Blood Bowl Rules

I finally got around to playing my first game of online multiplayer Blood Bowl and it worked about as well as I'd thought it would. I even had my router die in the middle of the match and the client managed to recover (mostly) gracefully when I switched my connection direct into my modem. Very impressed by that.

The game itself was a pretty typical starting Orc vs starting Halfling match... A 0-0 draw. I was up against Randy Buehler in like his fourth game ever and we spent a lot of time with him pushing halflings around and me trying to stand trees up without success. We hit the good old 1-in-36 of failing a few times which resulted in him losing a pretty sure touchdown in the first half when I kicked to him and me losing one in the second half when he kicked to me. We both made some tactical errors (rust and not really knowing the rules, mostly) but I'm sure we'll do better going forward. A couple rules questions did come up which I couldn't really answer at the time. Most of my time spent playing the game was 12 years ago and that was at least 3 rules rewrites ago.

So, I went looking for the current rules. And found them here! Definitely worth a read if you haven't played in a while/at all.

First rules question... Is there overtime? According to the current rules that's up to the people playing. For the online game if the game is a play-off game where draws aren't allowed then you have overtime. Otherwise you don't. Hence, the 0-0 draw.

Second rules question... Randy inflicted a casualty on one of my two treemen early on but didn't get any SPP (Star Player Points, the experience currency in the game) from doing so. Why not? It turns out you now only get SPP from casualties inflicted directly from a block. If you inflict a casualty by knocking someone out of bounds, or by fouling them, or by throwing a halfing into them you don't get any points. This is definitely different than back in the day when I distinctly remember knocking people out of bounds for points. It was my main way of leveling halflings up! Isolate one dude and then keep shoving him out of bounds. It's a shame that doesn't work anymore, but I guess it's better for the longevity of the players. Fouling used to be something worth doing for experience each turn at the very least. Now, not so much. It still could make sense to try to inflict some damage, don't get me wrong, but it isn't a way to power level. This was why Randy didn't get his 2 points... He took my tree out by stepping on his head.

Finding an opponent in the client doesn't seem like the easiest thing to do. I think because I'm in a small league and don't know enough about playing in other leagues. I may start up another team and throw it into an online league just to see how that works. On the plus side Sceadeau has a Vent server and the league has a Facebook group so finding games isn't impossible. More people couldn't hurt, though!