Empire Cup 4 - Blood Bowl AAR

This past Saturday, I drove up to Long Beach Island to attend Empire Cup 4, my first Blood Bowl tournament. 

I decided to take my Chaos Dwarves, since I had used them in the recent league and had a decent grasp on how to run the team. Team had a 1.1 million gold budget to spend on their team, and then additional gold to spend on skills depending on their Tier. Since Chaos Dwarves were Tier 1, I had 60k to spend. I gave one Bull Centaur Break Tackle, and the other Block and Mighty Blow. I also took Zzharg Madeye for more ST and ball handling skills. 

My goal for the tournament was to at least get a touchdown against an experience opponent. Anything else was a bonus!

My Round 1 game was against Cary and his Goblins team. It had the full compliment of Goblin craziness - chainsaw, ball-and-chain, doom diver, 'ooligan, pogoer, and bombardier - along with a couple of Block Trolls.

However, a few lucky dice rolls (and not one, but three interceptions from the Bull Centaurs) meant that I was able to win the game, 3-0.

My Round 2 opponent was Ramsay and his Chaos Dwarves. We both realized that this was going to be a slow, methodical game. Ramsay had decided to drop the Bull Centaurs in favor of taking a Block and Claw skilled Minotaur. While I managed to foul it off the table, it was definitely the focus of my team for the first half.

While both Ramsay and I managed to score, an unfortunate double 1 when trying to Go For It with a Bull Centaur allowed Ramsay to run a hobgoblin in for a Turn 16 touchdown. The game was a loss, 1-2.

My round 3 opponent was Campbell and his Norse team.

Unfortunately, I made a few mistakes during this match - getting greedy with a 1 die block and reroll, for example - and the dice were against me. This was a bad game for the Immortals, with a lot of Dwarf casualties. I also had a Hail Mary pass from Zzhargh scatter off the pitch, when it could have been a tying result for the game. It ended up as a loss, 0-1.

I placed 7th out of 8 players, but was awarded Best Sportmanship. At least I accomplished my goal of getting a touchdown!

It was a fun time, and I enjoyed my first tournament. However, it definitely showed me that I'm not a fan of driving 2.5 to 3 hours each way to get to a day long event. I'm considering the two day event later this year, since that'll at least give me a day to recover.