The more I’ve played blood bowl, the more I’ve come to notice a pattern in many coaches that I think lowers their overall defensive success. That is, they are very reluctant to mark opposing players while on defense.

Now, there are a lot of reasons why this is. Coaches are reluctant to put their players in harm's way. While I may subscribe to the thought process that I would rather all my players die than lose the game, I understand not all coaches will be willing to throw away their players’ lives so cavalierly. And there is definite value in protecting one’s players, both from a one game perspective, and from the meta perspective. It’s easier to score in half 2, after all, if you aren’t down to 7 players.

But a bigger part of the reason why coaches don’t aggressively mark I think comes down to learning the game. Blood bowl is complicated. Very complicated. When I think about the number of rules I have to explain to someone just to get them started in their first exhibition game, I realize it's a miracle anyone plays this game at all. So, after we get the basic rules down to a new player, we tend to teach them some axioms to go by. Do moves that don’t require dice first, prioritize making 2 dice blocks, set up proper cages and such. But one of these new player “rules” is to not give the opponent free hits.

And there’s good reason for this! In general, the more blocks you throw, the more casualties you will generate, and so the converse is true as well; the more blocks you give up, the more casualties, on average, you will take. And so, we don’t want to tell new coaches to just base players, get blocked to oblivion and quit as their teams die.

But there’s a level beyond this basic understanding of the game. Not all blocks are created equal, and sometimes it is worth risking your players to put pressure on the ball. Marking your opponent’s players where they are going to have to throw less good blocks means that both your players are less likely to get removed (or if they are, the opponent was more likely to have to have committed more resources to do so), and openings for yourself are more likely to occur. Moreover, the opponent is less likely to be able to move forward with their drive.

Take the standard double column defense that I see coaches use all the time. This defense puts zero pressure on the ball, but relatively maximum protection on the players. It's no Dakka, but you’re generally just getting hit once a turn. Your players are safe, and the opponent can only reliably move forward 1 or 2 squares a turn. So what’s the problem? Well exactly that, your opponent can move forward 1 or 2 squares a turn. A half is 8 turns long, and a half of a pitch is only 13 squares. If for 7 turns a team is moving forward 2 squares a turn, well by the end of the half they are already at the doorstep of the endzone! Even a dwarf team can manage to move forward like that. And not just that, with multiple rerolls now, any AG3+ team can score half the time once they are close to the endzone through a double column if they are judicious with saving their rerolls.

But think instead if you are marking opposing players strategically and aggressively as they move forward. Now, to protect the ball the offense is going to have to do one of two things. They could stand there, move players to set up 2 dice blocks and hit your guys down. But if they do that, how are they gaining ground to move forward? At the start of a defensive drive where each team has 11 players, the defense effectively has more players than the offense. On defense you have 11 guys you can pressure the ball with, the offense only has 10 guys to protect it with. If they are moving guys around to block off your markers, it is now much tougher for them to actually gain ground and score by the end of the half. And now when it gets to the later turns of the half, you can even switch back to a more conservative defense now that they are so much farther from the endzone than they would have been had you been doing it that way the whole time.

The other option is to take some riskier moves to move forward. They could try some dodges, or hit some 1 die blocks to have more action efficiency while they move. But this is exactly what you want as a defense. Every dodge is a chance they fail, every 1 die is a chance they knock themselves over. Every fail they reroll is another reroll you’ve bled from them. Even elves fail their dodges 1 out of 6 times. Make them roll more bad dice and the failures will come. And once the fail comes, you can aggressively go after the ball. Remember, on offense they have to succeed every time, you only have to succeed once.

But all of this is hard to do, and takes a lot of experience. Knowing where and how to mark opposing players to make their options bad is hard, and varies greatly from team to team. It depends a lot on survivability of your players, relative strength values and game states. It's easy to mess up in an aggressive defensive style, and it's not always right to use one.

In a lot of ways, blood bowl is a game about constantly unlearning what you have learned. As you progress you will learn rules that you mustn’t break until you know when it is right to do so. And it never stops. Even the best coaches, or rather especially the best coaches, are always learning and adapting. Not that I am one of the best coaches, but I myself am realizing how I need to actually learn how to use big guys properly. For most of my time playing, I’ve just avoided them because I hate unreliability in my players. But that just means I’ve been potentially robbing myself of a powerful tool for the teams that can use them properly.