Ann's Immaterium

Mostly physical culture but also writing, gaming, and other dark procrastinations

, ,

Ancient Blood Bowl Glories Return

The last time I played Blood Bowl was in the late 1980’s during my college years.  A friend’s boyfriend owned the game (it had cardboard guys instead of miniatures) and he wanted to start a league so we played.  It was fun but summer came and everyone spiraled off onto other paths and I never saw any of them again.  Not unusual for college with life organized into semesters and staying in touch with social media not being what it is today.

Fast forward to now, and a friend wanted to start a league.  Sound familiar?  I said yes and we had our first game at his dining room table.  There were three games going on at once, ardent spirits flowed freely, and it felt a bit like gaming at a convention in that you had to yell to talk to your opponent.  It was great fun.

I thought the cheerleader and dwarf referee were a nice touch.

I wish I had thought to take some pictures, but I didn’t.  Fortunately though, I did get in another game a couple of days later with the same opponent, who had two painted teams, and was kind enough to invite me to his house.  My hosts also kindly shared their lovely meal of chicken and asparagus too, which I greatly enjoyed.  He played the Orks and I played the Humans.

I had one special character, the big guy in front to the left with no helmet.  He was slow but extremely strong and good at hitting people.  Not a bad guy to have in a scrum as it turned out.  The other special character, the guy with the winged helmet standing next to my Big Bruiser Guy, is included in the photo but I didn’t have him on my team.  I’ll probably try him the next time we play.

As it turned out that was the Stupidest Troll Ever!

It was a good thing that trolls can regenerate because our blue friend fell into a bunch of pieces, the victim no doubt of one hundred year old super glue bonds.  Fortunately we got him put back together in time for kick off.  Unfortunately he turned out to be the Stupidest Troll Ever, which is saying something considering that you have to roll a 4+ on a D6 each turn to get your troll to do anything other than just stand there.

Apparently if you have some of your own guys standing next to your troll, you can get a positive modifier on the Hopefully He Won’t Just Stand There and Do Nothing roll, which can be helpful.  For our game we didn’t realize this.  I think he might have done something in one or two of the eight turns we played.  We’ll remember our error next time for sure.  Also, I am told that you can hire trolls on your team that aren’t paralyzingly stupid, but where is the fun in that?

The Ork/Goblin/Troll Team.

My take away with playing mostly the basic game so far with only a few of the special rules is that it is fun enough that I want to paint a team or two.  I decided upon the Nurgle team and bought the team box.  I based my decision completely on the fact that I like painting Nurgle, though now that I’ve delved a bit more into the game I think I’d enjoy a team with more of a passing game.  Still, it’ll be fun modeling the guys and I like that one only needs a handful of models for a complete team versus building an army in larger games.

For next time I hope to have another poxwalker done.  I haven’t been playing much 40K for awhile now, but I do want to get the unit finished.  I think they’d be fine in Blood Bowl if you overlook the fact that most of them are packing knives, broken rifles, wrenches with spikes tied to them, and the like.  I’m not too worried about it considering that goblins can bring chainsaws, giant spiked ball-and-chain weapons, and throw bombs at the opposition, and the less said about the Forge World drunken dwarf on a zamboni-looking thing the better!

Flesh Nurgling 100 pixels wide no background

←
→

19 responses to “Ancient Blood Bowl Glories Return”

  4. Wow, good times! Makes me miss the league I ran. But like you mentioned with your college game, people move away and what not, and it just fizzled.

    Funny that you all had to yell over each other. The time we had 3 games going at once, was pretty quiet. Pretty much all of our games were like watching chess matches, with a lot of quiet time. Interesting to know that some people’s games are much more talkative.

    Dumb trolls. Yep, the story of many a Blood Bowl game unfortunately. I’ve learned to stand them front and center, and just act as a road block. If you don’t use them, they don’t go stupid and keep their tackle zones. If your opponent is dumb enough to punch everything in their path, then they make a great punching bag. Other wise I only risk blocking with the troll, if it’s not going to destroy my defense when he fails that really stupid check.

    I like the painted up teams there, pretty cool. Surprised to see blue Orcs though. Something different and kinda awesome. Oh, the Star Players are Mighty Zug (strong guy), and Griff Oberwald, though you all might be using the models as other Stars.

    Question, what’s the goblin with cymbals? I think I want to get my hands on one of those for the new Hooligan Goblin Secret Weapon. If I can find that plus decent pogo and doom diver models, then I can skip the upcoming FW pack! 😉

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

    • Better late than never responding to a comment. For some reason I’m just noticing this 14 months later!

      Well, I think main reason for having all the noise was none of us really knew the rules that well. Dave, who painted all of the miniatures in the pictures above, was our resident “expert” but there was a lot of “just roll a die and go for it” as well as flipping through the rules. I do remember it as a fun time.

      Yes, turns out you were right about the star players. If I remember correctly, I didn’t get a chance to use Oberwald, though Zug seemed pretty good at doing strong guy stuff.

      I believe the goblin with the cymbals is supposed to be a cheerleader. I’ll have to ask Dave, he’ll probably know.

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

        • I’ll let you know if I find out anything different about our friend the percussion goblin. Yes, I vaguely remember that Griff was quite a bit more expensive.

          Liked by 1 person

          Reply

        • @Faust

          I heard back from my friend, Dave, who asked his friend (the resident Warhammer expert) about our percussionist and he said, “Yes, that little spud is a Squig Noiser from the old Citadel Night Goblins range.” Apparently the cheerleader thing was just how Dave was using the miniature.

          I noticed that armed with that information I was able to find pictures of the miniature pretty easily on Google.

          Liked by 1 person

          Reply

          • Ahhh, ok. That’s interesting because I just got something like a Squig Noiser from an Ebay auction. I’m going to use him for Blood Bowl Goblins team (the Ooligan), but I was curious what he does in Warhammer. Though I don’t really know that game anyways, so it probably still wouldn’t make any sense to me!

            Liked by 1 person

            Reply

    • Yes, I’m having a lot of fun with it. One of my friends has been hosting a Blood Bowl night, where he sets up three or so pitches and invites everyone over. I’ve been playing humans lately but tonight I got to try playing orks for the first time, as opposed to playing against, which was interesting.

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

  6. I’ve never had a chance to play the tabletop version (even tho I have three teams for it), but the tablet version is a pretty fun time-killer, even if the AI is dumber than the Trolls are 😉

    That sounds like a really fun game day. Glad you enjoyed it, and I look forward to seeing your Nurgle team as it comes together.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

    • Thank you, it was a very fun game day. We are hoping to organize another day soon, and I’m planning on going over to my friend’s house and playing a game with him again tomorrow. I’m going to be bearing pie this time to hopefully placate and distract him as part of my overall strategy. 🙂

      What three teams do you have?

      Like

      Reply

    • I also apparently hit reply and not Enter.. oops.
      Sounds like an awesome time basically a mini con. I’ve never played with or against a Nurgle team but I am excited to see pictures as you paint your way to victory.

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

    • Might be a little bit of a theme perhaps. Maybe it is what your Space Wolf guys get up to for fun … or perhaps “playing at Space Marine” is what your Blood Bowl guys do when they want to have fun?

      Thank you, yes, it was a very fun evening. We are hoping to play again soon. I’m working on getting my Nurgle guys put together though the real bottleneck is going to come finding a good day to spray prime them. It is very wet and humid here and a bit on the cool side; perfect priming weather for screwing up one’s models! *beams*

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

      • I think my Norse team is “playing at Space Marines” because while they are decent Bloodbowl players they get completely destroyed on the battlefield.
        But now I’m imagining that 40k is like a really cool version of laser tag in the bloodbowl universe.

        Liked by 1 person

        Reply

  8. Sounds like you really enjoyed that, so thanks for sharing! Not too sure that I can fault the logic in having a team member who’s “extremely strong and good at hitting people”. Thanks for the timely warning for those of us with a sensitive disposition that some more Nurgle-based minis are in the pipeline.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

    • Yes indeed, it was a lot of fun.

      That star player was certainly not very subtle but it was hard to go wrong with him either. I originally figured he’d end up facing off against the troll, but he never did because the stupid troll spent almost the entire game being stupid and not moving or doing anything. Didn’t even seem to be much point in trying to tackle him, really. Got the most done with my receivers and passing game, which accounted for my touchdown in our 1-1 tie.

      Yep … glad to give a Nurglicious heads-ups/timely warning! 🙂

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

The Immaterium craves your comments!