Yesterday was the 2022 Freedom Bowl, held in a cidery in Snoqualmie, and after a day of intensive Blood Bowl plus several pints of cider, and more booze when I got home, I wasn’t really capable of writing about it.
Last year, with an identical team setup, I did dreadfully, with a 3-0 loss among the lowlights. The Freedom Bowl is a tournament where human teams are encouraged; an occasional bunch of rowdy dwarves attend, but they’re frowned upon. There’s usually one extra rule; this year it was to have two little drunken boar occasionally loose on the pitch.
I had a 1-1 draw, a 1-0 win where in the first half I could do nothing to stop him scoring (apart from when he rolled a 1 and tripped on the way into the end zone), and then I played my 3-0 nemesis from last year.
I made a mistake and set up with 12 players, and I was the first person to notice this, after a couple of turns. Blood Bowl has a carefully defined mechanic for how in-game cheating should be handled. When there’s an extra player, the opposing coach gets to choose a player to be sent off, as if they were caught fouling. So I used a bribe to keep him on in defiance of the ref.
On his turn, he tried to send a player off again, and I managed to argue the call – by rolling a 6 – my player stayed on the pitch. He fumed, but carried on with the rest of his turn. Then the next turn came. He’d be able to have my player sent off (and this time it was a player holding the ball, about to score, so this was crucial).
In Blood Bowl, you can’t back out of an action after dice have been rolled, so in the split second between his turn ending and my starting I yelled out my blitz, slammed the dice on the table and killed one of this players, before he could end my turn by having a player sent off.
All fair in war and Blood Bowl. My opponent took this in good grace, and sucked up the death, then sent off my player who was carrying the ball. We had a hard fought game where I almost squeaked a draw at the very end, with only 4 players left on the pitch, but a 2-1 loss was much better than a 3-0 one. Happy with that. (Although reading the rules from Games Workshop, an obscure errata says I shouldn’t have been able to do quite what I did. We’ll know for next time.)
Today was hot, as usual, and we slept in until ten, which was not usual. I went climbing with Destroyer and we did very little in the afternoon. But this week the house gets drywalled, so we’re really now close to the end. I think we said that before….