Streaming this week on Twitch (21 UTC Thursday 22nd April), Matt Slater’s Ranked Amateurs hit their 400th game on Fumbbl and Matt’s using it as a Fumbbl fundraiser before the team retires into Blood Bowl 2020.

The 400th match will be against Gary Gygax, and you can see the two teams below, and can watch the match through Fumbbl or on twitch.tv/sann_bb.  The Ranked Amateurs are a team that only ever hires linemen!

You can support the fundraising effort on this forum post, which also has links to the two teams.

Fun few games in the back garden today as the weather smiled on us coming out of Covid lockdown for our first Blood Bowl 2020 games.

Teams were (1100 TV, 5 primary and 1 secondary):

• Halflings with Deeproot and Karla
• Underworld with Hakflem
• Black Orcs with a bribe
• Lizards
• Wood Elves
• Undead

Highlights of the day:

• Undead mummy not getting any benefit from Brawler all day
• Underworld taking saurus off the pitch so outnumbering them 14 to 8 at one point (yay swarming!)
• Deeproot chucking prone halflings all over the place
• Quick snap not helping one turners as much as only open players can move
• Sun shining!
• Doughnuts
• Having to re-learn the Throw Team Mate numbers
• Making up new names for GFI.  Push?  Rush?  Dash?
• Learning not to predict a winner until all the scores are in
• Enderman’s first tournament win over me!

It’s the same old game, just with a few tweaks!

BBTS first review here.

This is a look at the teams done by Vergond for BB2020.  Will say up front that this is an amazing achievement for a community resource, and anything here is not a criticism, just things to bear in mind when using.   I finish with a “tier list” of which teams I would choose to use when playing.

Amazons

Slightly underdressed catcher for me, but otherwise brilliant!

Chaos Dwarf

Really good, massive weapon on the Bull!  Small weapons on the CD and hobgob.

Dark Elf

Big sword on the blitzer, otherwise spot on.
High Elf

Perfection!

Humans

A few weapons on these guys.  Serious ogre!

Khorne

Big fat weapon on the herald, and smaller ones on the other ones, but good otherwise.

Necro

Scary stuff! Sword on the ghoul and fat cleaver on the flesh golem, but the others are brilliant.

Norse

Almost perfect except for the swords on the ulf.  I think I would swap in the Necro wolf above, then this might be my team of choice (while being slightly underdressed, but there are lots of fully dressed men around!)

Slann

One small weapon, but otherwise spot on.

Tomb Kings

Shame about the massive sceptre!  Skeleton has a good Jason and the Argonauts vibe.

Underworld

The skaven here definitely got lost from a Warhammer battlefield!

Vampires

Solid.  Shame the team is so bad currently…

Wood Elves

Our first bows on the pitch!  Scary knives mark out the wardancer, I guess no-one was brave enough to take them away.

Chaos

Great big guys, scary little guys with weapons.  Nice team!

Chaos Renegades

The crazy gang come together really nicely, unique figures easily identifiable for each position.

Dwarfs

An actual BB team!  Wonder what the story is of why these guys exist… Love the T-poses, as the kids say.

Pro Elves/ Elven Union

Not a big fan of these, but very usable.

Goblins

This lot are suitably bonkers.  The Doom Diver in the bottom left is wearing a top hat, the bomber has a clown mask, and altogether they capture the craziness of this team!

Black Orcs

In with a bullet to #1 team.  Awesome stuff, and one of the teams you can’t play online at the moment, so definitely a contender.

Kislev

Another perfect one.  I love Kislev!

Halflings

Weapons on the positionals, but in this case I think that’s quite handy to identify them (didn’t say I was consistent!).

Imperial Nobility

Worth playing just for the Ogre.  In fact, I think I’d play a team of Ogres with the Ogres from each of the teams, that would be awesome!  Pretty good, unfortunate blitzer weapon, but will forgive it.

Lizards

Perfect, again.

Nurgle

Suitably disgusting.  Maybe the massive halberd explains the foul appearance?

 

 

Ogres

The actual Ogre team, Runt Punter on the right.  If I were to play Ogres I would use the Ogre figure from each of the different teams, and it would look amazing!

Orcs

Solid team.  I’d swap the blitzer (bottom right) for the lineman (bottom centre) as I don’t use linemen (go gobbos!).  Love the thrower (bottom left) who just wants a hug.

Shambling Undead

Awesome mummy and wight. Solid team.

 

Skaven

Few too many weapons for me on this one, doesn’t quite capture the BB vibe.

Snotlings

Interestingly, this one had some error messages flash up, which would get annoying if using.  But snotlings are meant to be annoying, so maybe that’s part of the charm?  The stilty runner is floating…

 

 

Tiers

So for me, if I was looking for an immersive experience, this is how I would rank the teams:

1 – pretty much perfect, I would use these as first choice:

Dwarf, Lizard, Slann, Kislev, adapted Norse, Black Orc, adapted Ogre, Amazon, High Elf, adapted Orc, Renegades, 

2 – perfect unless you’re picky, use if you like the teams in particular:

Vampire, Halfling, Nobility, Chaos Dwarf, Chaos, Dark Elf, Human, Nurgle, Khorne, Necro, Undead, Wood Elf

3 – I would only use if I was a superfan of the teams:

Skaven, Elven Union, Goblin, Snotling, Tomb Kings, Underworld

Sharp eyes might have noticed OWA omission, they’re made up of other teams.  Silly team…

Summary

Again to reiterate, an amazing community efford by Vergond, and I can’t wait to get stuck in with playing – videos to come later.  Will be great as a training resource as well, with more flexibility than other online platforms.  Will be my training video resource of choice from now on, and there is already talk of leagues, though I’m personally somewhat overcommitted with Fumbbl and BB2!

 

First experiments with playing Blood Bowl: Second Season (aka BB2020) in Tabletop Simulator (TTS), from a completely standing start, ably assisted by Jip and Domfluff, providing enthusiasm and expertise respectively.  Any consequent wrong or missing info is mine, and this is a description of what we did, not necessarily what is best, we’re muddling through!

Update June 21 – jump on the Discord for the latest update!

Why would you do this?

At the time of writing, Cyanide are working on Blood Bowl 3, but just indicated that it is not due imminently, and Fumbbl volunteer devs are also working on implementing the new rules, due Q1 2021, but again it will be ready when it’s ready, and that’s cool.  Our league (SAWBBL) has seen a massive influx of new players on the back of the new box set, as has the BB community in general, but the pandemic is limiting the amount of tabletop that can be played (to zero, usually…).  So it would be great to have a way of playing demo games, tutorials, and full-on competitive games using the new rules, which is where TTS comes in.

What is it?

TTS is a PC game available on Steam.  I paid £15, but there are frequent sales, so I should probably have paid less.  It has various workshop downloads, either free or paid that allow virtually any board game to be played online.  When you buy it, there is a tutorial, so I won’t cover the basics here, just the stuff I had to ask.

How do you play BB2020?

Once you have downloaded and installed TTS, if you have someone you know who has it already set up, then that is all you need, and they can just invite you to a game and you can start playing.  The set up is a bit like this:

You can drag players to their places, roll dice, show prone players, stunned, rooted, bonehead etc.  You have to do all the moves and “state changes” yourself, so in that sense it is just like tabletop, nothing is done for you.

If you want to set it up for yourself, there are a few more steps needed, which I’ll summarise now.

Click Games, then Workshop (ironically).  That will take you to a search window.  Click Browse, and Steam will open.  Search for Blood Bowl 2020 Pitch w/Teams, then click Subscribe.  That will give you the pitch components I used above, and more.  I have deleted some as I won’t use them (range ruler), and moved stuff around so it suits my preferences.

You then go back to TTS, click Games, Workshop and the Blood Bowl 2020 Pitch should be an option.  It comes with cardboard cut-out style figures, that you can drag out of the brown bags by right clicking and then clicking Search.

To get the 3D figures, you go back into Workshop, and Browse, and search for Blood Bowl, and this time look for an item by Vergond.  If you click on the user’s name, it will take you to lots of 3D teams, all of which are ready to click.  If you hover over a team then a green square with a + will appear, and if you click it then it will add it into your workshop.  Do this for as many as you need.

Go back into TTS, then Workshop, then the three dots and expand.  You can then drag the players onto the pitch, and if you unlock the bags you can drag them into the appropriate bag for that race.  You will also need to make them slightly smaller!

Once you are set up, you can click Games > Save and Load, give it a name, and this will save your set up on your machine.  You can then use it to play against other people, who will only need TTS installed.

Next Steps

I am going to play some games, then look at publishing a set up that the local league can use, to avoid having to go through the faff described above.  At the very end of typing this, I also got to thinking why we didn’t just use Vergond’s complete set up, which is at Blood Bowl Table (Second Season), so perhaps more on that later!

Extra Things

When I was streaming, TTS crashed when I used Alt-Tab to switch windows. Google says that putting TTS out of full-screen mode should stop this, so fingers crossed.

 

So there’s a new Blood Bowl coming.  Much heralded and much trailed, and then leaked on 2nd August, either by someone from China selling knock-off rulebooks or a cunning GW ruse to build the hype.  Doesn’t really matter.  1200+ comments on the BB Community group later, and lots has been said.  Here are my thoughts, based on a bit of reading, summaries from a few people including GngrNoob, AndyDavo and ketilkn on Reddit.  Thanks to them.  I’m writing from a position of no inside knowledge, with my NAF President days behind me, so these are just my own thoughts and obviously all is my opinion.

At the time of writing the Warhammer Community team either reacted to the leak or put a long devised masterplan into action, depending on your world view, and have shown off the box set and the Imperial Nobility in detail.  This team were in the slightly rubbish official GW app, and those that played them in leagues said they were a bit broken, mostly due to being the only team to start with Guard players.  A new tier 1 roster is not the headline however, the headline is the separation of agility into agility and passing, along with the whole passing mechanic being changed, and it is this that is causing the angst (such as there is) of whether it’s a whole new game or not.

The New Rules

Most of the changes are tweaks that could have been incorporated into an LRB-style evolution.  Some are pointless, like changing the injury table to a d16.  The kick off table has a reduced effect, with Blitz and Perfect Defence being toned down, which will increase the likelihood of the better coach winning due to reduced randomness.  I’m needlessly infuriated by the Cheering Fans/Brilliant Coaching symmetry having been removed, but most of the rest is quite… well, OK, but probably no need.  I don’t think it will make it particularly a better game, maybe at the margins, so on balance I would rather not have had these significant changes.

There has been some discussion about whether the rules have been playtested.  The WarCom release talked about some of the best players in the world having been involved, and there’s every reason to believe this.  If you look at those who have written playbooks in the Spike magazines, then the calibre of (most of) these players is high, and so the chances are these players have been involved in the playtesting.  It’s also likely that some of the most famous streamers have been involved in the development of Cyanide’s BB3, and the rulesets are likely to have been developed in tandem.

Dying Races

The effect on the various races will be an interesting one to see, and we don’t know the answers yet.  Will Khorne, Bretonnians and Kislev make it into the rules and the new version of the game.  If Kislev do, then Slann will live on, if not then I think the time of the space frogs may be at an end.  It seems unlikely, but not impossible, that the NAF will design a new roster for them including the new statlines.  Will other races be doomed as well, especially those that have not had a new plastic box set and particularly those that have not had the “made to order” treatment either?

The NAF response

It’s virtually certain that the NAF will move to the new rules, the only question is how quickly, and what will happen to CRP?  It has already been mooted that CRP could be listed as a variant in the NAF database, which I think might be a reasonable idea, particularly for those parts of the world who are more resistant to GW’s changes.   If this were to happen the current database could all be moved to the CRP variant, and the BB2020 game records could begin.  As a statistician this would make the dataset more pure and more interesting, and therefore better, and we have the capabilities around now with Glicko and active developers to produce some interesting analysis around the data.

I only really know about the UK tournament scene, and my impression is that the transition here will be fairly seamless, with a few tournaments holding the line and sticking with CRP for a while.  2021 is going to be a turbulent time for Blood Bowl, and it’s fairly likely that some people are going to stop being tournament regulars, unfortunately, but the game will go on.  The tricky ones are going to be the big tournaments, with Poland Eurobowl in October 2021 needing to decide on a ruleset (or in fact, they have decided on a ruleset).  My money would be on this tournament being the last major one (and the last Major) with CRP ruleset, before the new GW rules are fully incorporated.  I’ve been wrong before though.

The Fumbbl response

At the time of writing Fumbbl has already started to respond to the new rules, writing AV breaks as 8+ rather than greater than 7, for example, so every indication is that the client will adjust and adapt.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

The Good:

• change can be invigorating.  There will be new tactics to learn, and something to talk about in the BB world for a good few years to come.  I actually love learning new games, and am excited to learn the new rules.
• GW is sticking around, with new figures to come for a few years to come, it would appear.  This leads to a persistent trickle of new players, which is good for the game.
• It looks like there will be a standalone rulebook, which if it contains all the rules needed for the game would be a major step forward.

The Bad:

• some people will stop playing, and these people will be a loss to the community.  Or they will stick around and complain a lot, which isn’t great either.

The Ugly:

• there are a whole raft of new rules coming in, and unfortunately GW’s reputation precedes them here in terms of not being able to produce a watertight set of rules.  There will be typos, there will be mistakes, there will be unforeseen consequences of interactions of rules.  This is going to be a bit of a pain, and GW’s approach to FAQs is pretty terrible, unfortunately.

That will do for just now.  This was Part 1.  Thoughts welcome!

Blood Bowl never seems to disappoint in terms of stories to be told, and Saturday was no different.  The big takeaway from me is that I like to win at Blood Bowl!  Shocker.  But the reasons are interesting.  I like to do stuff to challenge myself a bit, and in the BB world this means playing against the best coaches around.  It’s why Eurobowl is great, it’s why the NAF tournaments on Fumbbl are ace, and it’s why winning games is good, not good because of the warm fuzzy feeling from winning, but because it means that your next game is likely to be against someone at least as good as the person you just played.   On the flip side, it also means that if you lose then your next game has an increased chance of being against someone who is less good than the person you just played, or is using a less good race, and in both situations it’s non-ideal for the purposes of playing challenging games of BB.

So, my day.  Game 1 was against Varag, a lovely and enthusiastic (loud!) Spanish player using Wood Elves.  I was using High Elves, with 3 dodge catchers, a leader thrower, and frenzy and mighty blow blitzers.  I didn’t particularly have high hopes going into the tournament, I was using HE on my quest for “the 52”, which I’ve decided is getting all 26 races to at least 10 NAF games each (just a thing I’ve made up, really).  My first block killed a lineman, and in the next few turns I deleted another couple and built a nice cage near his endzone.  All good.  He failed the one-turner, and then scored in two turns at the start of his drive, and then again I got fairly comfortable in his half with the ball.  Only fairly comfortable though, because both wardancers were still alive!  At this point I had a nailed-on draw, or the possibility of stalling out for the win. Or, as it turned out, a third possibility, which was to leave the ball slightly unsafe, get turned over, and lose 2-1 after some serious dice.  He was very happy!  I was less so, but at some point I’ll learn not to overexaggerate the inevitability of the wood elf score, and take the touchdown for the definite draw and possible win. They’re not called mind sports for no reason (by those who call them mind sports).

The loss took me to bottom table (it’s random based on those on the same points, I think) and cjblackburn’s halflings.  He stole all my rerolls and didn’t roll a single take root.  Two interesting dice moments, where I took a 3-dice block with block before scoring, and managed to roll triple skulls, and puggy double skulled but passed the loner.  Apart from that I scored in 8 turns and then he scored in T16 with the Ag4 halfling, after I’d done everything I could with my limited players.  1-1 draw, where I think I did everything right, so frustrating times.

Game 3 was more wood elves, but a less experienced coach (mahwell-skel).  He was using the GW halfling dice, and my table manners may be affected as I think I may struggle if I ever see a knife and fork again!  The first half was comfortable, with me scoring in 8, but towards the end of the first half and the beginning of the second he managed to score 7 casualties!  He scored in turn 12, so I was attacking with 4 against his 9.  Made a sideline cage in his half, such as it was, but he turned the ball over and then had 4 turns to trundle up the pitch for the win.  A possibly unnecessary hand-off was punished by Nuffle, and a snake eyes allowed me to scoop up the ball and go 2-1 up, leaving him 2 turns to score with rerolls in hand.  The ball scattered to one of his line-elves on the line – he moved down the pitch and handed over to a wardancer, but not very protected, so I was able to get two dice and a pow, and then collect and protect the ball to only leave a one-die blitz.  The knockdown didn’t come, and I’d managed a win from somewhere.  Respect to him for taking the insanity well!

The clan had mixed days – no good dice for Alex’s cage-diving in games 1 or 2, but then a 4-1 win with his pro elves in game 3.  Linus won game 1 using bretonnians, then was podfreyed in game 2 and lost game 3.  There’s another U16 competing for the chocolate bear, and jip and I are both on 1-1-1, so the competition for star of the car is also fierce.  Lunch not included next year, so the takeaway prize for the latter takes on extra importance!

Finish with a big shout to Ringbeard for being top of the table – definitely rooting for him to keep the Waterbowl trophy at its home!  Also to kfoged for running the scoring and Alex for exemplary organisation as ever.  Bring on day two!