UKTC 2024, 24-25 August 2025

I hadn't intended to go to UKTC this year. The date change from last year (April to August) and initially the thought it might clash with Thrudball meant that a number from our league were unable to attend for various reasons.

Then two weeks ago I saw some messages from Mike (sann0638) and Alex (dementor/pegleg) saying that they were looking to put in a last minute team to even up the numbers. I looked into whether I could make the logistics work, and with a car share from St Albans with our other team mate Tom (chicken, 23rd of his kind) booked in, along with a little jiggery pokery with nursery pick ups from my partner, it became a possibility. 

I rejigged my calendar of what teams I will be taking to what tournaments so I could use one that is currently painted and I settled on an amazon build with 2 blitzers (block and wrestle), 2 blockers (guard and block), 2 throwers, linewomen to 13 (1 with block and 1 with guard), 3 re-rolls, an apothecary and (apparently - I forgot about it all tournament) a coach. 

I played a number of practice games on FUMBBL just to familiarise myself with the skills and stats of the players along with one tabletop game and was feeling relatively comfortable with the team.

My teams mates had vampires (Alex), gnomes (Mike) and goblins (Tom).  

A total of 7 hours in the car to get there on the Friday meant a beer to destress, some pizza for my hungry belly and some board games helped with relaxing ready for the tournament the following day.

On the way up to York, I'd been chatting to Tom about his experience pairing up with DimmyGee for Summerslam where, whenever Dimmy asked Tom the score and it was (for example) 1-0, Dimmy's response was "TO YOU?!" I stepped into Dimmy's shoes and performed this function for the weekend. I hope that I did so adequately. 

Sann Clan (l-r) me, Tom (chicken23), Mike (sann0638) and Alex (dementor/pegleg)

We had a sitting down school-style photo in solidarity with Alex who currently has a broken leg.

Round 1 v Dante (breakmonker on Tactics and Theatrics)

As the first round is drawn the day before, I discovered on the way up that I was drawn against Dante who I had played at UKTC two years ago. That game was elf union v skaven and ended up in a 2-2 draw with me equalising on turn 16. 

Dante has recently been selected for Team England and is a very experienced skaven coach, but for this weekend he had humans with 5 guard.

I quickly realised that my 2 blockers would be my key players in allowing me to actually gain the strength advantage by turning off his guard whenever he wanted to hit me. As such, spreading them out a bit was the way to go to maximise the area that defensive would cover. 

I played quite a high pressure defence and forced the humans down one side. Unable to get 2 dice blocks, Dante did a one dice which was a skull, re-rolled into a skull and this gave me the perfect opportunity to surf his ball carrier. 

The ball was thrown in to my backfield, recovered by my thrower who passed up to my blocker with block, meaning even if the humans did get a shot at the ball, they would be needing a pow (most likely on an uphill block). I was able to get through and score in my final turn of the half to take the lead.

I decided to try to score quickly on my drive and after throwing a lot of players into the backfield I was able to do so. Whilst fairly comfortably in the lead, I knew Dante would throw everything at getting back into the game, and with a two-turn score my lead was cut to one but I was receiving the ball. 

Under a lot of pressure, I made a some slightly risky dodges, rushes and a handover to get the ball to my blocker who was able to run away towards his endzone. I decided not to rush for the score which actually gave him a chance to tag my ball carrier and attempt to rush for a 1-dice blitz but the rush failed and my blocker was able to blitz and score to go 3-1 up. After the game, Dante suggested screening might have been a better option but I just wanted to get the ball as far away as possible.

Dante then had a chance at a consolation one turn touchdown, however a Time Out happened meaning he actually had 2 chances to score. He got the ball into my backfield relatively well surrounded. I worked it so I had a shot at a 1-die block if I succeeded on a 5+ dodge. It wasn't to be an he scored a consolaton (which he initially mistakenly thought was an equaliser) to close the game out.

Dante is a really great opponent. I have enjoyed both the games we've played and he will be a very worthy representative of Team England at the Eurobowl in Athens next month. 

As a team, we lost this round as Alex drew but Tom and Mike both lost.

Round 2 v Cameron (blockparty87 on 2 Up 2 Down)

Cameron was playing a fairly standard norse build. I again kicked and rolled a blitz on the kickoff. I managed to put him under a lot of pressure. Even though I managed to get 2 removals including one of the valkyries, he managed to get a pass and run away. 

Even though I use massive cards to remind me of the weather, I'd forgotten it was really sunny and failed to do a modifier on this. I'm not sure it would have made any difference to the score. On a blitz, I pushed him into the endzone to force him to score. 

On my drive I was surrounded. I managed to clear the path and get the ball upfield needing just a 3+ dodge with the inbuilt re-roll to score but this failed and I went in one nil down at the half. 

In the second half I danced around with the ball a bit. Cameron did knock it loose but I blitzed a player onto it where it then bounced onto my blodging blocker who caught it, dodged away and was safe from that point on, even after an unlikely series of dodges from a valkyrie to put pressure on. I did an excessive three die block on her, which broke her armour meaning I was able to safely secure the 1-1 draw. In this round, there were 3 wins for my team-mates so we got a team win.

One of those wins involved a controversial choice made by Alex to choose to push his opponent into the endzone and equalise when the POW was an option. He thought that he had much more chance of a one turn touchdown than he did of preventing his opponent recovering the following turn so he took that as being his best chance of winning. As it turned out he got a time out and got the two turn score easily, but it did provide many hours of analysis/incredulousness at the curry house that evening. 

Round 3 v Paul (pbowman on Murder Queens)

The Murder Queens were one of a number of Scottish teams (along with Murder Kings, Murder Aces and Murder Jokers) who had made the trip over the border to play.

This was an amazon mirror match and looking at our rosters, it seemed that I'd got a lot more on mine (I've checked and rechecked and it is a legal roster) so I'm wondering if Paul had not taken into account the skills when checking the team value. He seemed to have a reasonable weekend, going 2/2/2 with some of the results being against good coaches, so maybe I just missed something on his roster.

We shared the pain of the amazon models falling apart. By this stage, one of my throwers had come off her base (and been replaced by a linewoman with a pass skill band) and one of my blitzers had lost her head. 

For the third game in a row, I kicked, and for the second in a row I got a blitz. I managed to use my blitzer to hit and run to gain an extra square of movement and rush twice to get under the ball. She didn't catch it but there was a lot of pressure and a couple of removals (including his tackle blitzer) forced him to score quickly. 

Paul put a lot of pressure on me but he ran out of re-rolls and I had the ball in the hands of my blocker who was able to score without really breaking a sweat - I was even able to surf on turn 8 before doing so.

Reciving in the second half, I initially failed to get the ball and then gave it to my blodging blocker in a guard cage which just caused my opponent lots of problems, and he was never able to get a good hit. I chainpushed the ball carrier to avoid the need for dodged or rushes. I was stalling out and Paul did manage to engineer a way to get a hit on her but a skull meant that I was able to blitz free and score for a 2-1 win. 

To add insult to injury, Paul even rolled quad skulls on an insignificant block on his final turn. 

Alex and Mike both won their games, with Tom drawing so another team victory. The team ended the day on 2/0/1 with my individual record being 2/1/0. I was pretty happy with that. Finding out that we were up against Team Wales that evening meant we knew we would have a tough ask first thing in the morning!

Game 4 v Andy (celt on Team Wales)

Andy was playing norse (and very happy to chat about norse tactics after the game, which I need in advance of playing them later this year).  He is a very experienced coach and TO, and it was always going to be a tough game. 

Again I won the toss and elected to kick. I immediately started fouling his team, removing the yhetee and a berzerker this way before getting a casualty on a beer boar from a surf. Significantly up on players, I was able to force him to score earlier than he would have wanted. This left me two turns where I did all the hard work of dodging away and passing, then blitzing the player I intended to score with free, but she failed to catch the hand-off and I was 1-0 down at half time.

Had that worked, my second half strategy might have been different but starting to get down on players with none of my KOs recovering, and losing the game I obviously needed to score to get anything out of the game. I pushed to do this before I further ran out of players, and a pass to get the ball hopefully out of range was intercepted. From this point on, there wasn't much I could do as the ball was out of my reach and he scored last to win 2-0. There was no shame in losing to a player of Andy's quality, but I wish the score had worked just before half time to make a bit more of a game of the second half.

Whilst Alex got a victory, Tom and Mike also lost, meaning it was our second team loss of the weekend.

Round 5 v Gordon (huntlyloon on Two Guys One Dice Cup)

Gordon was playing undead. I wasn't looking forward to this matchup as undead are a solid team and I wasn't sure what the amazon strategy should be against them.

Again I kicked and I managed to knock out a mummy, wight and a zombie. It forced Gordon to send a ghoul down my right flank as a potato play, rushing twice to go ahead. This uses a re-roll but succeeds, however gives me a lot of time to try to get one back.

I hold the ball back a little before trying to score on my turn 7 with a slightly risky 4+ catch and blitzing my blitzer free.  I figure that it's better to try on turn 7 knowing that the undead one turn attempt isn't  easy and that if my scoring attempt fails, I've got another turn to try to get the equaliser. The score works, and unfortunately for me, Gordon's knocked out players all return. 

I set up to defend a one turn attempt before Gordon admits he isn't going to give it a go. 

Reciving the ball, I dawdle and progress slowly, fouling a ghoul to death and getting another couple of knock outs. I make a dive for my left hand flank and screen off the ball carrier to guarantee the score and the victory. 

As a team, Mike has a really bad game with his gnomes but Alex also got a victory and Tom secured a draw meaning a third team win.

Round 6 v Barney (Rubble on Let Me Atom)

Barney and his team had come up from the West Country (Yeovil to be precise) and must have had about as long a journey as us. He was playing orcs with a split of guard and block big uns, with guard, mighty blow and tackle on blitzers. Annoyingly I kept forgetting which one was tackle as the skills were colour coded under the bases and I kept forgetting to check them when they were slightly obscured, although I don't think it would have made a differnce to any of the decisions I had made during the game.

I put a lot of pressure on him and got my players round the back. Whilst Barney was able to stall out to score on his turn 8, it was not for want of trying to stop him and he did have to roll dice to score. 

I had used all my re-rolls at this point, but I got a time out (worst result on the kick off table) although my strategy to capitalise involved trying to push a gap in the middle and flood players through. In hindsight I should have just blitzed at least one player around the edge, as I failed to roll anything better than both down on a crucial block, causing the turnover and meaning I had no one in range to score.

I scored in the middle of the second half under a fair bit of pressure. When Alex asked if it was because I was pushing for the win, the answer was that I was part pushing for the win, and part unsure if I would score if I didn't score that turn.

The only photo I took all weekend (in my final game). Here you can see the headless wrestle blitzer who will shortly fail her dodge. 

I used two of my re-rolls on rushes to get the touchdown leaving me in a bit of a difficult position defenstively, however I put a lot of pressure on to stop the score and I worked out how to get a one dice block on the ball carrier with my wrestler which, if the ball fell favourably, I had my other blitzer in a position where she could pick it up and run away. The wrestler failed to dodge away from his tackler and it wasn't to be. 

The orcs passed the ball to a blitzer on their turn 15. The blitzer was exactly 8 squares away from the endzone, so any push would mean he wouldn't be able to score. My blocker blitzed in for a two dice block needing just a rush to get it... before she rolled a 1. Also out of re-rolls, however, the blitzer rolled a 1 over nuffle's tripwire and we ended up with a 1-1 draw. 

Alex, Mike and Tom all won their games, meaning another team victory and finishing on a 4/0/2 record in 12th place. which I think is far higher than my expectations had been. Individually, Alex finished 5/1/0 and on equal points with the winner - missing out on strength of schedule.

I was in 53rd place with a 3/2/1 record which I was pleased by, especially with some of the matches being against very high quality coaches.

If you are interested, you can also read Mike's write up of Day 1 and Day 2.