Blood Bowl: Chaos Edition

I got a message out of the blue from one of my WBC friends, Sceadeau, asking if I happened to play Blood Bowl. I haven't in quite some time, but back one summer at Comfy Prime we had a board in use probably 20 hours of every day. Man, those were the days. We didn't get into the whole Games Workshop idea where you had to buy and paint your miniatures before you could play... We used numbered pieces of paper, the junky minis that came with the game, and the pewter pieces from my copy of Robo Rally and had a grand time of it. I bought the PC game when it came out in 2009 and had fun playing it but I found it lagged too much on my laptop and ultimately got distracted by other games. Probably WoW given the year.

Apparently they've been coming out with new versions of the PC game with improvements and new teams. A new version recently came out which brought the number of playable teams to 23. I took a quick look and discovered that halflings are one of the teams added in since I last played. Here's the very first sentence under their 'strengths' on the webpage...

"You’re going to end up losing a few Halflings regardless of what you do,"

Oh man, now that brings back memories. I lost more than my fair share of halflings back in our league. They're so terrible! I can remember that they were so cheap to replace that I'd retire guys if they were just going to miss the next game. No sense playing with only 15 people next time when I can turn him into an assistant coach and throw another 30k at a new dude instead! I loved playing halflings partially because they were truly terrible and partially because you got to do some very silly things. I can remember one time I stopped someone from scoring (Josh's maybe?) by chucking a halfling at the ball carrier who was on the sidelines and out of running range of my team. Direct hit! The ball bounced into the stands where they threw it down the field in my direction.

One of my guys got an early agility up and he became my go-to scorer. Get him the ball, get him beside a tree-man, and chuck him down towards the end zone. He broke his neck on one such play when he failed to land properly and ended up only having one strength. He sure was terrible!

It turns out the game is/was on sale on Steam for the black friday/cyber monday junk, but they also were offering the new version for $10 to anyone who bought an older version. Sceadeau is putting together a league of some kind and I figure I can go be terrible there for old time's sake. So I upgraded to the new version and played a game against the computer last night to see how things worked... Turns out halflings are still terrible! The AI didn't seem great and still ended up knocking me down below a starting roster by the last kick-off of the game. They were also down to only 10 guys but that's because they only started with 11! I had the full 16! Lots of little speed bumps all over the place.

Trees are still awesome, but it looks like wood elves can buy treemen also. Which means they pretty much have to be better than halflings at pretty much every aspect of the game. Except being expendable I guess... But I don't know that I want to be good... I want to be awesome! And nothing says awesome like using your teammates as projectile weapons!

If anyone is interested in joining in let me know.