Thrudball 2024 will be one for the history books in the Sann Clan household.  Alex broke his leg falling down the stairs about a week before, but we had him with a cast and in a wheelchair, so it was full steam ahead!  Unfortunately, we saw the nice surgeon on Friday, who said we should come in for the weekend for a CT scan and possible operation over the weekend.  We protested that we were playing toy soldiers, but he was quite insistent, so we enjoyed the Sevens and gave up to our fate.

Sevens with Gnomes

I was playing Gnomes all weekend, in order to get the full set of teams (31 now, including Bretonnians – 14 in the world who have done it at time of writing…)  I was the spare man for 7s, as I was running Score for it – a Tree, Fox, Beastmaster and 5 Gnomes.  Pro on the Tree as the captain, then one dodge gnome for each game.

The first game was glorious, played against Stewbacca’s Vamps.  Went slightly pearshaped when my tree did a 1 in 27 to allow a simple vargheist block on my fox, but then he triple skulled to allow me to run in.  Pushing for the score, his backfield vamp blood lusted, so I was able to chuck a gnome in for 2-0.  We exchanged scores in the second half for a 3-1 win.

Second game was Gr4not4 and High Elves, and we both scored on offence for a 1-1, as well as my masterly defending ensuring that he tripped over the white line for me to avoid the losss.

Third was bee333, new to the tournament scene with Imperial Nobility, who duffed me up for a 2-0 win!

Alex was hoping to play some Magic after the tournament, but got sucked into a game of Spartacus, a fun but complicated board game!

Congrats to Elspoonio’s vamps for the tournament win.

Saturday

Headed to the hospital for a CT scan, lunch in the bag, expecting to be there all day.  CT scan done, then told to bugger off home, so we head to Thrud, arriving just after round 1 so played each other!

For the main event I had full positionals, plus Puggy (without his special skill) and gnomes to 14 players, plus 5 rerolls.  I really like rerolls, so this was awesome.

Alex was using Imperial Nobility (benching the Tomb Kings for the moment).  His block Ogre was on fire, smashing through my little guys, for a total of 11 team casualties in the game.  He scored easily, and my throw team mate scattered three times in the wrong direction, so was not to be.  In the second half I was a 3+ dodge away from a decent screen after my fox decided to go for a semi-potato.  The dodge failed, and the ball was loose.  Bit of a scramble ensued, and the match finished 1-0, 11-2 in cas.

Phone call at lunch told us to come in for an operation in the morning, so we had to make the best of the day!

My game 2 was a Gr4not4 rematch, but this time his High Elves were tooled up to the max, with a M9 blodge catcher and a hail mary bomber.  My guys started bashing, with 2 MB block trees and the gnomes able to hit without too much worry of turning over (the joy of wrestle!).  Was feeling pretty comfortable on my drive until I forgot about his bomber sitting in his end zone, and got too close to it, which spoilt my drive and led to his touchdown.

The second half was exciting, as he had very few players!  His fast catcher used his speed to run deep into his half as the rest of the team disappeared, and a TTM assist allowed me a one die on the ball carrier.  POW!  I scooped up the ball, but he still had 3 rerolls, and enough KOs, so I thought 3 turns would be too many to let him score back on, so I decided to risk not getting powed.  Sadly, I got powed, and the game finished 1-0.  Don’t like bombs.

On two losses, I was drawn against ManfredIronskull and his Chaos Chosen, who had a Fezglitch style star (Drunken Thrud).   I received, and the ball and chain was on the line, so my tree punched him to the KO box.  He had two extra arms, and two claws, so with a lack of block my trees and mass wrestle were able to out block him, aided by a few surfs.  This was my first 11s gnome win!

The Thrud auction is an integral part of the tournament, but I knew a while ago that there was a birthday party in Swindon that I was keen to get to, so stayed for a few items and then left Alex with his chums for a bit.  I came back about item 75, so got a flavour of the awesome charity effort, and Alex got to play some Magic!

Sunday

Alarm was set for 6, then we were about to wake Alex for his op when the phone rang and the operation was postponed!  Day 2 for us!  Alex was on 3 wins, so was a bit chuffed to be able to return and go for the tournament win.  Linus (Enderman) was also able to join us, as he was signed up for the tournament but wasn’t feeling up to it on the Saturday.  Because I’m a friend of the tournament I was able to sneak him in, which was kind of the admins – many thanks!

My game 4 was against BigMace’s goblins, a cool squig-themed team with the Thrud Squig – S4, horns and pogo stick monster!  Only 2 rerolls though, and these went quickly, making life difficult for him.  I was able to score pretty quickly, and the bribes started kicking in, such that by the time of the second half there were not many goblins on the pitch, and a lot of gnomes!  This was a 3-0 win against a lovely opponent.

More goblins in Game 5, this time OddGood, and now the wheels really started to come off for my opponent, who had two ball and chain players.  Trees love ball and chains though, as they often aim for trees and miss, which means they are left nearby, and get punched.  Happy days.  This was one of the things that went seriously wrong, along with the goblins getting walloped and failing dodges, and this led to a chunky 5-0 win.

Sadly, having won his game 4, Alex lost to Trondur in game 5, so the Thrud dream was not to be.

I was now on 3 wins and 2 losses, so on a reasonably high table, and faced Nazgob’s 210-ranked wood elves.  He chose to kick to me, and I was able to build a solid drive.  A lot of my rerolls over the weekend went on rerolling take roots, meaning that the trees were able to trundle down the pitch, and combine with the beastmaster guard to make a decent cage, as well as killing a few elves on the way.  The first feasible wardancer leap was in turn 6, and the bounce was safe, so I was able to score.  He had two turns to score back, with no rerolls, and came worryingly close, but I went in at 1-0.

Naz went for the quick score to get the win, but it went wrong with not many elves on the pitch, and the foxes were able to scoop and score, and then a combination of TTM and a gnome passing play (6s, anyone?) meant that this one was 3-0, with many casualties to me.

So a pretty successful weekend, with 11 touchdowns in one day!  I think I was pretty lucky with my fixtures, but the gnomes are pretty solid.  I based or otherwise exposed the foxes too often in the first couple of games, before realising quite how critical they are to the team.

I had a M8 fox, who was ace, and seemed significantly better than M7, as the trees didn’t need to be quite as far up the pitch for the fox to be the scoring threat.

In terms of team build, one guard tree might have been better.  Mass dodge on the gnomes is a no-brainer, there would have to be a good reason not to take it, really.  Lots of rerolls was great, and as I’ve said before it was mostly used on root rolls and the occasional double skulls.

Before the tournament we had recruited well to the Sann Clann, signing up Kfoged and AndyDavo (#2 and #3 in the world), so it was nice to be able to take the trophy home for the best team performance!  Congrats to Davo for retaining the individual trophy.

Another great weekend at Thrud, thanks to all who organised, see you next year!

Links

Thrud Rosters: https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/mike.sann0638.davies/viz/Thrudball24/CoachRosters

Coaches who have played 31 races:

https://public.tableau.com/views/NAFGames_0/Prolific?:language=en-GB&:sid=&:redirect=auth&:display_count=n&:origin=viz_share_link

Final standings:

https://www.thrudball.com/thrudball-2024-results

Silly brain woke me up at 4am local time, so getting my revenge by forcing it to write words!  This is the half time (of my visit) report of the 5th NAF World Cup currently happening in Alicante on the southern Spanish coast.  The WC happens every 4 years and has been growing kind of exponentially since 2007.  I helped organise 2015 in Italy, then was on a competitive team in 2019 in Austria, and this time was with a collection of local and not so local coaches looking to enjoy the atmosphere and have an awesome time (and get best Black Orc coach…)

L-R: Kismet from Little Git Painting, Doddsy (last minute stand-in, signed up on Sunday!), me and Dementor, and father-son team from Bromley MiniMorg and EyeballPaul.

I did some pre-tournament roster analysis, which was fun to build the hype, and it was great to see a load of people who appreciate the Tableau stuff.  Can be a bit like shouting into the void sometimes, but great conversations with people like Drakenspear were had, who was over from Canada.

There are just under 2300 people taking part, and on Thursday it seemed like every bar had a collection of BB coaches in as we wandered around the town centre in the hours leading up to the opening ceremony on the pier at 8pm.  Fantastic to have a central meeting point to meet people like Fumbbl’s Christer, NAF committee members  and the like, who I have lots of dealings with online but seldom see in person.  One of the big differences this time for me is travelling with Dementor, who since the last WC has built an online presence himself as part of AndyDavo’s streaming team and general roster and rules guru, so nice for him to see people in person too.

On Friday the buses to the venue ran from various points around the area, starting from 715, so a nice early start.  Everyone had QR codes, and the line moved pretty quickly to get everyone into the amazing venue, a central playing area surrounded by awesome vendors (Charlie Victor, Hungry Troll, Pedro Ramos etc).  The draw for Round 1 had already been done so game started gradually as people converged on their tables (186 tables of 6 coaches of 2 teams!), which meant there was plenty of time for round 1.  

All participants got a great goody bag with tokens and pitch, a felt one which can fold nicely and then go out smoothly, which is pretty much going to be my standard tournament pitch from now on.

Our first match up was against a Spanish team.  My first drive was absolutely golden, bullying dwarves until they lost the ball and I went in 1-0 up and very cheerful about life.  My dice then deserted me, and he scored on my drive. Tried not to get too grumpy, then pulled off a nonsense TTM to pull out a 2-1 win.  They all count!

Lunch was a massive paella, supplemented by the food vendors around the hall.

The queue was pretty massive, but the sun was shining, everyone was chatting, and there was lots of time for lunch, so very little grumbling that I saw.  I invested in the WC beaker at this stage, which allowed 400ml beers at 2 euro a time.  Happy days!

The start of round 2 is always a nervous one for a TO, as it’s the first time of drawing a new round in anger and getting it out on time with no mistakes, and there was a little delay while it got sorted with a few teething problems, but was soon underway.  I was against necro, and my dice issues continued a little, but he scored in turn 5 and I was able to score back when his sweeper ghoul failed to dodge out and sweep.  The second half was straightforward, so another 2-1 win, this time against a German squad, and our first squad win (and only squad win on day one).

The ranking is swiss within swiss, so I was a surprised (and pleased) to be playing a nurgle team on table 1 of our squad match up round 3 against another Spanish squad (who make up a 3rd of the field!). Nurgle is a great match up for black orcs, and I was out guarding him (he didn’t have any…) so with my seven strength  to his five he found life hard going.  It was sweltering heat as well, so his rotspawn missed one of his drives.  The only worrying part of the game was him coming too close to a two turn TD with no rerolls after I scored in my seven – I thought with Nurgle it was pretty safe, but dice happened!  When the penultimate rush failed and his beast felt the heat, I was pretty confident, and ended up with a 3-0 win, including a rare troll touchdown after he caught the ball!

The ball token is great, along with the rest of the swag, and I bought some adhesive magnetic bases for my team, which meant that as the goblins didn’t have any skills it stuck to them.  Very pleased with that.

Unfortunately my win was the only one for the squad in that round, so we finished 1-0-2 for the day.  Time to submarine!

The day finished pretty late, but the buses were there ready to take the troops back to town, and the squad headed straight to bed after a long few days.  I popped to the local Irish bar to watch the second half of New Zealand v France, then settled down myself for what turned out to be 4 hours of sleep.

The organisers have published the overnight standings, which put me around 100th individually, only black orc coach on 3 wins, and the squad just in the top 300.  We are playing a Spanish team in the morning, though led by caio, a coach from Uruguay, who again I have chatted to online through NAF work, and it will be great to play him and his chaos dwarves (another good match up for me, especially since minos don’t tend to have claws any more, and his doesn’t).

Time to see if I can grab some more sleep now, or if a mid-day power nap might be called for during the long lunch break (spanish omelette, yum!).  If you want to know how the napping turns out, follow me on Twitter for more updates (yes, it’s rubbish and evil now, but it’s where updates are…)

Semi-traditional mid tournament roundup from me, though with a twist as I spent yesterday streaming from the NAF Championship instead of playing.  This was an absolute blast, and will hope to do it again soon!

The kit was provided by the Tabletop Sports Network (tSN), who were also streaming live to Twitch and will be putting the videos up on their YouTube once the dust has settled.  These guys are proper tabletop streaming pros, and having a two-person production team made the whole thing an absolute dream.  We had two games on the streaming tables, with Scrivo sitting next to them and giving occasional factual updates, and Rob on the production desk controlling the stream and the movable cameras, while I and a guest commentator talked about the action – absolute pleasure to be joined by Sizzler, Deeferdan and Leipziger for the 3 rounds.

We chose the games for interest, featuring some top players, international players, interesting races and famous faces from around the BB world.  On Sunday as the tension builds we’ll feature one of the top tables from each round, and then the Grand Final at around 3.15 BST.

So what games are we likely to see?  After 3 games we are down to 19 players on 3 wins, so two of them will be in the final.  This is how round 4 is looking.

In the mix notable names include Team England players petew (current Captain), geggster and joemanji and Twitch streamers RickWreckless (on the stream for game 2 Saturday), purplechest and JBone.  The South West of England is well represented by ceetee, Jip and whitey (local derby on table 8!), as well as Loki who is both from the South West and a member of Team Scotland (hence the kilt). 

Sporran is also from Scotland (obviously), and along with freezingstar, iantheace, el_spoonio and Dragonborn are representing the “newer” contingent with fewer than 100 NAF games under their belts.  Scouseboy and Lyracian meanwhile could be ones to watch, both previous NAF tournament winners.

GrumpyMaestro has an interesting backstory, as he’s a Team Scotland member who has decided to retire from Blood Bowl and is selling off all his stuff – a NAF Championship win would be a great way to go out!

Finally an honourable mention for fatgandalf who has been rewarded for his record of two wins and a draw by being chucked in with the 100% crowd and a game against a double NAFC winner!

Hope you enjoyed the updates, it’s looking like another glorious day in Nottingham, so please do join the stream, or follow along on Twitter or Facebook.  There are also many photos available in this Google album (thanks Lunchmoney!).

Following on from part 1…

Game 4 was against the Swedish Whine Squad, and a bit of as pasting as a team with only Ronaldbeanio managing a win.  The critical moment of his match was his chaos dwarf opponent setting up with 12 players.  It took until turn 2 to notice, so the mino was promptly sent off!  After a check of the FAQ and a roll of a 6, luckily for him he went to reserves rather than off the for the rest of the game.

I was against orcs, and was a bit disappointed when my line of scrimmage all left the pitch, along with the blitz target, so 4 off the pitch in turn 1.  It was a struggle after that, with the only glimmer of hope being when a 2 dice blitz was left for my bloodspawn, who promptly rolled a useless double both down.  Bizarrely, my one turn score attempt was again marred by a freak kick off result as an officious ref took out a key cog in the machine.

In the second half he rolled a blitz on the kick off and killed my bloodspawn, so I was a little sad.  Made good progress up the pitch but an opportunity to surf two of his blitzers didn’t come off and I was left in a pickle.  The wheels quickly came off and the last 4 turns were a write-off.

As a team we then headed back to the lighter, airier and quieter second room and played the Fumblebrewskies, though one of them had to head home so Bron had a bye.  He was offered a NAF ranked game but decided there were better uses of his time.

My opponent’s skaven team mostly decided to leave the pitch, though a single lineman put up stiff resistance and scooped up an unhelpful scatter to score, meaning the pressure was on to score quickly in my half and then turn him over.  Luckily, he was out of rerolls, so a single dice skull finished his drive quickly.  Ronaldbeanio had a torrid time against a goblin bomber, but it was a comfortable team win and we were back in the darker, stuffier and louder top room.

Squad Tzeentech were part of the Squad Chaos collective, and were all playing greenskins – Orcs, Black Orcs, Underworld and Goblins.  I was against Throgg’s Underworld and his uncooperative Troll, who decided to start the game with a double skulls.  This led to a fair amount of pressure, but the gutter managed to sneak free and survive a blitz, only to fail a 3+ dodge on the next turn, so I was able to go in 1-0 at the half and in a comfortable position, only marred by my bloodspawn having been fouled to death.

The second half should have been straightforward, but was not to be, as a two dice uphill on my blockless ball carrier popped the ball free.  Luckily the scatter was favourable, and eventually ended up on one of my Bloodseekers, only for another two dice uphill to again work!  A goblin sneaked in to retrieve, and then survived a five dice blitz to head for the end zone, though couldn’t reach it.  He didn’t survive the next three dice, but by this stage the gutter runner was standing next to him, and was able to catch the bouncing ball then run in the 4+ 2+.

More about that gutter runner, however. Earlier in the drive he got stabbed to the KO box due to a Prayer to Nuffle, and like the nice person I am I reminded him a) that he had an apo and b) that he could change the KO into a Stun!  Won’t be making those mistakes again (kidding, of course I will).

Similarly, didn’t help Ronaldbeanio’s cause when I reminded his opponent that Goblin Trolls are now 3+, though that counteracted an earlier correction about a 6 on a Throw Team Mate not affecting the Scatter.  Probably brings up an interesting philosophical point about when it is OK and not OK when spectating to point out a rule misunderstanding.  I assume it’s usually for the best!

3 draws and a win for Barnacles meant a team win, and we finished on 312, which was certainly respectable.  Barnacles was Star of the Car on 402, Ronaldbeanio and I both on 231, so a positive result, and Bron on 213 or 113 depending on whether you include the bye…

All in all, a most excellent weekend.  Team tournaments are the best, as I’ve said before, and this was a good one with a good team!  I’ll definitely be using Khorne again at some point, as the mass Frenzy is much fun.  Obviously they need a couple of beer pigs to be a fully rounded team, but you can’t have everything…