This past weekend I traveled up to Ottawa to participate in the
Capital City Kick Off. 1.1M team build with max 80k on skills, with a skills draft after game three. My list had 2 mummies, 2 wights, 4 ghouls, 3 zombies, 1 skeleton, 3 rerolls, 1 assistant coach and 1 cheerleader. I took block on both mummies and sure hands on a ghoul for my skills.
Lemme preface this report by explaining about the custom dice. Most tournaments like to use custom dice, as nobody can complain about cheaters and it's fun little swag. Well usually the special design is the 6, but for the CCKO - it's the one. This year's dice had hands flipping you the bird with CCKO tattoed on the fingers. They looked really cool but damn did they ever seem to roll the F U a lot, I know everybody rolled snake eyes more than once. They really made the tournament anybodies game because agility teams were falling over and dropping the ball and bash teams were having lots of problems breaking armour.
Very frustrating games of blood bowl though!
Game 1 vs Nate (1-1 draw)
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| Nate came up with a group from the US! |
Nate brought necro, block on both werewolves and both golems. I mistakenly went after killing his wolves, thinking they were AV7 but they're really AV8. I could hardly break armour and I think we each managed one casualty each all game. Over extended myself on the left and he blitzed the ball carrier and went for the quick score. Next kickoff we roll pouring rain and I just can't do anything to do with the ball, and I'm not hurting him much either. It takes me the rest of the game to eek out a tie on my last turn.
Game 2 vs Rob K (2-0 win)
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| Apparently I was pretty rough from the night before! |
First time playing Rob - he was using pro elves, his dice/luck were horrible all day, he won the fame roll and that was about it! I just kept it simple - caged up and tried to beat him up. Even with AV7 I only managed two casualties - but he just couldn't get a string of moves together to threaten my ball carrier and I scored a touchdown in each half. Got to play this game on the Khorne pitch (squares were shown by skulls on all the corners, very cool looking board but a little fragile.
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| KHORNE PITCH - Dead and Injured box read "Blood for the Blood God" |
Game 3 vs Mark D (0-2 loss)
Played Mark for the first time finally, he'd brought a Norse team - I was hoping to be able to get the hurt on, but it turned out the other way, with Mark causing all kinds of casualties early on and scoring twice, to me killing 2 a turn - twice in a row in the last couple turns of the game. I definitely made some basic mistakes in this game, but all credit to Mark he took quick advantage.
At this point we were going to do the skills draft. Basically everyone gets 4 free skills or attribute increases, but there are only 2 available of each (1 full set per 12 players) and are chosen worst ranked to best ranked. I ended up with block for a ghoul, wrestle for a ghoul, piling on for a mummy and multiple block for a mummy. The first three were great, but since I had no guard I found it hard to take full advantage of multiple block. I was sitting with 1 each of win, tie, loss so I picked near the middle of the pack.
Game 4 vs Leathan (2-1 win)
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| Me vs. Leathan (in blue) |
Here my luck started to change somewhat. I've never played Leathan outside of deathbowl format. He's a very strong player and he brought dwarves so I was quite concerned that I wouldn't be able to hurt him (I couldn't) and that his tackle would take out my ghouls (it didn't). I don't recall him getting too many hits on my ghouls, I do know he rolled double skulls at least five times throughout our game, often at crucial moments and usually repeating on the reroll! I scored on the last turn of the game for the win.
Game 5 vs Adam (2-2 draw)
A very fun game from my perspective, having played Adam many times. He scored twice in the first half (often pulling off some quite skillful dodging and blitzing), while I went to town on his dark elves. I was actually managing to hurt his players in this game, and through the game killed six of his players, knocking out many more. Pretty sure I rolled boxcars something like 5 times in a row (followed by an 11) in killing 3 of his guys in a row. In the end he just didn't have enough models to stop me from scoring, though it might have been more interesting if he'd gambled on me failing to knock over his ball carrier instead of tripping while going for it to get completely clear allowing me to pick up the ball, hand off and score in the last turn of the game.
Game 6 vs Andy (2-2 draw)
Back to frustration against Andy's orc team, AV9 seemingly impossible to hurt, I managed to kill a single black orc all game (they all had guard) - always seeming to get knock outs when I hit his throwers. All's fair as his black orcs were usually on the ground from trying to take down my mummies with block. This was another game where I pulled out a tie in the last turn of the game. I did that 3 times this tournament, and had a couple times where I should've scored and got greedy. Definitely still need to work on not getting too excited.
All in all I did reasonably well, finishing 2/3/1 w/d/l = 7th out of 18 and having played three times on table 3 means I'm keeping myself in the top half of players. I was one casualty away from tying for most casualties, but would've needed two to win due to tiebreakers. As usual it was a blast, next year my goal is to get at least one game on the top table (etched glass squares over a volcano, with stands around and a switch that makes noise when you score a touchdown!)
