Blood Bowl: Fireball The Orcs!

I played a game of Blood Bowl yesterday as Lizards against an Orc team that set itself up on the opening kick-off with 8 orcs in a little box in the backfield. Getting 8 coin flips to get a mighty blow hit on an orc seemed too good to pass up, so I threw my wizard at him. It ended up knocking 3 guys over and removing none of them, and ultimately the game ended up as a draw where he barely scored and I likely win the game 87% of the time if I'd kept the wizard for the lightning bolt on the ball carrier. It got me thinking about if I got played on the kickoff... Did I get unlucky to not hurt anyone or are orcs just tough enough that it was strong play from him to bait me into using the fireball.

I decided to do a spreadsheet to figure out the numbers and then discovered Excel just straight up has a function that does it for me. Hello BINOMDIST, thank you very much. Here are the odds against any number of 9AV targets (columns) of getting any number of KO+ removals (rows).



So I was 55% to remove 0 orcs when I shot a fireball at 8 of them. Maybe this play would make sense if I was desperate to get lucky, but I didn't need that at all. I'm convinced the attrition fireball was a mistake, and I definitely got baited.

On the other hand, if 7AV elves were to make the same offer we'd get the following:



Now we're 75% to get rid of at least one and have pretty good chances of removing multiples. They're also better at recovering from the lightning bolt, so if an elf team were to give me that opportunity I would jump all over it.