TBBL- The Lows and Highs of my First Competitive Game (Blood Bowl 2 [PC])
Blood Bowl was a board game first released back in 1986 by Games Workshop and beautifully mashed together their Warhammer Fantasy universe with American Football. Fast forward to 2009 and the digital version was released before Cyanide Studios and Focus Home Interactive released Blood Bowl 2 in September 2015. Being a grumpy old git, I remember having the original version of the board game with polystyrene pitch sections (everything that wasn't a figure was made of bloody polystyrene back in the war-gmaing day- I'm sure Games Workshop are more responsible for our wonky ozone layer than people realise!). Knowledge about but not love of Blood Bowl has dimmed over time however I was nervously excited to take part in my first competitive match.
The Twitch Blood Bowl League (TBBL) is one of many league systems that are our there - even I didn't realise how many till I started writing this and had a look at this link. Although the list contains a lot of seemingly inactive leagues or those containing very few players, there are some pretty big leagues included and of course, to coincide with this years Football (Soccer) World Cup, Cyanide are running a Blood Bowl 2 event as well. I could try and qualify for this through my TBBL participation but, to be honest, there is such a thing as too much fun. You can read that as me not having any faith in my ability to compete let alone qualify for the event - I'll leave that up to you. ;)
My first game went surprisingly well despite the early, nervous excitement leading to a series of cock-ups. For instance, at one point I tried to click on a player, missed and ended my turn. It was not my finest moment and of course, it was live on stream! Yay me! This lead to nearly conceding the first touchdown but I somehow managed to stop my Underworld opposition (nasty lil goblins and skaven backed up by a dopey troll) scoring and went into half time at 0 - 0. The second half went south quickly. A skeleton (imaginately named "Key") was horribly... re-killed?... and was followed by conceding to go 1 - 0 down. All seemed lost. But miraculously, in my final turn of the game, I managed to get my ghouls to work together. Lacking any re-rolls (last one was used passing the ball from one ghoul to the other...standing side by side...ffs) the ghoul named Rippy NomNom managed to "go for it" and gain the one extra square needed to score an equaliser. Without breaking his legs! Joy!
Am not going to lie. It. Was. Amazing.
It was made all the better by having people, in chat, watching me blunder through my first game. To have folks there to laugh at me, be amazed when i actually managed to pull off some good moves and equalise added another dimension to the match. Felt like being at a footy game with my best friends... except warmer... with wine... and lacking the crushing frustration of watching Scottish football. Other than that it was comparable. Thankfully I made enough cash from the game ($40K - really crap roll of a 1 for gate receipts) to replace my dead undead skeleton; full squad available for the next torture, er, match.
My next match will be in the week commencing 9th April 2018 so follow me on Twitter @SOV_Carrumba for when my next game will be - I am aiming to stream them on either Wednesday or Friday nights at 10pm BST but it depends on the availability of the opposing coach as well.
May Nuffle look kindly on all your real or metaphorical dice rolls in all you do.
#CyanideStudio #BloodBowl2 #TBBL