the team was 2/1/3 but I was pleased personally to have gone through the day undefeated.

Mezquita generously gave us a bottle of wine from their region as a gift which we put in the fridge and have after day 3. It wasn't to everyone's tastes, but I really enjoyed it. 

Round 7 v Mad (A Bunker Project)

Waking up on Sunday morning to find I was drawn against a former Thrudball champion wasn't really the start I'd hoped for, although with Marianne beating one the previous day, I was hopeful that I might be able to do the same.

Mad is an Italian gentleman and good fun to play against. He had a black orc team with mighty blow and dirty player as the only skills he had taken. 

With double skulls on the first turn, it wasn't looking great for him, although his dirty player started to run riot on my team. I put a lot of energy and resources into removing him which helped me feel a bit better and I managed to turn the ball over and score to go into the half 1-0 up. 

Receiving the ball, and learning from my game against Paul I screened off to prevent any possibility of the blitz to be able to stall out a little before taking a 2-0 lead and effectively guarnateeing the victory. 

With nothing to play for, I encouraged my opponent to kill and foul my team. At this point we got a drink together, and I discovered that beers were 1 Euro each. This may have had some influence on my results later in the day.

As a team, Marianne and David also picked up victories, with Ian and Alex drawing to win us the round.

Round 8 v Dardorl (Santako Total)

Drawn against another Spanish team, this time from Barcelona, I was playing Dardorl's norse. The game was going exceptionally well for me initially. I got a blitz on which I managed to get a knock out on a positional, and then shortly after I managed to also knock out the yhetee. I tried to cage dive on three occassions but the 5+ needed failed each time even with the dodge re-roll. Each individual dodge attempt has over a 55% success rate so to fail it three times in one half was rather frustrating.

With the numbers advantage, it is possible I made a tactical error and instead I should have focussed on a column defence which might have prevented my opponent from getting through. As it was he managed to dodge away and score. 

With the knockouts coming back and two turns to score, I made an attempt at the equaliser but with no re-rolls left and my leader having left the pitch, the dice said no.

Down on players, I decided to attempt to score quickly but I put my ball carrier slightly too close to a valkyrie who managed to knock the ball out of my hands. From that point onwards I was on the back foot and running out of players, I was unable to stop my opponent getting a 2-0 victory.

The team were really appreciative of my attemps to speak Spanish, my enthusiasm for doing so being increased by the beers that they bought me mid-game!

We only got draws from Marianne, Ross and Ian this round with the rest of us losing, and so lost the round.

Round 9 v Groncho (Cantabrones)

After mucha cerveza, I told my opponent I wanted to only speak Spanish for the game. It was an enjoyable game, but I don't remember too mcuh about it now! 

Playing against orcs for the second time of the weekend, I failed to stop them scoring and my cage diving form from my previous game continued with at least 2 more failed attempts to do so.

With not enough players on the pitch, I failed an attempt to score back in 2 turns so in the second half I was pushing to score but I got turned over an failed in ever more desparate attempts to get the ball back and lost 2-0.

I asked my opponent if he had painted his team himself at one point, to which he stunned me and said that he had made the team himself out of green stuff. I was so impressed, I made sure the rest of my team were aware of this as well. 

There were wins this round for Ross, Ian, David and Alex meaning we got another team win and finished the tournament on 4/1/4 which I was very happy with. 

Conclusion

I was personally a bit disappointed that my record of 4/1/2 turned into 4/1/4. Going into the tournament, I had hoped to win more than I lost and to finish in a position with three digits. I just missed out on both of these, but had an amazing experience meeting new friends and old and just soaking up the atmosphere. 

The tournament as a whole was won by French team Azes and my photo of them lifting the trophy has been used by the event organisers which is another thing I'm proud of in a silly little way.

The World Cup was far and away the best tournament I have been to. There are a few complaints that people have, but it's mainly due to the fact that there are volutneers organising an event for nearly 2,300 people and that's not an easy thing to do. Personally, there is nothing that brought my weekend down (other than a bit of a bad run of dice). 

I would definitely want to go to another World Cup if it is at all feasible for me to do. 

Final SKABB Standings:

Team finished 203 out of 372.

Individually:

211 Oli 4/4/1
774 Marianne 4/2/3
1102 Stew 4/1/4
1106 Ross 2/5/2
1301 Ian 3/3/3
1514 David 3/2/4
1660 Alex 1/5/3