Welcome to One Turn Touchdown! It’s finally happened, we have began our journey into the world of blogging.Let me introduce myself, I am Tom, NAF name Tommymcg, and have recently been reintroduced into the marvelous world of Blood Bowl thanks to the re release of the game in November 2016. I say reintroduced as like so many like myself i have previously played Blood Bowl in my younger days (i believe 3rd edition).What first attracted me to the beautiful game was how a system with such simple mechanics can be so tactically complex and narratively immersive. The Joy of creating, building and branding your own team, watching them grow (or collapse) and competing against other great coaches all whilst being surrounded by a uniquely characterful portfolio of artwork and fluff to set the scene was incredibly enticing. So when i first heard the news that they were re releasing the game with newly designed models and boards etc my interest was caught immediately.

The Early Days

Well the first 6 months or so getting back to grips with the game were very slow, building and painting the new teams so that i don’t have to play with the same race over and over again. During this time i think i only played a few friendly games against friends but had a hunger to really get involved competitively. It involved endless evenings browsing the web trying to find local clubs or shops that hel events, little did i know about the beautiful thing that is the NAF website or Talk Fantasy Football.

I remember attending my first competitive Blood Bowl Tournament at IBuyWargames in Woking (check it out, a great hoppy zone), that feeling you get when you complete your first event and set the foundation for the future of your gaming was great. That was it, i was hooked and spent the next few days continuously looking out for Blood bowl tournaments, and didn’t even care if they were local anymore.

The next event i attended was the reintroduction of ‘The Blood Bowl’ by Games Workshop, hosted during their annual convention ‘Warhammer Fest’. This was GW’ first attempt at organizing a competitive tournament for Blood Bowl since the re release of the game, I believe they have been running ‘The Bugmans Full Beard Cup’ at Warhammer world and hosted an event a few weeks after release but this was set to be their first large scale event. Unfortunately in my opinion, and the opinion of other attendees, its was not the most successful first attempt but we won’t get into that now. It was here that i met Chris, NAF name Crit_Hit, another coach who has fallen victim to the addiction of Blood Bowl in the London area. It’s since then that my calendar has been full of Blood Bowl events, having someone to organise games and events with really opened up a range of opportunities to compete and after a year of playing it lead us here, beginning to write a blog about the game.

So why a Blog?

So during the first year of getting reacquainted with the game it was difficult to find places to play regular games so would fill these voids with reading blogs and listening to podcasts. I came to find that what i was looking for as a new player was the experience and opinions of other coaches at the same place in their Blood Bowl journey and being someone that started again during the re release meant there were bound to be thousands just like me. This is where it came to us, if we wrote a blog, journaling our progression as new coaches, it would be beneficial to us as being more involved in the community enriches our overall Blood Bowl experience particularly when playing games isn’t as easy to organise as we would like and will hopefully benefit other new coaches by sharing experiences with other like minded people.

As big fans of the game we believe there are 3 main parts of the experience, Playing, Hobbying and Blogs/Podcasts. Different people will focus the majority of their time on one of those aspects whilst others will be equally involved in all 3. Our personal ambition is to be as involved in all three of these aspects of the hobby as we can so here we are.

What do we aim to achieve?

We discussed exactly what we want this blog to be and agreed we wanted it to be beneficial to our readers, although we will reporting on our experiences playing and hobbying etc we aim to make it relevant content to help you. Reporting on a tournament we have been to could potentially be interesting to some people but in my experience im not too interested in reading two pages about how someones ogre boneheaded 8 times in a game, i would benefit more from seeing some great paint jobs, learning from roster mistakes or even what works work in certain teams and what to expect from different events. Don’t get me wrong the frustrations and stupid dice rolls is a huge part of the game and can also be hugely entertaining and will no doubt occur on many occasions during our travels.

To begin we aim to cover the following

• League Play
• Tournament Play and experience
• Hobbying, Building and Painting etc
• The Community
• New Model Releases

At the time of writing this we have recently been to two great tournaments which we will be doing a write up about shortly, Burmayhem 2 and UKTC 4

So if you love Blood Bowl and want great content on a regular basis about the hobby as whole then follow us here and we will see you soon.