After five years and "a few" games on Fumbbl, I finally got my act together and attended my first tabletop tournament, the Peking Autumn Bowl Tournament of Chaos in Norrköping, Sweden. It was a small tournament held in a town some 250 km from where I live, and most of the attendees were local and veteran NAF players.

Two day tournament, 3 + 2 games. Random pairings without repeats for the first 4 games, then Swiss for the final round.

The tournament rule pack was interesting and a refreshing change from "Vanilla" rules. Everything was themed around the Chaos Gods. Only 14 rosters were allowed, and coaches had to choose a chaos god to be affiliated with (including Chaos Undivided and the Horned Rat). Not all choices of god were available to all rosters. Depending on the choice of Chaos God, different special rules were in play. TV was 1250, with 3 tiers of skill points. No skill stacking. Some star players were available and cost 4 SP to hire.

I took ogres, favored of Khorne. Special rule for Khorne was that once per turn, if an opponent becomes Seriously Injured or Dead *for any reason*, the Khorne team gets an extra reroll to use during the current drive.

I decided on three ogres (two with Block), one Punter with Leader, 11 gnoblars (one with Sneaky git), and Morg to make 16!

I brought my Fumbbl Dice for good luck!

Game 1: Vs Norse linemen + Borak and two bribes (!). Opponent played a strong game, taking out gnoblars and ogres left and right. Ogre crew was down to 3 big fellows on pitch after only a few turns and struggled. Borak was an absolute beast, and stayed on until turn 14. Ogres struggled to break the Norseman armor, and opponent had a deep bench with two linemen and a boar.

Game 2: Vs Chaos Pact. Morg was outstanding, ogres were well behaved, and opponent was down numbers in the second half. Ogres pulled off a 2-1 win.

Game 3: Vs Skaven with a rat ogre and 7 (!) rerolls and Leader (!). Ogres pulled off another win and absolutely brutalized the rats. Rogre was casualtied early on, leaving the rats severely short of strength. In the end, ogres carried the ball with Morg and walked the ball down the pitch. Rats kept throwing 2-die uphill blocks to try to stop him, failing every time. In the end, they made a wall of rats in front of him, but he blitzed out (2 die block to push, 4+ dodge, 3+ dodge) for the game winning touchdown.

Game 4: Vs a well built Chorf team with a mino. Chorfs played a strong game and were frighteningly difficult to remove, even with Morg doing some heavy lifting. Eventually ended up a 1-1 draw. Chorfs were favored of Slaanesh, granting all players Sprint and those with built-in Sprint got Extra Arms.

Game 5: Vs fellow Ogres with Grombrindel, Papa Skullbones (random mutations on some players), and a blessing of Tzeentch which granted a "contingency dice" rolled openly at the start of each drive, which could be substituted for any single dice roll made by the Tzeentch player during the drive (after seeing the result of the first roll). Eventually a hard-fought 1-1 draw.

Bottom line was a 2/2/1 record and fifth place out of 12 (a couple of players only played 3 or 4 games). Ogres were stoked, as was I.

Takeaways:

This was a very positive experience, and I will make sure to go to more tournaments on tabletop. Prior to the day, I had not played a complete game of tabletop in my life, so a lot of the mechanical parts of the game were new to me (turning the models back and forth to show which had been activated, using tokens to show prone/stunned big guys, keeping track of the turn counter and rerolls manually, et cetera). Thanks to the years of practice on Fumbbl, I was still able to keep up with the tournament pacing, and the gameplay as such was similar enough. It helped that I did not face a lot of Guard and had none myself, as seeing complex scrums without the benefit of player markings (as on Fumbbl) would be a little challenging.

The sense of community and camaraderie was everything I had heard about and hoped for. Everyone was super chill, noone took the gameplay very seriously, and some competent blood bowl was played.

I made sure to be extra clear about my dice rolls ("you have armor 8+, I have mighty blow. I got through without mighty blow, now rolling for injury"), mostly to be sure we were in agreement. Same with my block dice.

Fumbbl Dice were a big plus for me personally, as I was never unsure of the symbols during my own dice rolls.

My middle aged eyesight and lack of familiarity presented some challenges in seeing text written on skill rings. For my own teams, will make sure the skill/positional marking is super clear and high contrast for visibility.

Things I need to get a hold of for future tabletop play: tokens / markers would be nice, for everything from the turn and reroll counters to Stunned/Prone markers when I'm playing with big dudes. A good notebook to keep notes of games in as a journal of the tournament. A dice tower (I saw some fine examples).

Morg was outstanding, as expected. As for my Roster, I would probably have been better off taking two Guard ogres instead of one of the Block ogres. It would have been possible to swap out the two rerolls for a vanilla ogre, but the added liability of more bonehead rolls to fail and more big guys without Block, would probably not have helped.