“I wrote a letter to a friend about the game, and I'm posting it here as an in-depth match report.

So here's an epic story of my own:

I lost a big game recently. Well, sort of. I actually tied, but it was the seventh (and deciding) game of the conference. (I'm in the Aussie league, if I didn't tell you) I tied the game, so I didn't advance. If I had advanced I'd been in the Premier Aussie division, with a shot at winning it all and being the best team down under, at least for a season.

[edit: well, guess I advanced anyway =)]

It was a pretty interesting game. If I had played even slightly better, or gotten slightly luckier, I would have easily won. I'm playing a nasty 15 man skaven team, one blodge strip ball gutter, one blodge ss gutter, and one monstrous ag5 horns dauntless gutter. (horns and dauntless are both doubles in lrb4) With him, he's ma9, agi4 dodge and if he makes his dauntless roll it stacks with horns, so if he's blitzing he's your str+1. Makes him downright brutal with the agi5, I can dodge anywhere. I have a guard/bt rat ogre and a claw storm vermin, a mb vermin, and a block claw linerat. 2 dp's, everything else is pretty normal.

He has a pretty brutal team. 3 dp's, although one of them is str4 so he doesn't foul with it much. 4 mummies, 1 mega with block/bt/stand firm/guard, 2 with block and one with nothing. 3 block/tacklers, which is bad news for me with my precious gutters. One amazing av6 thro-ra, which is mildly threatening but never seems to matter in this game.

If you're interested in either, team, here is the match report link, and a link to each team:
http://fumbbl.com/FUMBBL.php?page=match&id=3071487 match
http://fumbbl.com/FUMBBL.php?page=team&op=view&team_id=619533 rats
http://fumbbl.com/FUMBBL.php?page=team&op=view&team_id=572897 mummies

Blizzard starts the game out. Weird. We both figure it'll go back to sunny on the first kickoff (that's what usually happens when I roll blitzzard), but instead it rages for the whole game! Therefore, gfi's were extremely limited.

Another wonderful thing happened. I had one handicap, and it was Iron Man, which makes one of your players invincible for the game. The worst injury he can get is stunned, even on a casualty roll. Of course I gave it to the agi5 gutter runner, and I wasn't disappointed. He spent most of the game focusing on that one guy! This guy also absorbed two casualty rolls as stuns!

I really should have beat him, but I was nervy. This was a very important game, and it hasn't been long since I've started considering myself to be really good.

We start out, I kick, I just block a lot, foul, make a halfassed attempt at a cage near the top sideline, and fail something before I pick up the ball.

He moves up to capitalize, puts his mummies in my face. So I take the bait and blitz the wide lane clear, and go for the short pass to my gutter runner, hoping to outrun him and score quick. I fail the pickup and rr it, and then proceed with the pass even though I have no reroll! It was a dumb idea, and of course I failed the pass and it scattered outside my lines. The rest of the half consisted of hangar surrounding the ball with like 3 guys and me trying to get lucky with my agi5 and kill hangar, both of which I eventually do. The bh on the blitz-ra regenerates to my dismay, but I get a pass to an open man (quite a lucky series of dice rolls for me!) and go in for the score. I score on the last turn, he fluffs his last turn and just like that, it's the second half.

I must explain now that I hired a wizard, which makes a fireball that hits a 3x3 area at the beginning of any of your turns. Any model in a square hit takes an agility test, with no modifier, and if they fail they're knocked over as if by an opponent with mighty blow. I have saved this wizard till the second half for an easy touchdown (wizards are just ace against khemri), and I totally wasted it. Oh, the hatred! It burns inside me...

So I fluff the kick (even though I have kick!) with a Bad Kick and it scatters in the wrong direction and off the pitch, and of course the ornery bastard gives it to his ultra mummy. And of course he cages this mummy like it's in style, with almost no chance for me to break through, even with my agi5. eventually I get impatient and use the fireball midfield! It works wonderfully. Oh wait, it didn't knock the mummy with the ball over, just every other guy near him!

This is where I make the most crucial error of the game. My agi5 is lying next to the ball when I put this fireball off. I can blitz the mummy! I'll get two block dice with my cheesy horns/dauntless combo! So I do it, I clear the way and blitz. I forget that in lrb4, you have to actually move at least one square in order to get the str bonus. So I get a 1die block, fail my dauntless at first and reroll it, and it comes up both down. I don't have block and he does, so that sucks for me!

Basically after that he just screened very well, and I wasn't able to effectively get around it. I tried several times to blitz with both the strip ball gutter and the agi5, but I just didn't get the luck I needed and he scored, and we tied. It was sad =/ He played much better than I did though and really he deserved a win, only his khemri are slooooooow.

I was happy that I got a lot of money (50k) and with 3 cas each, we tied.

I really misread this game, looking back. I threw the ball into a mass of khemri. With the blizzard, I could have easily played keep-away, used the gutters to run around the perimeter, blitz with the claw storm vermin and foul a lot. With 9 ma and gfi's failing on a 1-2, I should be able to outrun anything he can throw at me. especially on the agi5, 2+ dodges even in a tackle zone. Then, later, I wasted the fireball when I didn't really have the support to take advantage of it. And of course I forgot the rules and really paid for it this game. Hangar played a much more solid positioning game than I did. I blame it on my newness with skaven. I'm probably more used to positioning dark elves and lizards, and haven't learned to use my fodder effectively. ”