Thursday, April 06, 2017

Blood Bowl Puzzle

An interesting situation cropped up at the end of a recent Blood Bowl game, and I wanted to look into it in more detail while not being under a 3 minute timer to make all of my moves in a turn. In some senses it's a very straightforward position and in other senses there's a lot of things going on that need to be considered. I thought it might be interesting to provide the situation as a puzzle and let people decide what they would do and then go through all of the things to consider in another post.




The Blood Bowl 2 interface is pretty good for watching things live, but pretty sketchy for easily seeing things at a glance for people who aren't used to it, so I'll explain what's going on in this picture first.

This is turn 16 of a game where we're down 2-1. We're a brand new Necromantic team, dressed in pink, and we're playing against Dwarves. We have possession of the ball, in the hands of a werewolf who is 8 spaces from the endzone (indicated by the blue pillar of light). Werewolves have an 8/3/3/8 statline and their only relevant skill is frenzy. We don't have any rerolls and the only thing we care about is maximizing our odds of scoring a touchdown to tie the game. No other player on our team can reach the endzone and there aren't enough players on the field to set up any crazy chain push plays (I don't think, anyway!).

The other players we have access to are 2 flesh golems (4/4/2/9), 3 zombies (4/3/2/8), and a wight (6/3/3/8 block). Our second wight is lying on the ground beside the ball carrier but unfortunately he is stunned. There are not many dwarves left in play, but the ones that exist are in annoying positions. All dwarves have 3 strength and all of them have block except for the one hiding behind the flesh golem in the upper left hand corner. The remaining dwarves are marked one on the werewolf, one on the second flesh golem, and one on a zombie. We have 2 free zombies and a free wight, all a fair ways behind the play.

What is your plan for the turn?