All posts by sann0638

Blood Bowl

Score for FoulBowl

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Entertainingly, Frogboy has asked me to run the computer for him this weekend at Foulbowl, so will be making all the draws available on here (and hopefully it won’t crash, with all of the 40 people trying to get to it at the same time!).

This is a great dry run for running Cakebowl last year, so as a Father’s Day treat to myself while the kids are about I have been playing with the Score output files.

In the “templates” folder I edited to the text of “do draw.htm” so that it says this:

<html>
<head>
<title>@tournamentname@ – Draw for round @round@</title>
</head>
<b>@tournamentname@ – Draw for round @round@</b><br><br>
@record@
Table @nr@ – @coach1@ (@race1@) v @coach2@ (@race2@)<br>
@end@
</html>

Which is a lot shorter than the whole table stuff that was there before.  It produces the draw looking a bit like the following, which should be easier to read online, hopefully (the names are the ones from Cakebowl).  Might stick it back in a table though to make it easier for the second person to find their name.  Though hopefully people can use the find function on their phones!

FoulBowl – Draw for round 6

Table 1 – hawca (lizardman) v Frogboy (Orc)
Table 2 – Wulfyn (lizardman) v Rubick (Amazon)
Table 3 – Ceetee (Orc) v Landrover (Norse)
Table 4 – Heff (chaos) v Maverick (khemri)
Table 5 – Gutrot81 (Chaos Dwarf) v dreamscreator (Chaos Dwarf)
Table 6 – Hobnail (Orc) v Besters (chaos)
Table 7 – Gorgoroth (Orc) v Morbo89 (Skaven)
Table 8 – YogiBedlamBear (dark Elf) v Be4ch (Orc)
Table 9 – Glowworm (necromantic Undead) v Angry Hobbit (Chaos Dwarf)
Table 10 – Eski (Orc) v Wotfudboy (Dwarf)

I then tried to update the match sheets, to add in bonus points for fouling (hence the name), but bizarrely using Word to update the rtf file made it all go pear-shaped.  A quick Google and install of OpenOffice later however, and I was able to produce this file, which puts the coach name on instead of the team name and doesn’t waste too much paper.  Save it into the “templates” folder.

 

Blood Bowl

Teams in Score

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Part of my reason for producing ExScore was that Score cannot automatically produce a score when the Tournament Organiser wants to reward a team win, so if your team of 4 achieves 3 wins and a draw, they should be awarded 3.5 points, for example.

This was the case for Eurobowl 2014, in Belgium, and the way that I suggested the organisers use was to enter all the results for a team at the same time (which is often done anyway), and use the Settings to award Team Points each round.

Say that you award 1 for an  individual win, 0.5 for an individual draw, then 1 for an overall team win , so a team that wins 5-3 gets 6 points in total, each player on that team would gets 6000 bonus points.  As an individual score is in the units or tens, it will never overcome the team score, so will only be used for the individual Swiss.  The team will then have been awarded 48000 team points (e.g. 6000 x 8 players), but this does not affect the actual standings as each team’s points are just multiplied by eight.

Hope that all makes sense, do comment if not!

Blood Bowl

Streaming Kit

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After a request for info, seemed like a good idea to have streaming advice in one place.

So, here’s what I use:

  • A Logitech C920 USB Camera
  • A microphone stand, slightly adapted to hold the camera
  • Sometimes an extension lead for the camera, though the 20m one caused the camera to cut out.  The 5m one worked fine, and I’ve just bought a 10m one to test.
  • A Twitch account for live streaming and YouTube for uploading videos
  • OBS software

When I’m doing commentary I use a USB microphone or headset – the former causes popping, so TheSage says I should use a pop filter.  I did make a homemade one at some point, but it seemed to be taking the whole thing a bit seriously to use it!

Politics

Parish Councillors

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I received a piece of election literature through the door today, from someone standing as a parish councillor.  This is brilliant – someone taking the parish elections seriously enough to spend money on producing leaflets.  I read a few of the policies (reducing anti-social behaviour, great, new  footpath (good, but in the wrong place), other stuff (not sure you’ll have the power, but good thoughts), but then saw that it was a UKIP flier.  Boo.

Firstly, there is a problem with political parties being involved with parishes.  Our parish will have 9 councillors, rather than the 650 in parliament or 60 in Swindon town council, so they should be able to vote on issues independently, rather than having to decide among themselves in groups what they stand for.  The national issues will generally not be relevant to parishes, and the local councillors should be elected overwhelmingly on individual competence rather than a broad sweeping generalisation on what they stand for.  Sadly, very few electors will put in the effort to find this out, which is one of the reasons that parish elections are flawed anyway.

However, the big impact of having party political allegiance is that for lots of electors the broad sweeping generalisation is what they will vote on, which brings us back to UKIP.  I will never vote UKIP, for a few reasons.  In the beginning they were a dog-whistle racist party, in that not everyone who votes UKIP is racist, but if you are racist you are likely to vote UKIP, and equally if you are racist and want a mainstream political party to represent, then you are likely to choose UKIP.  Therefore, the broad sweeping generalisation that comes with being a representative of UKIP is that you are a bit racist, in the same way as Conservative means low tax, and Labour means high public spending.  Lib Dems, still not sure.  Green, lots of good things, but we don’t have anyone standing for Green in our ward.

In addition, UKIP’s reason for being is Brexit, which I am very much against.  It has been, and continues to be, a massive distraction from the actual important issues.  There is very little time for actual governing, while ridiculous number of hours are given over firstly to campaigning for the referendum, and now putting into place a decision made with a majority of 52-48.  No-one can know the actual economic impact of coming out of the EU, so it seemed to me to be a completely irrelevant choice, fundamentally based on a certain amount of xenophobia.

So, in summary, I wish that parish councillors were all standing as independents, but if they do choose to align themselves with a party, this will lead to me ruling some out due to this, and then choosing from the rest on the basis of perceived competence.  Not that I have much of a way of finding this out, as none of those standing has ever got involved with any of the community activities that I have organised over the last three years…

Blood Bowl

Using GW Boxsets

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One of the most common questions (and to be honest, complaints) about the new box set concerns the lack of positionals to make a good team.

So, what do we have?

Dwarfs: The GW set comes with the 12 dwarfs you need for a basic team.  Job done.  The Deathroller is nice to have, but a competitive team would not usually have one, as it’s so much Team Value for something that’s not likely to have a huge impact on the pitch so it’s very optional.  The only problem is when you play in a league and want to go to more than 12 players, obviously.

Orcs: Comes with 2 Blitzers, 2 Black Orcs, 2 Throwers, and the best teams have 4 Blitzers, 4 Black Orcs, and probably only one Thrower.  Plus they have a Troll, which has now been released.  My most efficient recommendation for this would be to use the figures that are nominally Blitzers as Black Orcs, possibly marking the bases of all of them with a green strip to make it clear.  You can then put a red strip on 4 of the spikiest lineorcs, and use them as Blitzers.  Job done, or if you wanted to be fancy, you could do some head swaps, so that all Blitzers were not wearing helmets. Finally, add a troll.  For this you can use almost any fantasy troll model, as they are not usually carrying inappropriate weapons, or if they are they can easily be snipped.  Stick him on a 30mm or 32mm base, and you’re done.  A few Goblins might be nice too, but again any goblin figure without a weapon would do the job here.

Humans: Comes with 2 Blitzers, and you want 4.  You may want extra catchers too, but not such a big deal.  Simply use 2 of the bottom left linemen as Blitzers.  Colour code all the Blitzer bases red.  You should also be able to pick up some spare human linemen if you want them from people who bought the box set, or those who bought two boxes to fill out the positionals.  Finally, get an Ogre.  They’re awesome.  Either the GW one, or the GW Morg, or literally any Fantasy Ogre not holding a weapon.

Skaven: only 2 Gutter Runners.  Nightmare.  Easy peasy though, use the Throwers as Gutter Runners.  No one will mind.  Then nominate one of the linerats as a Thrower (you could stick a ball in his hand, from the sprue).  You will want extra linerats (my current tournament team has 13 players, rats are squishy, but almost every Skaven player will have bought two boxed sets for the multiple Gutter Runners.  You probably won’t want more than one Thrower in your team, unless it’s a long league.  Rats die.  A lot.  You will want a Rat Ogre model, and these are harder than the Ogre or Troll to proxy, but there are some good plastic options out there, or the GW Blood Bowl one.  In old ranges there was a Headsplitter model, which I like a lot.  The other option for extra Gutters is the Deathrunner from Warhammer Quest: Silver Tower, as the box comes with 2.  The weapons would be need snipping though, which is a shame as it’s quite a nice model.

Hope that’s helpful!  Thoughts welcome.

Blood Bowl

SAWBBL 1

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Crumb-bowl – the King of British one-day tournaments – has been reincarnated as SAWBBowl, standing for Swindon and Wiltshire (Blood?) Bowl, to mirror the new name for the local league (SAWBBL).  56 coaches signed up for the new venue, with lots still on the waiting list. Why? A combination of the friendly host (Glowworm), the excellent lunch (John the Noodle Guy), the noob-friendly rules (3 games, 1100, 5 normals and a double) and the glorious sunshine (seemingly guaranteed!).

While 3-game tournaments of this size are a bit of a raffle for who wins, you do still need to win all 3 games, so competition was fierce.  Scoring (12/5/0, bonuses for TD and Cas up to 3 each) rewarded pushing for big wins.

I took Skaven, as I’m using them in most tournaments this year, and also took the Sann Clan along – Linus with Chaos Dwarfs and Alex with Amazons and Zara.  My build was the same as previous – 4 GR, 2 Blitzers, 1 Thrower, 6 Linemen, 3 RR, Apo.  2 Block GR, 1 Wrestle, Blitzers with Guard and Frenzy, and then as a quirk of this tournament (Glow obsessed with the number 4), the number 4 player could have 2 normal skills instead of one double, so I went with Wrestle and Strip Ball on a Gutter, which I have christened “Wrip Ball”.

Game 1 was against Tank’s Vampires, on his birthday!  Not a great birthday treat, to play against Tier 1 with a team he hadn’t used before, but hopefully it was fun anyway!  I made a mistake early on, choosing to 1D blitz with my Wripper rather than a normal two-dice with no skills.  Against a Sure Hands thrall, this decision was all kinds of wrong.  Ah well.  He scored, but I managed to recover the game and win 3-1, as well as getting three casualties after his Vampire skulled out to death with the last block of the game.  Max points, and everything shiny.  Had a chat with Tank after the game, suggesting some stuff (putting thralls where you want vamps to be, always setting up for 2D blocks on the line), and I think he won a game later, as well as winning some shiny dice, so his day improved!

Lunch was awesome as ever, and the boys played vast amounts of football on the lawn outside with Cam, Gorgoroth’s son.  Still missing the Caterham crew, who weren’t able to make it this year, but hopefully they will be back next year.

Game 2 was v the Skaven of Shortarse, a local coach with whom I am building up quite a rivalry (after his mino scored in turn 24 of a previous game of ours, grumble grumble). He had Glart, instead of the extra players, and had sidestep on his Gutters and a Dirty Player, so a very different build to mine.  He took to fouling quite early on, which led to an opening in the cage, but there was a whole comedy of errors (including me mistaking a blue skill ring for block, whereas it was actually wrestle, more grumble) leading to a scoreless first half.  He was a couple of Gutters down, however, and the second half turned into a bloodfest – I think he only had 3 players left at the end, and after a few turns of stalling I scored in turn 16.  RIOT, ARGH!  Luckily, he didn’t manage to pull off the score.  Phew.

Game 3, on table 1, playing for the title as long as a decent number of points were gained.  Tricky though, as it was against Wishwellington’s Wood Elves.  A decent coach from UKBBL playing with the best team, which included a Tackle/Strip (Strackle?) Wardancer.  Yuck. I had a couple of decent chances on his drive, but nothing quite came off, and then three minutes of horror led to three of my Gutters heading to the dead box.  Waaah.  I then uttered the words “well, that’s game over”, which should basically be a hanging offence, as in the second half my single remaining Gutter somehow managed to hang on the ball long enough to get into his half, and then a linerat scooped up the ball and limped over the line.  He had a decent chance for the Turn 16 one-turner, assisted by a Quick Snap, but it didn’t come off.  So a draw, and neither of us got silverware!

Congratulations to 20phoenix, with his first tournament win after quite a few second places, and Darkson who managed 2nd with vampires.  Alex picked up the wooden spoon, and won an excellent board game donated by Canteloup (who is still alive, hurrah!),  who also donated a win to Linus.

The new venue is tremendous, and the capacity for next year will be 60.  I thoroughly recommend signing up as soon as the tournament is announced, and paying by the end of January to secure your place, as this really is one of the hottest BB tickets of the year.

Blood Bowl

Rerolling

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Over at Team Scotland, we’re using the awesome Fumbbl functionality to test out Eurobowl teams against each other – personally, I’m testing out with and without the Rat Ogre.  I’m currently firmly in the “without” camp, as I don’t like having my blitz dictated, and there are no doubles choices so he can’t have block.  Anyway, that’s not what this is about.

In my latest (well, first) game, I was against Phil78’s Wood Elves.

I had this position, after an unfortunate double both down for him, I had a one-die blitz on the ball carrier.  Made the 3+ and 4+ dodges, and then rolled a push.  I had 3 rerolls left, but we were only in Turn 2.  There was a 1 in 3 chance of getting the ball off him, by rerolling (I had block, he had dodge), and if it worked it would be pretty good.  Glowworm says “never reroll a push”, but that’s largely superstitious nonsense.  I did reroll the push, and got a skull.  Maybe there’s something to it after all.

Reroll management is obviously incredibly important.  In this case I made the wrong call because:

  • the chance of it going well was too low
  • the upside of it going well was not good enough
  • there were too many turns left for the number of rerolls I had left

And it’s these three things you should consider when deciding whether to reroll, along with how bad it would be if you did not reroll, and similarly how likely it is to be a bad outcome.  When I skulled, my Gutter was also badly hurt.  Luckily, the Apo was on hand!

Blood Bowl

Getting Excited

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After 62 NAF tournaments and over 300 tournament games, I’ve finally cracked it.  The thing that stops me from being world class is that I get excited and make bad decisions.  I need a big sticker (or stick) that says “take a couple of minutes, analyse the situation and play on” rather than “things are looking good, this is AWESOME!”.

As an example, my vampires were playing against 20phoenix’s skaven.  He drove into my half, then all my gazes worked and I sacked the ball carrier, with my vampire catching the ball.  This was quickly followed by his lightning bolt failing.  Life was good.  The next turn was critical.  My two choices were to whack a load of rats and hope to get some of them off the pitch, thus consolidating my position and making life even more AWESOME!  This is what I chose, but it meant that I could not form an effective cage around the ball carrier.  The next turn, he half-diced my vamp with strip ball, and the ball popped loose.

The sensible and better choice (definitely with hindsight, and hopefully with foresight next time) would have been to think that it was my turn 2 and I have the ball on his drive, so there is no rush to get anywhere.  With this frame of mind I could have not worried about hurting more rats and just concentrated on clearing them out of base contact, in order to form a better cage.

Similarly, I can still remember at Eurobowl being in a tremendous position with my Necro against Wood Elves, and making exactly the wrong choice – leaving a possible (though unlikely) one die with Strip instead of a half-dice with nothing. Again, this was because I was in much the better position, and it clouded my judgement.

So the moral of the story?  Take a moment instead of acting like a crazy person.  That, and Strip Ball can do one.

Blood Bowl

Homemade Board

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I made this board in 2011 and there seems to be quite a lot of interest in general in homemade boards with the resurgence of BB, so I thought it would be worth revisiting.

 

I was initially inspired by various boards in the Stadia of the Old World thread, particularly Virral’s board and Rev’s guide on CMON.  I don’t really have any woodworking skills, but luckily B&Q will cut wood for you for free!

Another part of the reason for making the board is to have a larger Elfball board, as a few of my minis are on 30mm and the occasional one on 40mm, so I made a board with 35mm hexes, which happens to have about the same diameter as the length of a BB pitch.

 

The finished version, complete with Elfball logo:

Then the other side of the board, which contains a B.B. pitch. The bits of polystyrene were packaging from an IKEA wardrobe, and I used a soldering iron and metre long metal ruler to make the grooves. The central section lifts out and tucks at the end so that the case folds up.  The dugout boxes shown open up to double as carry cases:

I first painted the entire thing black.

Then I painted in the white lines, and started putting the flock on by painting glue on to the squares, then shaking off the excess. The stairs on the side also hold the central section in place.

 

And the board ended up looking a bit like this:

Since making the original version, I’ve also added a couple of score tracks, table football style:

And a few adverts round the outside:

I was quite pleased with it, given my lack of experience making stuff in general.  Eagle-eyed viewers might notice that it’s showing its age a bit, with some of the flock coming off, and there is also a dent in one side matching my son’s elbow!  The board (in its folded up state, as shown below) has travelled the length of the country from Bognor to Manchester, and is a joy to play on (in my humble opinion) as you can rest your arms on the outside and lean in quite a satisfying way.  The dice do bounce quite a lot though, so it’s a table for dice-cup users!

Blood Bowl

Legacy Teams

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I love Legacy teams!  These are Blood Bowl teams where lots of people paint an individual miniature, and then there is a raffle and one person wins the whole team. I’ve taken in part in all (I think) the talkfantasyfootball.org teams since 2007, plus various Waterbowl ones, and been lucky enough to win 3, including some spectacularly nice figures.
They are a brilliantly democratic thing, with simple paintjobs and highly intricate ones both getting one vote.  People often contribute figures and then ask not to be included, which is tremendously generous.

The latest?  Waterbowl 2017.  Skaven.  Watch out, here comes Morg!