Exhibition, Week Two

I didn’t have time to write about this yesterday, so I thought I’d take care of it today. Wednesday night saw the Philadelfia Eagles (did you see what I did there?) in their second exhibition match against the Karak Eight Peaks Piercers, which is a goblin team coached by my buddy J. The game went, well, just about the way you would expect a game to go when goblins are on the field. In other words, there was a lot of silliness and a lot of injured goblins. See, while most teams have a clear, effective strategy in mind, goblins don’t. Dwarfs are tough and resilient, and thus great at grinding their opponent down. Elves are agile and quick, and excel at outmaneuvering their opponent. Orcs just beat everything in the face as hard as they can. Goblins are focused around being ridiculous.

For starters, they’re weaker than almost everything else on the pitch, with low armor and a skill that makes them more likely to get injured. They do have two skills that help them dodge around the field, but when you consider the fact that they have only average Agility and take a penalty to throw the ball, this doesn’t help so much. What do they have, you ask? Craziness. For starters, a goblin team can take two trolls. They’re big. They’re scary. They’re stupid. They’re perfect for Blood Bowl. On top of this, goblins can also take a number of illegal secret weapons. There’s a goblin that throws bombs, another that uses a pogo stick. There’s a goblin fanatic with incredible strength. And then there’s my favorite – a goblin with a chainsaw.

The most common goblin strategy is to have your trolls throw the goblins. Yes, they are allowed to do this. You can pick up the goblin holding the ball and hurl him downfield, in hopes that he lands on his feet and can scramble into the endzone for a touchdown. Or you can chuck a goblin into a tightly-packed group of your opponents and hope to take a few out. This strategy tends to work very well. . .at least, if you don’t roll like J. Another thing I should explain is that J is a good player. He’s been playing for years and has sound strategies. But, for whatever reason, when he’s across the table from me, his dice hate him. It doesn’t matter which game we’re playing, he will make bad rolls that would cause a mathematician’s head to explode with the improbability of it. This happened during our game.

To begin, he had a Hell of a time just trying to pick up the ball. On top of this, he was having players get knocked out left and right, but couldn’t seem to find enough umph to take out any of my own players. His chainsaw-wielding crazy manage to knock one of my elves down, but couldn’t injure him, and was himself taken out only moments after taking the pitch. One goblin was even killed by one of my blocks. On top of it all, two goblins were eaten by his trolls! Thankfully, it was just a practice game. In all, J had six goblins injured by the end of the game, three of them dead, and several had been knocked out, returned to the pitch, and then been knocked out again. I had lost not a single player, and, in fact, only had three or four knocked out during the course of the game. Final result? Philadelfia Eagles (did you see what I did there?) 5, Karak Eight Peak Piercers 1.

Also, I found this (misspelled) demotivational poster that expresses my sentiments for Blood Bowl: