Waterbowl 2012 - 18/19 February - Stockport

[Nippy Longskar]

Top stuff Alex, well done! I may even be back next year.

I had 6 brilliant games this year, all nail biters and against lovely folks too so thanks to you all.

Great time too with the Danes on Sat night and Sunday eve, great to meet you guys.

[Sizzler]

Hi, everybody. In a move I'll come to regret later I wrote a report.

Waterbowl Weekender – Part 1

What do you get if you find a warehouse, turn the heating off and mercilessly pump a playlist of German trance-metal into the ears of everybody inside? You get a potent, suicide-inducing cocktail, but you also get the Waterbowl Weekender.

For over half a decade Manchester has played host to this roller coaster ride of emotions. There have been highs, lows, ball-pool brawls, smash and grabs, fender benders and a bout of food poisoning that almost killed half of the British Blood Bowling community. Yet people still turn up, and in force. From every corner of the kingdom nerds will pack their dice and their travelling slippers and make the trek to the wettest city in the country. Even players from far-off lands cannot resist the call of salmonella and bad music – a longboat was seen docked at Salford Quays – and we have even seen those strange and peculiar people known as Geordies.

I took slann to this. I thought it would be fun, challenging and wanted to tease every drop of potential out of my juicy grey matter, the way people do when they learn a new word every day or force pages of an encyclopedia into their ears. They were also the only team I own so it was either that or spend the weekend building a scale replica of Dave Downes out of dice. My roster was nothing special – four catchers, seven linemen, a kroxigor and four rerolls – and its only stand-out feature was the fact that I didn't own a kroxigor and so I was using a treeman model in its place, which I promptly christened the 'Proxygor'.



The frivolities started on Friday evening when we played San Juan with the Danish. I've written a move-by-move account of the game but, feeling it was too good for this forum, have instead submitted it to the Nobel Prize Committee For Literature. Without divulging too much of this effervescent manuscript I will say that there are some highlights, such as Steyn building a coffee house, Brio producing two goods in one turn and Kare drawing two chapels. Riveting stuff I think you'll agree, and I'll see you in Stockholm when I pick up my prize.

We called it a night and Saturday morning seemed to come around faster than a cheetah on roller-skates. I was tired and frumpy and somebody had eaten all of my biscuits. I opened my bag to find a badly painted slann team, a pencil case with no pencils in it and a jam sandwich of dubious origin. Things could only get better from this point on.

Game 1 – Stick (Amazons)

I'd had a nightmare about this moment the night before. I was in my underpants beating a drum while Stick was riding a goat and blowing a trumpet. Don Vito was there too but he didn't have any fingers. I've never beaten Stick so was understandably a little nervous at the prospect of playing his amazons with my slann. I am, however, an undeniably talented Blood Bowler and so quickly began schooling him in the ways of the game. I skillfully lured him into two-dicing my ball carrier only for him to double skull it, deftly watched as he snake-eyed a go for it with the ball and, as a final coup-de-grace, I caught a late game bouncing ball whilst in one million tackle zones. The tone of the tournament was set. If my dice could retain this preternatural magnificence then I would be unstoppable.

Game 2 – Mr. Nuffle (Wood Elves)

There is a reason why people win games of Blood Bowl. When they concede a touchdown or the ball is stolen from they think to themselves 'I will not let my opponent do that to me again'. They learn, they adapt, they store each little move an opponent makes in their memory bank. If he uses his bull centaur to dodge and then blitz, you make sure that next time you will completely trap it so that the dodge is harder. If he jumps his witch elf through your cage on a 5+ with a reroll, you vow to close off the edge of your formation completely to disallow him the opportunity. These are the little changes to a plan that ensure victory – the game is always fluid and in motion and so demands malleability in a player. The reason I lost this game 5-2, then, is that I was incapable or just flat out refused to alter my game plan. I continuously moved the ball with a strength two player and so made an easy target for the strip balling wardancer. Like a caveman putting his hand in the fire I thought to myself that this time it will be different, this time the flames won't be hot. But they were and I would forever carry the blisters of defeat.

I didn't take any pictures of our game so here is a shot of my esteemed opponent in the curry house on the Saturday night. Immediately after this photo was taken he one-diced my Korma with his Jalfrezi thanks to a naan bread assist.



Game 3 – hana_666 – Wood Elves

After the severe savaging I'd received in the second game I was ready to cry. The day had yielded a veritable buffet of tier one teams and I was in no mood to gorge. A light breakfast of Stick's amazons followed by the entrée of having Mr. Nuffle's wood elves force-fed to me is not a balanced meal. But the show must always go on and so I sat down to play, wiser now and better educated in the ways of defending against strip balling wardancers. I received and promptly picked up the ball with the first strength two player I could find. In cold, Blood Bowling mimicry of Groundhog Day he once again fell foul of the leaping strip. I cursed the heavens for bestowing me with such dull wits and proceeded to attempt to recover the ball. I selected the nearest strength two player for the job and placed upon his shoulders the expectations of the whole team, not to mention the dignity of the Waterbowl League. He came up trumps, scooped the ball from under the nose of a gloating wardancer and, within seconds, was strip-balled. Hyoh!

This game somehow ended as a 2-1 win. I groggily remember Hana's dice collapsing in the second half. She played really well, much better than I did, so I can only imagine that once again shenanigans were at play. Once again though I completely failed to take any pictures, but as Noam Chomsky says in his 1977 book 'How to Write Blood Bowl Tournament Reports', pictures should be liberally interspersed between the text to maintain reader interest and so here's a pictures of my legs:



The Saturday Night

It turns out that drinking a bottle of wine has several effects upon my person. The first is that it makes me seem ultra refined when I sit, wine glass in hand and fingers perched beneath my chin like Michaelangelo's David, and make toasts with beer drinking Blood Bowlers – a solitary chrysanthemum amid the weeds and the thorns. The second is that it saves me money and thus I can spend more on fashionable jumpers and hair products. The third is that it turns me into a slobbering, slurring, Queen-toasting imperialist. I did more to provoke war between Britain and Denmark on Saturday than if a Lancaster bomber had flown over Copenhagen and reduced it to ashes.

A small contingent of Englishmen and two Danes invaded a quaint, local-frequented pub and colonised the pool table. It was then that the mainlanders stoically repelled any effort to beat them. Despite the relentless tirade of boos, swear words and disparaging remarks about Denmark as a colonial power, only one victory could be claimed by the English.

Admittedly this was not my finest hour. I was overwhelmingly inebriated - I could barely stand, could only speak in short, staccato bursts of racism and almost broke a window with a particularly adventurous pool shot. I demanded that Belinda Carlisle be played at full volume on the jukebox and only realised they had Taylor Swift on there after I had spent all of my money on peanuts. But these indiscretions were nothing compared with the ultimate blunder that I made. In a moment of shame and personal disgrace I got my medieval history wrong – in public!

Although I spent all of the Sunday apologising I must once again offer a sincere and humble apology to anybody who thought that I was offensive and rude. Lets be honest, I was and I was a Bat. I thoroughly enjoyed my time with the Danes and the meal we had on Sunday night was one of the weekend's highlights. I hope to see them all again soon and wish them all the best. I love them all and am never touching wine again!

[Don__Vito]

Sizzle is my hero... <3

[Purplegoo]

How are you not yet the mayor of Wigan, nay, the world?

[hana_666]

This was brilliant! Well done, Dave. Many, many thanks to Al again for running this.

I also offer a sincere apology to any I may have annoyed or offended with my Saturday night shenanigans.

Sizzler I doubt you could annoy or offend anyone lol your the only coach I've played against who apologised for me rolling terrible dice.. damn double skulls lol x

[hana_666]

That was awesome, well done don! And well done alex for running such a large tournament whilst also playing.

I bought my neighbours flowers and a card to apologize… I didn’t work.

You mean to say that Don serenading then at 2 in the morning with his lovely voice wasn't a good enough gift?!?!?!

Also thanks for the floor Jimmy x

[thechosengobbo]

Thanks to Alex for once again running a great tournament, and all my opponents for 6 fun games!

All in all, considering that taking an 11 man frenzy roster was a dunken dare I accepted from BIG Pete (whom I shall never listen to again) I think 2-2-2 was a rather respectable result. Even if my two victories involved a fairly large amount of horseshit (apologies again to Lauth and Gingerninja).

Hopefully at some point the nightmares of using a bashy team that will always frenzy itself out of it's own cage will subside.

[Sizzler]

Game 4 – Vagabond (Dark Elves)

Vagabond's real life job is to make computer games and this somewhat affected his tabletop experience. At the start of the game he tried to plug the board into a wall socket and halfway through turn seven he said that we couldn't continue unless we upgraded to the most recent version of Blood Bowl. When I was about to score my first touchdown he pressed circle-circle-square and all of his players became invincible. He once left to go the toilet and demanded that I stay perfectly still until he got back.

The game itself was, you guessed it, something of a haze. I'd probably remember much more about my games if I carried a notebook with me or stopped eating Pritt Sticks. Phil was a sport and a joy to play against though, and this somehow ended as another 2-1 win for me. We shook hands, drank some tea and then he taught me how get an extra 70mhz of processing power out of Zedsdead by sellotaping an AA battery to the back of his head.

Again I didn't take any pictures of this game so instead here's one of Kfoged pretending to be a tiger:



Game 5 – Barney the Lurker (Khemri)

It was civil war, then. Flame On stalwart and the man who led me to World Cup mediocrity would be my next opponent. Barney and I have played each other enough times now to know the lay of the land – I'll usually win through skill and raw talent, he'll do it through cheating and luck. I had no delusions of grandeur before playing this game, just the knowledge that Barney was well and truly outclassed. I don't normally boast about my own talents, no matter how vast and wonderfully incredible they are, but I well and truly annihilated Barney.

Okay, okay, you can probably see right through this façade. In truth Barney is a much better player than I am and beats me most of the time. I was mega jammy with some leaping in the first half to close off any chance of sacking the ball carrier when, had I failed any of the eight or more three plus rolls I had to make, I would've been in big trouble. In the second half the Khemri did what comes naturally to them and completely refused to pick up the ball. The slann capitalised and made it two and then three nil as Barney saw the futility and instead went for casualty points. A great result, but again it was more of a dice thing than anything.

Here's Barney before his team decided to rebel. He has hope in his eyes, a sense of wonder, like a child who still believes in Father Christmas:



Game 6 – Purplegoo (Skaven)

I remember the last time I heard some good news. It was twelve years ago and an announcement came over the radio saying that the Bangles had got back together. Imagine my elation, then, when I found out that I was to play Purplegoo in the final round. The Pie Bowl had gone on tour, albeit only as far as twenty miles down the road. However we were strangers in a strange land. Instead of the homely, familiar surroundings of Wigan we had been thrust deep into foreign climes, damned to play out our noble and stately game of Blood Bowl in the alien and Burberry plagued wasteland that was Stockport. Its dangerously close proximity to Manchester meant that instead of playing to an accompanying soundtrack of George Formby we instead had to settle for the Inspiral Carpets.

I went into this one with a realistic estimation of the outcome. My ambition was not to win or draw but to still be able to walk at the end of it. And walk I did, until I made the king of errors and blitzed with the Proxygor. A few turns later I was crying, curled up in the foetal position and my ice lolly had melted. Phil engaged the thrusters and promptly made it 2-0. I then begged him to be merciful, to remember the old days when we would play and laugh and gorge on mashed potatoes. I begged him to remember the good times when we had the world at our feet, when our heads were full of dreams of moving to New York to write a Broadway musical about budgies. He let me have a touchdown but that was all. I had a catcher in range for the equaliser but Phil exploded him and shouted 'Purplegoo giveth and Purplegoo taketh away!' before taking off his shirt and strangling me with it.

All in all this was another bruising encounter in which Phil took no prisoners – just one of many that he has delivered unto me over the years. I enjoyed it though. Throughout the game I was picturing him in a flat cap with a whippet by his side and a meat pie as a dice cup. The Wigan Bowls may be long gone we can still pretend that they mattered by living vicariously at tournaments and on the computer like the saddos that we are.

Summary

I'm sorry that this report has contained very little about Blood Bowl and has instead been stuffed with pseudo-factual anecdotes and outright lies. I'd like to say that I tried to document what happened in each of my games but I didn't even try. The weekend was a blast and slann were interesting. I wouldn't go as far as to say that they were fun, but I didn't feel suicidal (other than when I was draped over Leipziger's kitchen sink at 3am on Sunday morning) and have used worse teams at tournament level. I wouldn't take them to an event again unless the rulespack heavily favoured them or if Kermit the Frog was holding my family hostage.

I guess all that's left to say is thanks again to Alex for running it and to all the players for making it such a good event. I know people say that a lot and it sounds cheesy, but it's true – it really is the players that make a tournament.

I'll leave it at that, and one last photo of the glorious winner. Well done, Dave!

[KFoged]

Thanks to everybody for another great weekend in the UK!

Congrats Dave

KFoged

[Thadrin]

Can I have some of whatever Sizzler is smoking please?

and a photo of the legacy team.

[Podfrey]

Sizzler > God

And that's a mathematical truth....

[Nippy Longskar]

Can I have some of whatever Sizzler is smoking please?

and a photo of the legacy team.

Can't help with the former, but will do the latter tonight.

Sadly your catcher didn't arrive till Monday Thadrin, so he's not in the pics. I'll snap him seperately. He'll be mailed off to lucky Lauth at some point soon.

[lauth81]

Ist there a place I can subscribe to Sizzler's tourney reports?

Awesome stuff!

[Joemanji]

He does more on the Waterbowl forum : http://waterbowl.freeforums.org/

[Nippy Longskar]

Here's the legacy team - great job everyone who took part!

And good news for Hanna, I think your Hubris has arrived. Had a note through my door today to collect a packet from the post office so hopefully I'll be able to send both that and Thadrin's Catcher off to Germany.

Lauth, can you PM me a postal address please?