Wednesday, June 6, 2012

Blood Bowl in the Street: A 1 Day Tournament Report

What is meaner, rougher and nastier than Blood Bowl?  Playing it on stone streets and up against the walls!

At Kubla Con I took my Orcs to a short Street Ball tournament.
Street Ball is a Blood Bowl variant.  The pitch is just as long, but it is a lot more narrow.  The ground is stone, so is +1 to breaking armor and instead of crowds to be pushed off field into, you instead get slammed against the walls of buildings! Just being pushed back (not down) into the wall is +1 to armor as if you did get knocked down, and if you actually did get knocked down and against the wall then it is +2 to break armor!
Teams have just 600k to hire a team, re-rolls cost double and all your positional limits are cut in half, but you only need 7 guys on the field. You do get d3 magic potions each match, which you can give to injured players, it might be good, bad or weird. And you can get an item (up to 3) from the shop for 10k, so it is best not to spend everything on your team, since these items give a player a skill, such as catch, leap, sure hands, claw...

You can find the rule set to play here: Street Ball.
And you'll be ready to kick the balls in the street!

I used my Bronze Boar Orc Team, but since this was a rookie Street Ball team they went by the name:
Clobberstone Crushers 

And wouldn't you know it my first opponent was their nemesis...
The Lothern Lyin' About in their Undergarments!  Or Lothern Lions, I always forget. 

GAME 1

I won the toss and elected to kick:

I started out trying to beat him up good.... and stop him from getting anyone past my line.

He did get one past, but his high heel broke on the cobblestone and he knocked himself out!

I recovered the ball and threw it to my blitzer with catch, who failed to catch it and it bounced twice.

After some time I managed to score, at the very end of the half! Perfect!  Now to keep it...

I got the ball, then lost it, and it's hard to keep an Agility 4 team from getting where they want to be.
We did have fun pounding a catcher into the wall:

He did score and I ran out of time to get another TD myself, we tied 1-1, 
but I had the higher tournament points from inflicting casualties... Victory is Mine!  

GAME 2
I faced the ever-present Blood Bowl enthusiast and supporter of the game extraordinaire, Zoot Suit Jeff.
This globetrotting "I'm a Blood Bowl Team and So Can You" Americana team was being run as humans rather than Norse (I suspect the hard stone streets had something to do with that), with an Ogre, Blitzer, Thrower and couple catchers. 

He kicked to me, a perfect deep kick. 

The Ogre was pretty scary. I'd decided not to take a Troll, since with only 7 players I didn't want to dedicate a player to babysit it reminding it what to do. I did have 2 Black Orcs though!
I did manage to knock Lady Lib down (that red prone token) but wasn't breaking the armor. 
But he got the ball away from my Blitzer!
Then I got the ball back and challenged the waking ogre with a Black Orc
Oh what a mess!
I kept getting 'Both Down' results with Black Orcs against the Ogress, 
but she weathered it fine and I got both Black Orcs Injured!  
Luckily a Magic Potion did work and one of them came back to play the 2nd half! 
He had a KO'd player so was down a man and I had a deep bench (2 extras) so I had 7 still. I kicked:

 Kick off result: There's a sack of cash at the end zone!  All the players started running back to get it, ignoring everything but the sack of gold!  Whoever got to it first got a reroll!  Whoo-hoo!
I got to it, so I got a re-roll... excellent!
It also made a mess of both team's set up.

He had the ball, but had a hard time doing much with it as we mashed half his team against the wall!
Good Times!

The returned Black Orc got another Both Down against the Ogress!  
That's one seductive big green woman!  What orc can resist? But this time she got knocked out!

If we tied now he'd 'win' on casualties, but before that happened with several go-for-it's I scored!
Final Score 1-0

GAME 3

This game was against the Slann!  Probably the strangest team in Blood Bowl. All that leap is insane.
No Kroxigor. The team had 2 catchers & 2 blitzers. I chose to kick to him.  i figured, if he stalled I'd beat his frogs up, if he got worried and scored fast I'd have time to score to tie it up at the half.
I could not stop those leaping frogs, but I did steal the ball and run off with it! 
Look at him go!  (way at the top of the picture)
Since that was the last turn, instead of kicking to him he now kicks to me!
Oh, my poor thrower, The Seeker, has such bad luck, he stunned himself!
Don't laugh at him frog! That's not nice!  Want to see what is funnier than that?
The Wall!  That's what's funny! Well, I thought it was funny with that frog-face stain on it.
Distracted by this entertainment, the Frogs scored!  Those Catchers move fast! 
Facing the final five frogs, the orcs didn't have much trouble scoring to bring it to 2-1, a win.

With the same record as Dan's High Elves it came down to bonus points, and he had more total Touch Downs, so he walked away with the trophy!  I got a fun mini of a Fimir Blood Bowl Player! Nice :)

Congrats to Lothern Lyin About Their Hair Extensions! 

If you haven't played Street Ball Blood Bowl before I highly recommend it.  
It is a much faster game, and with the change of the pitch and almost never any rerolls it really changes how you generally play. Good Fun!

Be careful on the streets, it's a jungle!

6 comments:

Michael Awdry said...

What a wonderful variant! Fast and bruising and hugely enjoyable; I caught myself humming the Kaiser Chiefs whilst reading this post!

Paul O'G said...

I've played a lot of BB7s, but not street bowl yet. I emphasise the 'yet'!

Congrats on the prize and the wins - looks like the dice favoured you better than more recent games. Good times indeed :-)

styx said...

Never played street bowl, looks like a blast!

Dan said...

The management of the Lothern Lions have petitioned the NAF to officially sanction the Cobblestone Crushers for libel. You will be receiving a Cease & Desist letter from our law firm shortly. Further, if you can't figure out how to score more touchdowns (it's how you win the game, helloooo), then your sour grapes will avail you nothing.

We will now return to polishing our trophy. Good day, sir.

Laughing Ferret said...

Thanks all :)

Paul: I love Blood Bowl 7's. Great version of the game.

Dan: Sorry, Orcs can't read legal notices. Tell your pointy eared lawyer thanks for the toilet paper! Not as soft as your team jerseys we were using, but to show there is no hard feelings we're returning the jerseys to you.

kingsleypark said...

Great report and I really like the sound of the Street Ball format. Never tried it myself but will definitely have to look into getting a game of this.

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