Kent Team Championship 2025, 15 & 16 March 2025 in Canterbury

I usually write here about events that I have participated in. This is one of the few times that I’ll be writing about an event purely from the perspective of being a tournament organiser (TO).

This last weekend, we ran the Kent Team Championship 2025. You can read about the 2023 and 2024 tournaments if you wish.

Before I start, I would like to say thank you to everyone who sponsored the event, which is (in alphabetical order) Ashdown Gaming, Austromancy Crafting Co, Black Orc Down, Chaos Cards, Charlie Victor, Hearthforge Games, Ragnarok Scenics, Waia Games and Warzone Events.

And also everyone who helped in some little way, either in advance or on the day, which is EldritchFox, Whitehot, Andrioo, BeardedLucha, PaganAgent, MisspelledTree, MCB_Turnogre, LukeX69, SuperDom and the spare players - RedFacedGoose, Willderbeast, DevilEyez and Arboterrean. I hope I haven't missed anyone - apologies if I have. 

Planning

Most of this is going to be discussing the planning of the event rather than the event itself, although there is a bit of that throughout. 

The planning for this year felt a lot more pressured after having run an event the size of last year when we had 120 coaches competing. Last year’s event was the 4^th largest in the UK (and the 16^th in the world). I was genuinely amazed and delighted to find that out in the NAF report earlier this year.

Ruleset

For the previous 2 iterations, we had copied the UKTC ruleset basically word for word, perhaps with a tiny tweak here and here. The consensus from the feedback and within the organising team was to have a ruleset of our own. This year, eldritchfox was left with a clean slate to come up something. Whilst there obviously common elements with other rulesets, which is always going to be the way in Blood Bowl events,

One thing that we included was a team points system. Teams had a number of points to spend on their race choices, with unspent team points being able to be converted to skill points or cash for a team of your choice. We had used a similar system for Summerslam last year.

It does appear that people liked the team point element, but from a TO perspective it caused a lot of issues. It makes roster checking a lot more complex, and if you need to sub in a spare player, it adds a level of complexity. It will remain to be seen whether this stays in for future years, although I do like the idea of teams having to work together in a way to build rosters prior to the event.

One piece of feedback from last year noted the lack of a painting competition. As a decidedly mediocre painter, this hadn’t even popped into my head previously. Andiroo was in charge with this and came up with 2 categories – one for best team and one for best big guy. We had 13 entrants on the day – more than I had printed entry slips for! There were some really great entries, and it was a really close call on the winners, but hwd and haychee (annoyingly similarly named so caused a little confusion when awarding the prizes!) came out winners.

Duration

We made a decision to go to a 2-day event based partly on feedback from attendees, and partly because when you’re looking at 2-day events in the UK, the nearest one is Thrudball which is just under a 3-hour drive away from us.

We thought it would be great for Blood Bowl in the region to have a large 2-day, which local players could attend to get experience of an event of this size without the travel commitment of going to the NAF Championships (around 4 hours drive) or UKTC (nearly 5-hour drive), for example.

As we know from attending other large events which are predominantly in the north, the travel time can be a deciding factor. The midlands and the north are very well served by large 2-day Blood Bowl events, as can be see by the map below (red is 100+ 2-day events and blue is county with both a 100+ 1 day event and a 100+ 2-day event). It feels good to be able to offer a similar experience to those in the South-East with shorter journey times.

One comment from some attendees this year is that they would prefer an event which is just 2 games on day 2, to allow for easier travel back afterwards. I can that understand this would likely be a benefit to coaches from further afield. However, I think it would also be a reduction in value for those more local to us. Players from further afield are more likely to travel for a 2-day event, although the concern about when they would get back home on the Sunday evening is an issue for some. To try to help those with longer journeys, we might look to try to find alternative ways to arrange an earlier finish.

Originally the event was started to bring the local community together. I think our focus will remain to benefit the game in the region, with any coaches that we can coax to attend from further afield being a definite bonus as this will improve the quality of the event.

Ticket booking

We have been using a Google Forms booking form for the event for the last 2 years. Team Captains are required to fill out the names of those on their team, add info such as any dietary requirements, let us know if any players need NAF membership as part of their entry fee or if they are under 18 and therefore eligible for the best junior award.

This has been done at the point of purchasing the ticket and has worked quite well, although there are some teams who don’t know the make up of their team beforehand. Obviously real life sometimes means that people are unable to attend, as well, so the form doesn’t always match reality. It might be more useful for us as organisers that we look to get these filled out much nearer the date rather than when signing up initially.

We had set up a new PayPal account for the event. We were shocked when a couple of months after the event went on sale, PayPal decided to freeze the account and deny us access to the funds. I guess they suspected suddenly receiving a lot of payments of £200 was suspicious activity. After a 3 month waiting period, we had access to our funds and we deposited them in the new bank account we had created for our league which is now registered as an association and has free banking.

Looking at ticketing solutions, the cheapest looks like it would take around £15 out of the £200 ticket price and probably isn’t feasible budget wise, so we might need to request bank transfers only for the 2026 event. This hopefully shouldn't be an issue but will be something to investigate in advance. 

Software

After the manual entry software last year which caused a lot of stressful times between rounds as we were trying to enter the results, I wanted to use a system where the users would be entering the data.

This narrows down the options to a few main options - Tourplay and bbtm.app. Tourma can do that as well, but after trialling it at Summerslam, I was too keen on it and I hadn’t been able to get the functionality working to automate the data entry.

We have used Tourplay for tournaments previously, so we tested bbtm at OctOgre last year. Everything went smoothly, and the designer was really responsive to queries and supporting us both prior to and whilst the event was going on. It also asks for less from the users than Tourplay does – just a number of touchdowns and casualties, and you don’t have to assign them to any particular player. On top of that, you don’t need to create a user account, so the barriers to using it are lower. As such, we decided to use bbtm for the Kent this year.

Everything was going pretty smoothly… up until we tried to draw round 4 on Sunday morning. We came across a bug. We were able to manually work out the team match ups, and coaches were really helpful in working out the individual match ups, so we got going on time. However, a couple of stressful hours working on the software, followed by a mad panic when we were realising we’d need to switch to a spreadsheet made me pull out both of my hairs!

I was starting to worry about how we would get round 5 going. Whitehot had the idea of collecting scores on a Google Sheet and spoke to all the team captains to get these in, and amazingly right at the vital moment, the software designer (who is Canadian) woke up and logged on and helped resolve the issue. He then stuck around to help us draw round 6 later in the day. 

There was a small bug which he fixed overnight on Sunday. I do feel he went above and beyond making sure we were able to get our event running with just a slight delay. This is the sort of service that you don’t unfortunately get from Tourplay, as you’re lucky to get something back within a week from their support team. As such, I would feel more confident that any issues with bbtm will be resolved during the tournament. 

Even with the issues and the delays, it looks like the majority of attendees were happy with the system, and hopefully we will be able to use it in future years.

One thing we had to do outside the system this year was the roster building. We used a spreadsheet that was originally designed for the German Team Championship. I know that Sean who designed bbtm is looking to integrate some sort of roster solution, so hopefully this will all be part and parcel next year.

The spreadsheet was fine, but we did need to spend a lot of time tweaking it to our ruleset, and then there were a couple of small issues mainly caused by the fact that it was designed by someone else, so I missed a couple of things when customising it.

Room logistics

We have had the event split over 2 floors for the last 2 years. This hasn't presented many issues. The bar has only been open on the lower floor, which is where the lower tables are. We decided to place the vendors (Charlie Victor and Hearthforge Games) on this floor as it would mean greater footfall for them.

Last year, the tables we used were 6ft x 2.5ft tables last year. This meant that players were playing sideways on and a fair distance away from their teammates. We made the move to 6ft x 3ft tables, which might not sound like much of a difference, but you can get 2 pitches on them and play endzone to endzone and be shoulder to shoulder to your teammates. Hopefully this made it feel like more of a team experience. As we effectively needed fewer tables because of this, we are able to better utilise the space and so the event’s capacity has increase to 40 teams.

Presentation and branding

Ensuring that both rooms are playing to the same timing is a slight issue. Last year we had to be in communication between the rooms throughout to get the timers set up on the projectors. This year, I designed a Google Sheet with a timer on it, so that both rooms can projecting this onto screens to ensure that they will be running to same time. It was also possible to add a little to the display, including revolving logos of our sponsors. I’m happy to share this with anyone if it would be of use for their event.

We also created a PowerPoint presentation for the awards ceremony, so that we could project the name of the award and the winners' names onto the screen. This will allow players to see the name of the winner if they’d not heard it, and to look good in the background of photos when the awards were given out. On top of this, we’d got PaganAgent to create a design for a standee which was on display all weekend and then used in the background of photos (see below). 

Finally, we had printed and laminated table numbers for each batch of tables (e.g. 1-4, 5-8) with the event logo. Hopefully all of this helped to add to the event experience in some little way.

Goodies

One thing that Blood Bowlers can’t get enough of is swag! We had some goody bags made up with a lovely metal ball tokens from Charlie Victor, MDF painting handles donated by Ragnarok Scenics and Star Player bases donated by Heathforge Games, as well as a 10% off token for Black Orc Down online. All of this was put in a lovely bag to easily hand out to teams.

For prizes, we also had some very generous donations including a substantial amount of gift vouchers from Chaos Cards and a pitch from Hearthforge Games as the two headline prizes.

On the day

Day 1 went exceptionally well. After the setup – for which we had a lot of very kind volunteers – all we had to do was push a button to start the round. Everything else pretty much ran itself. There weren’t even any difficult rules queries.

We had 4 spare players from our league who were going to form a team if the number of teams was odd or fill in for missing players if they were not. One team dropped out the week before, so the spare players were filling in for a couple of missing players. I hope they all enjoyed the experience of a large event. They seemed to but I’ve not had a chance to catch up with them properly year.

I think the only issue with day 1 was that the staff member (who was on his own) didn’t open the food area, and that I needed to go and do so. It would have created less of a queue if it had been opened a bit earlier, which is what I had assumed had already happened, so that will be something to think about next time. Also there didn’t seem to be a full meal for any with dietary requirements, so we will discuss this with the venue. We're speaking to the venue about an additional staff member to help with this small issues. 

Day 2 was almost the opposite of the stress-free day on day 1! I had been due to pop off during round 5 to see my daughter in her first ever dance show. I’d shown Whitehot how to use the software and update the round timer, and he’d been sorting it out for the previous rounds with no issue.

We sat down about 8.45am to draw round 4… and the software said no. As I mentioned earlier, Sean signed on at exactly the right time to save the day and in the end I drove off and literally sprinted into the hall to see a short part of the show (she was actually only in it for about 3 minutes anyway). More than anything getting away from the stressful situation and getting a cuddle from her brightened my mood and I went back to the venue with the earlier stress all forgotten about.

The rules queries came a bit more towards the end of day 2. Perhaps Blood Bowlers know things but forget them a little when they are more tired? Aside from the software issue, and my stress levels (apologies to anyone I may have shouted at), the day did still go quite smoothly. 

Winners

As it got close to the end, we had a couple of teams in with a chance of winning. There were a large number of representatives of Team England playing in the event and a big chunk of them were up against each other on the top table for the final round.

After the issues around the winning team last year, I was very keen to make sure that we got the winners right this time around, so I was checking and double checking everything as the results came in and then double checking them when everything was finalised. 

I then quickly typed the winners’ names into the PowerPoint presentation for all of the awards. 50% of the names of the winning team were even spelled correctly! Note to self: take more time typing them in next time.

2026 and beyond

We will be taking on board all the feedback from this year as well as our own thoughts. If you attended and haven’t done so, then please fill out the feedback form.

I’m planning to do a deep dive analysis into other Blood Bowl events before we come up with an outline of what we want to do. It will be interesting to benchmark against other events on lots of different factors such as pricing, length, awards, how teams work together, rulesets and the like. Again, I will be happy to share this with anyone who is interested. 

As we will take all of this on board before making decisions, this will likely mean that we are putting tickets on sale later in the year than last time. The 2025 event was on sale late April 2024 – we will probably be looking more like summer 2025 for the 2026 event. We want to make sure we’ve got everything planned out properly before launching.

We also have some swag from this year and last year available for sale that will help to fund future years. If anyone is interested, feel free to email me (stewbacca at thenaf.net) and we can try to sort out it getting to you.

If you have anything you want to discuss, or any suggestions, feel free to reach out to me as we plan the event over the coming months.