An in depth analysis of varying factors at large Blood Bowl events

 

What this is

This report aims to do an in-depth analysis of large Blood Bowl events to look for patterns, trends, commonality and points of interest. I have looked at rulespacks for a number of large events as identified in the NAFReport 2024 with a particular focus on UK events and Team events – because I run a large UK Team event and I was looking to see what comparable events are like. I will be looking a lot of elements of these events individually in detail. A list of events along with links to where I found the information is included at the end. Hopefully those with slightly different interests can still find some value in this.

Note: as Eurobowl rules can vary wildly year on year, I have excluded them from this. That means tournaments which follow the ruleset (such as Home Nations and Tilean) have been excluded from the rules discussion.

Disclaimer

Whilst this report is as accurate as possible (it would be pointless for me to not try to make it so), there may be issues that have arisen due to varying languages, it not being possible for me to easily obtain data and differences year on year. This is being written early 2025, and depending on what is currently available, I will be either using information from 2024 or 2025. If you spot any error, feel free to let me know although this report is as accurate as I can make it on the information at my disposal, and should be accurate enough to see trends in large Blood Bowl events at the moment.

Pricing

I have taken the pricing for all events where I knew the price and the number of games and created the below chart which shows the price per game of these events. Exchanges rates have been taken from xe.com as of today’s date for ease.

The average seems to be around £8.30 per game, which is roughly where Kent Team Championship and Mulligans sit.

There are a lot of factors that might affect the value for money that a coach sees. Whilst Waterbowl is the cheapest per game at £3.33, it doesn’t include food or swag as part of the ticket price (although a lunch was provided on the Sunday this year due to local food outlets being few and far between). Thrudball on the other hand is the most expensive at £12.50 per game, however this price includes 2 breakfasts, 2 lunches, 1 dinner and onsite camping.

The only other event which doesn’t include food as part of the price is the German Team Bowl, which comes in at £7.67 per game, but it does have food available at an additional 10 Euros which if taken up would place it as one of the more expensive events at £10.45 per game, around the UKTC/Bilbali mark.

Bilbali is more expensive than it usually is due to extending to a 3-day event for it's anniversary edition which also includes a lot of added extras such as additional food and free drinks. They expect it to be much lower for future events. 

Regarding the inclusion of food, there isn’t a lot to be said on a purely data analysis, although it would be interesting to find out from tournament goers whether they are happy with food being included in the ticket price - my hunch is that for ease of ensuring the tournament runs smoothly it is the best option -  and whether there is any correlation between price of event (or price that they would be willing to pay) and the quality of the available food.

Format

Of the events that I looked at, only 2 were one day events. One of these (Stranglebowl) being 3 games and the other (Mezquita Bowl) being 4 games.

Only one event was longer than 2 days which was Bilbali which has adopted a 3/3/2 format for its anniversary edition.

This leaves 13 two-day events and only the Scottish Team Championship deviated from the 3/3 format by dropping a game on day 2.

Whilst anecdotally I have heard some talk about coaches preferring an event that only has 2 games on the final day to allow for easier travel, with either a 4/2 or 3/2 format, these are not common formats amongst large events. Both of them involve sacrificing something – either a night out or a game of Blood Bowl.

One thing that can be looked at to assist those worried about travel plans is the end time of the event on the second day. The below shows that there is a significant variance in the end time with the Home Nations and Waterbowl finishing at 17:15 but Kent Team Championship finishing at 19:00. This is definitely something for organisers to consider when planning their schedule – and with the latest finisher being my own event, it is definitely something that I will be considering when I help to put next year’s event together.

There are obviously 2 factors that will influence the end time – the length of the games and the start time of the event.

If we look at round times for all events (not just the 3/3 events) then we see a definite preference for 2:15. Of the 15 events for which I could find round timings, 11 of them have 2:15 round times (one to note is UKTC which has 2:30 for round 1 and 2:15 thereafter).

This leaves Mulligans which adds on an additional 5 minutes to be the only event with a 2:20 round time, and three longer events which have 2:30 rounds. These events are Kent Team Championship (again the event I help to run, so something to think about), German Team Bowl and Dungeonbowl, which is also in Germany. I’m not sure if perhaps German events in general tend towards longer rounds, or if these two are just the exception.

The other factor to think about when looking at end time is the start time on the final day. Of the 3/3 events, there is 1:30 difference between the earliest start time for the first game of the day (German Team Bowl at 08:30) and the latest start (Welsh National at 10:00)

The majority of the events have the first game of the day kick off at 09:30 on the Sunday.

Tournament Scoring

There are 13 events for which I was able to obtain the scoring structure for. 8 of these had a 2/1/0 scoring system or equivalent (e.g. Waterbowl uses 6/3/0). The “Win is worth twice a draw” theory seems to be common at the competitive events. It is certainly the most predominant option.

Mulligans uses the same approach but with bonus points (100/50/0 with bonus points) so it could be assumed to be similar, although bonus points effectively become the first tie breaker in this scenario. There will be more on my thoughts about bonus points in the tiebreaker section.

One thing to note is that Bilbali uses 2/1/0 for teams but 7/3/0 for individuals. I’ve included them as 2.0 because it is primarily a team event.

After this, there are three other options for the win to draw ratio. The highest variance is at the Welsh National which uses 3/1/0.

Thrudball uses a ratio of a win being worth 2.5 draws, and Mezquitabowl  has a scoring system whereby you effectively get a bonus point for winning by 2+ touchdowns. The default is that a win is worth 2.38 draws.

Stranglebowl goes close to the standard, with a 15/7/0 scoring system meaning wins are 2.14 draws.

As there is a section on the NAF website to enter event scoring, it might be possible to analyse this more widely, however there are likely some data quality issues in or to analyse it very easily. For example, some leave it blank, or put it in another section, some spell it out (e.g. Win – 3, Draw – 1 Loss – 0), some have 3/1/0, 3-1-0 etc. so it would be a time consuming exercise to cleanse the data to do this analysis.

Tiebreakers

A quick note on my thoughts on bonus points – they will move whatever you use to determine bonus points to become a de facto tiebreaker. If you wish for coaches to be differentiated first by something else, then they should be avoided. What they do offer, however, is a way to cap the effect of freak games (e.g. 5-0 wins against snotlings) making the Most Touchdowns tiebreaker more competitive. Another thing they can do is to allow you to combine multiple things into one tiebreaker.

Of the 14 events we are looking at, only 2 of them were using bonus points (Mulligans and Stranglebowl) with Mezquita effectively having a bonus point system for either winning by 2+ TD or only losing by 1 TD.

In these instances, I’ve put Bonus Points as the first tiebreaker in the table below.

The numbers are the position in the tiebreakers that each specific tiebreaker appears. If there is a .5 that means it is a team tiebreaker only.

The most popular tie breaker is Strength of Schedule which appears in 11 of the 14 rulesets, with two events having it as the first tiebreaker, and 8 having it as their second tiebreaker, with 3 of those being after roster submission, so it is the first Gaming tiebreaker in 5 of the 14 events.

The next most popular tiebreaker is Net TD which is within 8 rulesets. Net Cas was in 7 of them, and in all instances was the tiebreaker immediately after Net TD.

Head to Head figures in 6 rulesets. 3 of these were team events, in which you’re more likely to encounter a competitor on the same number of points as you because you are effectively reducing the number of competitors by a factor equal to the team size.

Chance, or some form of game factors in 5 rulesets, but every time as the final decider. Whilst many of these events have multiple tiebreakers prior to it, it probably makes sense to have some way of differentiating in the unlikely instance that everything until that point is equal. It is better to have it written into the ruleset expecting to never have to use it than to not have it in there.

My favourite of those studied is the Pop and Lock Dance Competition at the NAFC, mainly because I like the thought of some of the best Blood Bowl players in the world practicing their dance moves just before the English National. Personally I’ve been including Rock Paper Scissors (best of 3) in my rulesets, although this is partly because I think I’m quite good at it.

The conclusion to this is that there is no consensus on the best way to split coaches or teams on the same number of points at the end of a Blood Bowl event.

Software

There are 14 events where I was able to identify the software used for running the event. Tourplay is the big player here, with 8 of the 14 using it as their preferred option. The more it is used, the more familiar with it coaches will become, and the more they will expect it as standard. The big points in it’s favour are the data entry is on the player, and that it has integrated roster submission.

2 events were using bbtm.app. This is a more recent development and was used at the Amorical Cup in 2024. Of the 19 events listed in March, 15 of them were in North America. I am guessing this is partly because of the usage at Amorical means that players and TOs there are more familiar with it than those in other countries, and that has likely helped it to spread more readily there. Like Tourplay, it shifts the emphasis on data entry to the player, but it doesn’t presently have roster submission functionality.

3 further events had a Bespoke solution. I’m only familiar with two of these (NAFC and Stranglebowl) which both have the data entry done by coaches.

The final event – Thrudball – uses Score, and whilst this is manual data entry by an admin, they have been using Google Forms to get coaches to submit the data to them, so they get it in a spreadsheet format.

Two of the non-Tourplay events, have utilised bbroster for the roster submission.

Prizes

I noted down a total of 45 different awards across 15 events.

For the 5 team events, they all had winning team and runner up team. 2 of them had a 3^rd place team and 2 had a wooden spoon team. There were then 6 awards only awarded at one event (best local squad, best Fluff squad, best group styling, most TD, most Cas, best defence).

All of the 15 events awarded top individual, with 12 awarding runner-up individual. The three events which didn’t award this were all team events.

One event awarded a prize to the top placed individual not in the final (Dungeonbowl), and 3^rd place was awarded by 9 events.

Individual Most TD and Most Cas were both handed out at 14 events, with only Bilbali (a teams event) not awarding these but instead awarding the equivalent prize for teams.  

Stunty cup was awarded 13 teams, with the Scottish Team Championship being the one that drops from the 14 above.

An award for the best junior player was awarded 5 times, with 4 of these being awarded at English events.

A wooden spoon was awarded 6 times, although there was seemingly no pattern to the events that offer this.

12 of the 15 events had at least one best painted award, with all of these offering a prize for the best painted team, with a further 13 awards being available across some of these events for more specific criteria (Big Guy, Individual Miniature, Accessory, Star, Theme, Auction Donation etc).

There were then 19 awards which were issued by just 1 or two events. Some of these are specific to the event for a particular reason, some of them are novelty awards, some aren’t event related to what happens on the pitch (e.g. Best Outfit, Most Thrudlike).

Tiering

Tiering is probably the most difficult thing to look at due to the variety of different tiers available.

Of the 14 events, the number of tiers was as below.

Tiers	No. of events
3	3
4	3
5	2
6	4
7	2

There is no consensus to the best number of tiers. The spread is quite even, so there isn’t even any grouping on where that best point might be.

Even so, we can still look at the average tier (even with differing numbers of tiers) and see where teams lie in relation to their win percentages and each other.

I’ve plotted the below chart which shows average tier against win percentages from 2025 only (to take into account the Underworld nerf in May 2025). 

Please note: my assumption isn't that all races should be hitting 50% win rates. I am more interested in looking at the trendline of win rate:average tier ratio, and looking for anything that was far from that trendline. So this graph, shows that the average win rate for tier 4.75 (ish) is about 44%. Goblins are tiered there on average but their win rate is around 36%, so they win less than the average for their tier by some significant way.

Amazons are the only team to be in tier 1 for every single event, and rightly so as they are the second-best performing team. Looking at this, the further away from the trendline a team is above it, the better they do compared to their tier. The further away a team is below it, the worse they do compared to their tier.

Any team too far above it, is probably under tiered, and any team too far below it is probably overtiered.

What this shows is that there are a few outliers. I’m sure there’s a way to look at deviation from the line mathematically, however I am just going to do it based on visuals.

Most teams seem to sit nicely in the range of either 3% above or below the trendline. Anything outside of this is probably worth considering. Some points to note before we delve into it.

Firstly, these results are for all events so far in 2025. The tiering is for a select number of events that I’ve looked at. They therefore don’t align perfectly, but we can hope that the average tiering for events is similar to the handful that we have looked at.

Some teams may perform well at one tier, and badly at others. It is possible that if a team was universally bumped up or down, their winrates would change. This would be the intended effect, but whether it would skew them too far the other way or not is a difficult thing to know. I would be wary of changing anything too close to the trendline.

It is also important to note that this is data covering a 3 month period only. However, extracting the data from June 2024 (post UW nerf) to March 2025 is not possible directly off the NAF website.

Let’s start first by considering the big outliers which are – in my opinion – Goblins on the negative side, and Vampires, Elf Union, OWA and Chaos Renegades on the positive side.

Goblins are near universally in the lowest tier. The only 2 exceptions are Thrudball which has them in tier 6 of 7 and the Blood Bowl Open which has a special Stunty tier but is not explicitly the lowest tier. Thrudball in 2024 had tiering which allowed goblins to significantly improve their chances, hence why they are not currently in the lowest tier. 

Despite getting the most generous package in every event, their win rates are still significantly below the trendline.  There is an argument to say that goblins should be in their own tier, lower than all the other stunties (possibly with ogres joining them). 

On the subject of stunties, whilst they aren’t as far off the trendline, Gnomes are often tiered above the other stunties (sometimes along with snotlings) but their win rates don’t bear out their inclusion here in the same way that snotlings do. It is perhaps Tournament Organisers being overly cautious while they wait to see how good the team is.

Looking at the positive side of the line, vampires have the highest win rate in 2025, and yet they have an average tier of nearly 2. Unless a TO has a very specific reason for not doing so, they really should be universally tier 1 with amazons.

Elf union have the same win rate as Dark Elves who are almost always tier 1, yet they have an average tiering of below 3. There is an argument here that they need to be lower down to get the skill packages that they need to help them win – although perhaps TOs are a bit too generous to them.

With OWA and Renegades, this is more of an interesting problem. They are generally lowly tiered, and aren’t one of the more popular teams. The most popular teams are played around 5-7% of the time with OWA and Renegades being played about 2-3% of the time. It might then be better players picking them when they have a favourable ruleset or wanting a challenge and succeeding reasonably well with them. Even so, there is an argument to say that they should be a tier higher than most TOs think they should be.

Nurgle have been grouped with the stunties on occasions, and this seems to be borne out and brought them slightly closer to the trend line.

Based on my analysis here, I would say that 5 tiers seems to be about right, although this is very much an estimate and subject to the taste of the TO.

Squad building for squad events

This is something that was of interest to me as I am running a sizeable team event. I was interested in looking at whether there are any elements which involve squads working together for team selection, or whether players are free to choose whichever teams they want.

Two of them – my own (Kent) and the Scottish Team Championship used a squad points system, whereby a squad had a number of points to use for their race picks, with teams in each tier having a points cost. We found that 2/3rds of survey respondents liked or loved it, with a further 20% having no strong opinion on it. Our method allowed teams to spend underspend squad points on either skills or added cash, with the Scottish event meaning teams lost points. Personally, I think I prefer their method for team management.

Of the other team events, UKTC and German Team Bowl have no squad element, and Bilbali has improvement packs which are different for each team in the squad. Dragonbowl in France has a system whereby every team gets a human lineman and then whichever squad has the lowest tiers can get a bonus to upgrade these linemen.

As team events are much less prevalent, there is not really any one general approach.

Skill system

There are 4 distinct systems of allocating additional skills to players.

The most popular is an allocation of Primary and Secondary skills to each tier. This was used by 8 of the 16 events, with players generally able to choose a primary instead of a secondary if they wished. This is probably the more traditional approach to tournaments.

Four of the events used a skill points system, as described in the Matched Play Guide. I don’t recall seeing this used prior to the release of the Matched Play Guide two years ago, but it has gained a bit of traction since then. Whether it continues to be popular with the community in the future remains to be seen. Two of the four events were the large Scottish events, so it might be more popular within that community.

An allocation of Star Player points is the next most popular with three events using this system. Two of these events were German, so again it might be that a community has taken to a particular way of allocating skills.

Finally, Thrudball is the only event which uses a cash-based system where primary and secondary skills along with stat increases have their own value for purchasing.

Skill restrictions

Considering the restrictions on adding skills at Eurobowl, I thought I’d look to see what events generally do. 12 of 16 events had no restrictions on the number of skills that could be added, which is a definite majority.

Of the remaining 4 events, 2 of them (German Team Bowl and Dungeonbowl) cap the number of added skills at 4 of each skill, which includes inherent skills, meaning you can’t add Block on dwarf teams, for example.

The Big V caps it at 4 of each additional skill, but doesn’t include the inherent skills within these amounts.

Finally, Stranglebowl caps it at two of each added skill.

Stacking

There is significant variation in the allowances for stacking. 7 of the 16 events (so nearly half) allowed no stacking whatsoever.

Of the 9 events that allowed it, 3 allowed it for all tiers, 4 allowed it for lower tiers only and 2 allowed it only with trading or specific packs.

3 of these 9 events added a charge for “killstacks”, i.e. combining tackle and mighty blow, or sneaky git and dirty player.

Cash

One trend that seems to be becoming more popular is differing cash for different tiers. Analysing 17 rulesets, it is almost a 50:50 split with 9 of them having differing cash, and 8 of them having a fixed amount. One of the 9 is Bilbali which differs by which pack you take rather than tier, so it is pretty much an event split.

The below tables show the values available for both fixed amounts and varying amounts and which events follow these values. I would suggest ignoring Bilbali as it is a very unique ruleset, although I have included it below for completeness.

Fixed Amount	Events
1050	Reva
1110	Dungeonbowl, Big V
1150	Kent Team, Waterbowl, NAFC, Stranglebowl
1200	Mezquita Bowl

 

Varying amount	Events
1090-1230	Bilbali
1100-1150	German Team, Dungeonbowl
1110-1190	Blood Bowl Open
1150-1170	Welsh National
1150-1200	UKTC, Thrudball, Mulligans, Scottish Team

 

There are some points of interest here. Whilst the Blood Bowl Open starts at 1110, this is only for three teams (Amazons, Undead and Underworld) before it jumps to 1150. All of the events that have 1150 as either the fixed amount or the starting amount are UK events. With the exception of Mezquita, all the non-UK events start at lower cash. I would note that it is compulsory to take a star player at Mezquita, which would explain why it has the most cash available.

Where some UK based players were not in favour of the Eurobowl ruleset - and there may be many other reasons why that was -  one reason could be that the reduced cash is very different to what we are used to at UK events.

What counts as a casualty?

Of the 16 events I was able to see full rulespacks for, it was interesting to note that 50% of them didn’t specify in the rulespack what would count as a casualty. This is perhaps something for TOs to note, although my assumption is that if it isn’t included then the default should be SPP casualties only.

Of the remaining 8, 2 events (Big V and the Blood Bowl Open) included all casualties and 6 included SPP casualties only.

If my assumption about the events where it wasn’t specified is correct then 14/16 (88%) of events use only SPP casulaties.

Inducements

Of the fourteen events for which I was able to find the available inducements, there were 7 which were universally available. These are Bloodweiser Kegs, Bribes Halfling Master Chef, Mortuary Assistant, Plague Doctor, Riotous Rookies and Wandering Apothecaries.

This surprised me a little as I don’t remember seeing anyone use Plague Doctors, Mortuary Assistants or Wandering Apothecaries at an event previously, despite them being universally available. Most of the others are vital for certain stunty teams to help them stay competitive, and the Keg is a tried and tested BB inducement.

Star players we available in some form for 11 of the 14 events, which I have to admit surprised me slightly as I had expected a larger number of the more competitive events to exclude them completely. I’ll look at which stars are banned in a later section, but the availability of stars can be broken down as:

No stars – 2 (UKTC, Dungeonbowl)
Event custom stars – 1 (Thrudball)
Star player mandatory – 1 (Mezquita)
Stars limited to lower tiers – 6 (Scottish Team, The Blood Bowl Open, Welsh National, Mulligans, Stranglebowl, Waterbowl)
Stars available with specific upgrade pack – 2 (German Team, NAFC)
Stars available to all at a skill cost – 2 (Kent, Big V)

Biased referees were available at 10 of the events and are probably worth considering alongside bribes for stunty teams.

Josef Bugman was available at 7 events. I’ve only seen him used on Blood Bowl 3 so far and I’ve not spent a lot of time thinking about whether he is worth it, although I did spend quite a bit of time thinking about Bloodweiser Kegs and concluding that they were a waste of money. https://skabbleague.blogspot.com/2025/01/nufflenomics-bloodweiser-kegs.html

The Weather Mage was available at 5 events, although I think it is very much a waste of cash, as I wrote about at length here. https://skabbleague.blogspot.com/2024/01/nufflenomics-weather-mage.html

Team mascots were the most popular of the Deathzone inducements, with 4 events allowing them. I quite like them (although I’ve not done the maths on the payback yet) as they give you a nice way to spend 30k leftover cash.

Temporary cheerleaders and coaches were available at 3 and 2 events respectively, and extra team training was available at 2 events. These inducements confuse me because rostering the equivalent is cheaper, and so including them in the rulespack adds redundancy and could potentially cause a bit of confusion to coaches.

The Waagh Drummer was available ad just one event (Blood Bowl Open) which effectively shows that in general, large events stick to the main rulebook inducements.

Special plays, mercenaries and wizards were not allowed at any of the events, which is what I had expected as the consensus is that they are, or can potentially be, game breaking.

Star players

The below discussion is not considering the cost or whether certain star players are banned, but more the list when an option such as this is chosen. Where all almanac releases are banned, it seems to largely be due to the proximity in time to the event date.

There are not really any surprises on the list, other than that there is a general lack of consensus about who should be banned or restricted when you get past the usual suspects.

Links

Big V
https://www.bigvbloodbowl.com/

Bilbali Teams Cup
https://www.bilbaliteamscup.com/

Blood Bowl Open
https://www.talkfantasyfootball.org/viewtopic.php?f=59&p=832641

Chaos Cup
https://chaoscup.com/

Dungeonbowl
https://dungeonbowl.de/

Dragonbowl
https://member.thenaf.net/index.php?module=NAF&type=tournaments&func=view&id=8890

German Team Bowl
http://german-team-bowl.de/

Home Nations
http://www.homenationsbloodbowl.com/

Kent Team Championship
https://www.talkfantasyfootball.org/viewtopic.php?f=59&t=47289&hilit=kent+team

Mezquita Bowl
https://member.thenaf.net/index.php?module=NAF&type=tournaments&func=view&id=9228

Mulligans Open
https://www.mkbbl.co.uk/mulligan-s-open

NAF Championship
http://nafchampionship.co.uk/

REVA
https://member.thenaf.net/index.php?module=NAF&type=tournaments&func=view&id=9035

Scottish Team Championship
https://drive.google.com/file/d/15DHuw07BZBVV088JxOzzff3wxIMXjUNo/view

Stranglebowl
https://member.thenaf.net/index.php?module=NAF&type=tournaments&func=view&id=8107

Thrudball
https://www.thrudball.com/

UKTC
https://www.uktc.info/

Waterbowl
http://waterbowl.org.uk/tournaments/waterbowl-weekender/

Welsh National
https://www.talkfantasyfootball.org/viewtopic.php?f=59&t=48108