About a month ago Sceadeau started up a little experiment... 8 starting Blood Bowl teams in a round robin tournament with people encouraged to play as often as possible. We ended up playing all 7 rounds in 20 days. Tack on the finals and you're looking at about 3 weeks for 29 Blood Bowl games. That's a lot of scoring, and a lot of blood. Woo!
Everyone seemed to have a good time, so we started up two more leagues. One allowed teams from the first league to carry over if they wanted. Three teams took advantage of that opportunity and the other 13 teams across the two leagues are brand new. I'm a little worried that the TV difference between the three established teams and the new ones might be a little problematic but short of trying to force the other 5 teams to keep playing I don't know that there's a solution to that problem. But if we do more of these after this set of two there'll be 21 potential teams to carry over so I expect we'll find 8 to have an established quick league going.
For my team in the first league I decided to try Skaven. I've mostly played bashy teams in my Blood Bowl career and felt like I didn't really know how to play a finesse team, so I wanted to give one a try. It hasn't quite worked, as evidenced by comments from people spectating my games... My Skaven team makes with the punching. Sure, I have some dudes who run really fast and can score but my first focus is how can I inflict some damage on the enemy team and only second how can I go score. I've got a guy with block, tackle, and mighty blow. He's about to level and will get either claw or piling on depending on if he rolls doubles or not. Must kill more dudes!
On the other hand it did work quite well, as my record after 8 games was 6 wins and 2 draws. I scored 22 touchdowns in those 8 games, thanks to having dudes with 9 movement! 26 casualties sustained by my opponents, too. Part of that is playing against halflings and goblins and watching them fall over and hurt themselves. Part of that is my dirty player taking out star players in the finals with foul after foul after foul without getting caught.
I've definitely gotten lucky, but it feels like Skaven are well built for taking advantage of luck. My game against Randy featured him rolling a 1 or 2 on his first 8 'pick up the ball' rolls, needing a 3+ each time. If this had been my dwarf team I might have been able to walk up to the ball by the end of that sequence and I expect I probably could have had the half end scoreless. With Skaven I ended the first half up 3-0. It also feels like Skaven can take a bunch of injuries but still viably keep playing. Dwarves that fall behind in men are done. I still like my Dwarves, and I do think they have a standard game plan that is more consistent. Both are good, and it's nice to be playing a bunch of games with both teams.
I've also gotten lucky with my Skaven in terms of permanent damage. I lost a gutter runner and a lineman early (maybe even both in the first game, actually, to Sceadeau's Orcs) but haven't lost anyone since. I've made a ton of money (including 160k from my last game alone) and I decided to give the Skaven big guy a try. For 150k I get a guy who starts with frenzy, mighty blow, and prehensile tail. I don't know how good he is but I feel like if I keep playing my bashy still game having access to a third dude with strength skills might help. My first game, whenever Robb gets around to playing, will be against a fresh Dark Elf team who is going to get 660k worth of inducements. That's a lot of free stuff!
The biggest reason I want to keep playing the team is I like my naming scheme. It's an Ocean's Eleven theme, playing off the idea that the original Ocean's Eleven movie was made by 'The Rat Pack'. Skaven are rat-men, see...
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