Elfbowl, Brighton, 22nd November 2025

 The BriBBe league, have developed a pattern of a few annual events. This year was the second ElfBowl. Unfortunately I couldn't make it last year,  so I was quite excited to make this year's event.

The premise is quite simple - the game is about passing and scoring, not about hurting. The tiebreakers are (in order) most touchdowns, most completions, touchdown difference. Casualties don't factor into it, and there is no prize for most casualties. 

The Throw a Rock Prayer to Nuffle was in effect the whole time, to discourage stalling, and there was a special elven weather mage in attendance to ensure that the weather conditions were always perfect. 

You could stack multiple skills on a player as long as they were passing, agility or certain mutations. 

This made for an interesting change to standard tournament Bloodbowl, making you push for multiple scores. 

When I first started playing elves many years ago, my tactic was always to try to score in 2 turns and spend the other 14 turns defending and trying to turnover my opponent. This tournament had a similar parallel in a few ways,  and made for some really fun games.  

I went for wood elves, who are my favourite team.  My build was pretty similar to what I've taken in recent tournaments. I like to max out on the catchers. There's a few reasons for this. Having 6 movement 8 players is really good, and I also like to get as much dodge on the team as possible. 6 starting players with dodge,  and adding it onto usually 3 more players gives the team really great manoverability. This really fits well into my play style. The other skills have usually been leader on the thrower, and strip ball and tackle on the blitzers. For this event, I switched tackle to sidestep. Whilst I thought the would be lots of dodge around, meaning that tackle would probably be useful, I went for sidestep for the one turn attempts to try to increase the total number of touchdowns. As it was, I didn’t have any one turn attempts in the whole tournament, but it was still a handy skill. 

It will be interesting to see how the team plays in Season 3. The catchers are better but two of them are gone. It is also looking like some tournaments will also limit or tax elite skills from the rulesets we have seen so far. 

It will be interesting to see how wood elves play with these restrictions. I know for most wood elf coaches, it will probably have minimal impact. I know I'm among the minority for taking all 4 catchers, with most only taking 2. Others will take the tree as standard, but I've never been too happy having a movement 2 piece on a team that I play as fast and manoeuvrable as possible. I know I'm not the only one with a preference for this sort of lineup, as Thulean won the Scottish Open earlier this year with a 4 catcher wood elf build, but I think we are not the norm. 

I'm going to talk about my games, although with the amount of action involved in the style of play means that my memory is a bit hazy, so apologies to my opponents if any of these details aren't quite right, as I didn’t make notes after the game as I was busy socialising.

Round 1 v Will (theamazingwill) 

I was saying hello to Will just as the draw was being made to discover we were drawn against each other. This was to my knowledge only the second tournament we'd both been at, and the second time we were drawn against each other round 1. 

Will had elf union and he ended up facing 3 wood elf teams over the three games! His roster included 2 dodge jump up blitzers, a dodge and sprint catcher, a cannoneer thrower and a guard lineman.

He casualtied one of my linemen on turn 1 and scored quickly after. After that, he didn't seem to hurt a single one of my players - and I managed a couple of knockouts which kept failing to come back (his guard lineman sat out almost the entire game). This was a big factor as I was outnumbering him and easily able to get hits on the ball when he had it. 

I scored back quickly and then turned him over to lead 2-1 at half time. Receiving I then went 3-1 up and another couple of turnovers meant that I ended up winning 5-1 (although Will narrowly missed scoring a second at the death). 

It was a difficult game for Will's elves who definitely didn't seem to want to be as elfy as mine.

Round 2 v Chris (hexbaron)

Continuing a theme, this was the second time that myself and Hexbaron had played. Last time I gave him a bit of a dicing, and sitting down I suggested we agreed that I would dice him again and call it there.  

Obviously I was joking but it did start to go a little bit that way. 

He had a human team with three guard and one frenzy on the blitzers, a block ogre and a four catcher build (block, sneaky git, sidestep and no skill). It was a scary looking team on paper. 

I kicked and he had grouped his played near the halfway line. I was able to manufacture a one die block on his ball carrying thrower which was a pow into a casualty. The ball came loose but neither side wanted to pick it up. Eventually I got hold of it and screened off my ball carrier ready for a turn 7 score.

Greedily, I took a 2-die block on a blitzer before I was going to score. This was double skulls and without any re-rolls, it meant that Chris was able to stop me scoring. We both agreed that this was a silly thing to do, especially as it triggered the Throw a Rock Prayer to Nuffle. 

The second half went a bit more to plan for both of us as we were trading scores. I went 2-1 up leaving Chris a chance at a one turn touchdown - he had 2 options to do so with both a halfling and a sidestep catcher. The blocks didn't go well for the chainpush option and my sidestep wardancer moved next to the ogre to make the throw trickier. The halfling got the ball but the ogre spiked him into the ground. I had opted to kick the ball deep in the hope of making the one turn impossible - which we both agreed afterwards again was a bad decision, and in the event actually ended up making the one turn attempt easier. 

I was exceptionally lucky to get out of the game with a win, especially after 2 big mistakes that I had made, but it meant that I was on the top table for the final game. 

Round 3 v Kev (coach_kev)

I have played Kev three times before (although only twice at full BloodBowl, in a continuing pattern to my previous opponents). This time it was an elf-off on the top table. Kev had high elves with a canoneer thrower, guard and tackle blitzers, three dodge and one wrestle on the catchers and a kick lineman.

A lot of the details of the game have escaped my memory now. I mainly remember forgetting every time that Kev had kick, and not realising why he was throwing a more difficult throw than he could have done to use canoneer! We both had a lot of snaked dice, in a very unelfy manner. 

We were trading touchdowns and I was 2-1 up in the second half on my drive. He ran a two catchers up up to try to score back, and I surrounded them. He slightly alleviated the pressure on one of them who he was about to throw to, but the thrower snaked meaning he kept hold of the ball because of safe pass. Whilst this wasn't a turnover, there wasn't too much Kev could do to protect the ball carrier and I was able to steal the ball and get a third which sealed the game.

Conclusion 

Kev and I both scored 10 touchdowns, meaning the most TD award would go to one of us, however as I was one of only two coaches on 3 wins, he received it due to the highlander rule. I had managed to score three more touchdowns than CptOats, the other player on 3 wins, and manage to with the first ever Steven Seagull trophy (which is an excellent idea and I think we're going to try to get a SKABB horse trophy for tournaments).

Overall, it was three really fun games of BloodBowl, and I really enjoyed the format. I will definitely be trying to get back next year if the date works.