Baltimore

It’s the dog days of summer here in Athel Loren, and you know what that means… It can only be time for the second annual Swelter Bowl, official Blood Bowl tournament of the Goonhammer Open (GHO)! Pretty much all of the cities on the beautiful Chesapeake Bay were built on reclaimed swampland, and they like to remind us arrogant humans of that fact when July rolls around. 

The Swelter Bowl ruleset leans into the weather in a major way! The weather is always Sweltering Heat (D3 players on the pitch at the end of each drive will pass out from the heat and be unavailable for selection in the next drive), and Changing Weather on the kickoff event table is replaced with “It’s Getting Hotter…” immediately applying a Sweltering Heat result to the players that were set up on the drive. Truly, this ruleset is from the mind of a sicko…

Dan: Sicko is accurate! I’ll lean into it. We had a wonderful turnout this year, with 18 coaches not only registering, but showing up, too! And with that nice, even number, I didn’t even have to act as ringer this year! Truly auspicious.

Roster Building

In the player pack, Dan recommended that coaches bring as wide of a roster as possible with the 1200K gold that we were given, spreading out our Team Value so that an unfortunate roll wouldn’t leave us without the absolute lynchpin of the team. Unfortunately for me, it’s the Year of the Elf! Elves are known for many things, but being reasonably priced is not one of them. A Wood Elf lineman costs 70K gold, a full 40% more than a Human lineman (the platonic ideal of the average Blood Bowl player). While an individual Elf is much better than the Human, trading a point of Armor for a point each in Movement and Agility, this increased cost means you can afford about two fewer linemen in a typical team. 

It turns out that two fewer linemen is a significant difference when you’re losing D3 players every drive (spoilers!). 

The Treeman has been a long-standing point of contention for Wood Elf coaches. It adds significant strength and durability to the roster, but is also one less piece that can contribute to the core playstyle of the team. I, personally, am firmly on Team Treeman. For me, it comes down to one key factor: the price. A Treeman costs 120K gold pieces, which is crucially less than double the price of a lineman. For the same price, I could get a lineman and a reroll, but that reroll won’t help my team survive across multiple drives in the same way that a Treeman, or a second lineman, would. 

With the Treeman settled on, my roster-building turns to the rest of the positionals. Wardancers are the star of the Wood Elf team, and bringing two of them is non-negotiable. Accept no substitutes! Ever since Passing was split out as a separate statistic, elf teams need to bring a Thrower to take full advantage of the team’s agility. I like to bring two Catchers to make those passing plays more reliable on both ends, but for the Swelter Bowl I decided to follow the advice in the player pack and trade one of them for a Lineman and an Apothecary to keep a key player in the match. My 12-player roster was:

• Wardancer with Strip Ball
• Wardancer with Tackle
• Catcher with Block
• Thrower
• Lineman with Kick
• 6x Lineman
• Treeman
• 2x Reroll
• 1x Apothecary

Dan: Rosters were mostly built as expected and recommended, but one stood out:

John Page’s Ogres “Ogre-Rated”

• 1 Ogre
• 1 Runt Punter
• Morg ‘n’ Thorg
• Da Black Gobbo
• 12 Gnoblars

I don’t remember the skill breakout exactly, but it definitely included multiple Sneaky Git gnoblars and at least one Block ogre.

This list is, respectfully, bugnuts. It is a big-time violence roster, and my prediction was that it was either going to murder the other team in a spectacular fashion or implode in a similarly spectacular fashion. It turns out that I was right! Either way, it’s creative and frightful, the best kind of Blood Bowl Roster!

Travel

Getting to the Swelter Bowl was one of my easier journeys of the year! Baltimore is just far enough away from me that it was worth flying, so all I had to do was show up to the airport and sit around for a few hours. Unfortunately, GHO was the same weekend as Hurricane Beryl – a real scheduling miss, if you ask me – and I got to sit in the plane for a couple extra hours because lightning struck the airport right before they started fueling.

Once we were in the air, nothing of note happened! We landed, I took the shuttle to the airport and found the room I was sharing with two other goons around 9 PM. One of my roommates drove 16 hours from the Midwest to come to the tournament (the most American thing I’ve said this week) and brought an air mattress for me to sleep on. I’m not one to look a gift horse in the mouth – it was certainly better than being on the floor all night – but the mattress leaked just enough that it slowly deflated throughout the night. I woke up several times, closer and closer to the hotel carpet, waking up for the last time around 3:30. Not an auspicious start, but not much worse than I usually sleep in hotels, frankly!

After an obscenely priced, and insultingly mediocre, hotel breakfast – the cost of staying in airport hotels – I made my way to the big room and immediately started sweating. True to its name, the Swelter Bowl was held in a large conference hall that also held two 40K tournaments and a Necromunda event. There were a lot of people jammed into that room, and the air conditioning simply couldn’t keep up. To make matters worse, the hallway just outside the conference hall was lined with massive windows and straight-up not air-conditioned. 150 people in the hall, and a greenhouse just outside it…. We were lucky that D3 coaches didn’t pass out every drive! 

Game 1: Steve’s Goblins

The first round of a tournament always has the most potential for chaos because it’s randomly paired, and this one seemed no different at first! I was matched up with Steve (who, by his NAF name, I noticed was a fellow Virginia Tech alumnus – go Hokies!) and his Goblin team. We introduced ourselves, went over our rosters with each other, and I said “I have an Apothecary, but I’m going to forget about it.”

As soon as Steve started unpacking his models, I knew I was in for a treat. His team was a pretty standard Goblin build, with

• • Troll with Guard
  • Troll with Strong Arm
  •  Chainsaw
  • Doom Diver
  •  Pogoer

• Da Black Gobbo

•  3x Sneaky Git Goblins
•  3-4x Rookie Goblins*
•  3x Bribes

*In the hubbub and confusion, I managed to misplace my opponents’ rosters that I usually take notes on, so most of these rosters will be from memory.

More importantly, though, the entire team was immaculately Star-Wars-themed. All of the Goblins were Jawas, the Chainsaw was R2-D2, da Black Gobbo was a very small Darth Vader, the trolls were Jawas in mechsuits, his Bribe counters were Jawa sandcrawlers, and even his dice were Jawa-themed with little hoods instead of skulls. 10/10, no notes.

Steve won the toss and elected to receive, which meant that I set up first. I deployed my elves in a pretty standard anchor formation, relatively short to keep them close to the ball in case of a Blitz! kickoff event. This is so normal to me that it’s basically automatic, and is a pretty good place to start against most offenses.

Reader, a Goblin team does not play most offenses.

Steve took one look at my formation, and set his team up to for a Throw-Teammate one-turn touchdown, with the Doom Diver on the line in between his trolls.  As soon as I saw the setup, I remembered how reliable the Doom Diver makes Goblins and deflated. Luckily, bringing a Kick elf let me send the kick deep into Steve’s half, an to make the hand-off less likely, and he even did me a favor and failed his first attempt at a pickup.

I swarmed downfield with my entire team, desperately trying to keep them on their feet to avoid being fouled off the pitch by a swarm of red-eyed freaks. Between Strip Ball and my team’s inherent Strength advantage, I was able to pop the ball out and score pretty quickly – Turn 3 or so. I was living large, in my lane, thriving even.

The second drive started much the same as the first, though I spread my line of scrimmage out this time to interfere with any potential Throw Teammate shenanigans. We had each lost a pretty important player to the heat – he the Chainsaw and me a Wardancer – so it felt pretty balanced, though I had one fewer player on the pitch than he did. I sent another deep kick in, to give myself as many opportunities as possible to sack the ball.

This was a much more traditional drive than the first. The Pogoer picked the ball up and made it to the middle of a cloud of Goblins, pushing their way up the pitch behind a spearhead of two Trolls. I screened and probed around, trying to slow their advance and threaten a sack while minimizing the damage I took. Eventually, I saw an opening and got the ball out around midfield, grabbing it with my Catcher and running away with no one else to protect it. Carrying on my Catcher ended up being my downfall, because Steve was able to scramble a couple Goblins back and find the Pow he needed to stop me from scoring again on Turn 8.

We went into halftime with me leading 1-0, and that was basically the last interesting thing that happened in the game! I received the kickoff in the second half, and was down four elves – including a Wardancer that had been fouled off by the Chainsaw into the Knock Out box and didn’t recover. With the numbers very much not on my side, I tried to score quickly, but sacrificed speed for safety and lost the ball by Turn 10. Luckily, I still had enough elves to keep tackle zones on the loose ball, and we both spent the rest of the game futilely trying to pick it back up.

Result: 1-0 Win

Dan: Steve is the true hero of this event. He’s a local player to me, and the night before I was griping in our Discord about how only 17 players had signed up, and he decided to risk his wife’s ire on a list minute tournament to save me from having to act as the ringer! Great job, Steve! Also, he has a NAF number in the low 500s, which is wild.

Game 2: Nancy’s Chaos Chosen

Nancy’s Roster:

• Chaos Ogre with Pro
• 4x Chaos Chosen Blocker with Block
• Beastman with Tackle
• 9x Rookie Beastman
• 2x Reroll

With all due respect to Nancy, I have two things to cover before I get into our game. The first is that I talked someone into driving me 15 minutes to the nearest Costco for lunch. My plan was to grab a hot dog and a Costco-sized case of beer for the rest of the weekend. What I did not consider was the sheer, horrifying number of other people that would be in Costco on a Saturday at lunchtime. Because of this, both I and my ride showed up 10 minutes late to our second game. Nancy was incredibly accommodating, which frankly only made me feel worse about it.

The second thing I need to cover is that, as we went over our rosters with each other, I remembered the Apothecary I had brought. I said “Ah, SHIT. The worst part is that I’ll probably forget it again in this game.” Reader, you don’t get a prize if you guess whether I used my Apothecary this game.

This game was basically the perfect game for a Chaos team. Nancy won the toss and elected to receive, and I was simply unable to stop her. She ground her way slowly up the pitch, sneaking past my Treeman when it failed an early Take Root roll. The rest of my elves tried to stay safe and slow the relentless march of the jorts-wearing Chaos team, and they failed to do either of those things.

Nancy scored on her Turn 8, leaving me with one turn and seven elves to try and score back. I don’t have a lot of experience with one-turning, so I set up and tried for the one-turn touchdown. The pass and the catch both worked and I was able to push my ball carrier to one square short of where it needed to be when I ran out of elves to activate. After I tossed my hands up and called the end of my turn, Nancy said “yeah, I didn’t think you had the players for it, but I wanted to let you cook.”

The second half went exactly no better for me! I set up eight elves against Nancy’s full team of eleven, so I tried to threaten the two-turn touchdown again and hope that I could defend successfully. Unfortunately, having only one Catcher meant I was really telegraphing which side of the pitch was the real threat and which side was the feint. Nancy used her numbers advantage – and Tackle Beastman! – to great effect, and smothered out my offense immediately. At one point, I realized that I, the Wood Elf player, had the ball in a real live X-cage in the middle of the pitch. That is… not the right thing for an agility team to do! I tried to stretch the field to the right, and then back to the left, and ran right into a brick wall of himbo- and goat-flesh.

Nancy got the ball off of me around midfield, and screened off the two or three elves that I had left to score a second touchdown on the last turn of the match. Ultimately, there were a lot of things going against me in this game. I had numbers against me, I had strength against me, and Nancy was simply a better coach than me. I’m almost glad that I lost after showing up late, because there’s no worse feeling than an opponent being polite and accommodating right before you dumpster them.

Result: 0-2 Loss

Game 3: Matt’s Amazons

After getting absolutely destroyed, with Nancy taking maximum points off of me, I was just looking to have a good time in the last round. Luckily, I found I was playing Matt, a semi-local who came down from Pennsylvania for the Swelter Bowl last year with his Skaven team, the Filthadelphia Fleagles. My Morg-mule Halfling team ended up tying him 1-1 then in a real nail-biter, so I was very much looking forward to our rematch.

Matt goes all-in on writing fluff and theming his teams, and this one was no different. This year was the Gerwig Barbies, complete with bubble-gum pink base rims and a full-page fluff dump in the style of toy-box advertising copy. Perhaps the best part of Matt’s enthusiasm for his team’s fluff is that it’s completely unintrusive. He made no effort to point it out, didn’t try to tell me all about it, didn’t make me read it before we played. He had simply created something he enjoyed and gave it to me to enjoy at my own leisure in my own way. This is the best way to share, y’all! In that vein, I’ll let Matt present his own roster:

I won the toss and elected to receive, to try and score before I ran out of elves (… again). For the Kickoff Event, we rolled up the tournament-special “It’s Getting Hotter…” and each of us randomly lost three players. I lost three of my linemen, and Matt lost a lineman and both of his Jaguar Warriors. This put him at an immediate strength disadvantage, which I would do my best to exploit for as long as I could. Unfortunately for me, Matt is an excellent coach and, even without his high-strength Blockers, he managed to threaten the ball enough that I was forced to score on Turn 5.

Amazon Blitzers are disgusting. Their Hit and Run skill makes them as fast as any of my players when they Blitz, and gives them a surprising amount of movement from a simple Block action. Matt leveraged this speed, as well as the guaranteed return of his Jaguar Warriors, to score right back with the four turns he had remaining.

The second half of this game went very much like the second half of the game against Steve’s Goblins! I kicked the ball back to Matt, threatened it very quickly, knocked it out with Strip Ball, and was completely unable to pick it up. We spent the entire half strategically placing our teams to interfere with each other’s plans while also threatening to score, and then bobbling the ball back and forth like a bad Three Stooges routine. 

The game ended exactly like last year’s game – a 1-1 draw with no clear winner. Matt and I are superbly well-matched, and maybe next year one of us will have a hot streak on the dice. It looks like that’s what it will take to separate us!

Result: 1-1 Draw

Overall Results

1-1-1, just as Thanos intended. For some reason, the Swelter Bowl has been my worst tournament of the year twice now. Why is this? Maybe Baltimore hates me. Maybe I hate Baltimore. Maybe I stubbornly cling to the same roster regardless of the details of the tournament. Who can say? Regardless, this was a solid mid-table showing in a pretty competitive Blood Bowling region. More importantly, I played against three great opponents and saw a bunch of internet friends in person, which is always good for the soul.

Parting Thoughts

This is the second tournament that I’ve ever taken an Apothecary to, and I’ve now used it in exactly one of six games. The Apothecary is not for me. It’s so unusual in tournament Blood Bowl that my bowling-ball-smooth brain simply cannot remember that it’s there. I might get a model to represent my Apothecary to help me remember, but more likely I’ll just not take one anymore. That 50K could have been a reroll!

My other great failing this tournament was not adapting my roster to the player pack. Every team I played against had 14 or more players on the roster, and I brought 12. Even if I hadn’t lost any players to armor rolls, I was virtually guaranteed to be outnumbered from the second drive onwards. That this was a bad idea was very clearly stated in the player pack, but I wasn’t flexible enough to make the appropriate changes. Part of this is the nature of the team, but more of the blame lies at my feet. 12 Wood Elf Linemen, 2 Wardancers, and 2 Rerolls was a valid roster that would have given me the deeper bench that this tournament called for.

Finally, and diametrically opposed to the previous lesson learned, is that I really, really need to bring 2 Catchers if there’s any way to fit them in the roster. Having two serious scoring threats on a two-turn touchdown attempt makes a huge difference, forcing the opponent to split their team. It’s probably worth giving up the Treeman for this. 

Next time out, I’m (probably) headed to the Starfall Festival in Birmingham, AL, which promises to be thoroughly wacky – the budget is 1275K and star players are required for every team. Shenanigans are sure to ensue!

Dan: It’s comforting to read that Isaac learned something about Swelter Bowl roster construction this time around. You really need to bring extra players if you want to perform! It seemed like all the coaches had a great time, and I was happy to give out some prizes to our winner, best painted, and most player value lost to the heat. My wife is having our second kid later this year, so I don’t know if running this tournament next year is in the cards for me, but if I can’t I’ll just make Isaac do it. Either way, it was a great time and a great group of coaches!

Marquis_of_Peaches: Shit, what did I get myself into? Maybe next year, I’ll play a roster that has wide options. Last year, it was Halflings with expensive star players. This year, it was Wood Elves with a dozen stupid-expensive players. Next year, with any luck, I’ll just TO and avoid all of the problems that come with actually playing in a tournament this silly.

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