Diet Bowl, 24th January 2026, London
January is usually a difficult month for me to attend events due to work deadlines, however this year has been much better/less stressful and I'm keen to get as much experience of Season 3 as possible before Kent Team Championship 2026 which I will be refereeing at. Thus, I took a trip up to London town for the first event of the London Tournament Series 2026.
It turns out that since I regularly travelled up to London 7 years ago, it has changed a bit. There are new underground lines! Or rather they've renamed one and added another. I got to go on the Windrush and Elizabeth lines. How modern! Although whichever one is just a renaming of the Overground fooled me, as some of the trains are direct. Such as the one I got on, which meant that it didn't stop at Whitechapel as I had expected. Nevermind, I decided to walk to the venue from there as it was a lovely day and I had lots of time. Sometimes it is nice to have a wee stroll through London. I even saw a dragon.
The rulespack was a bit lean on skills for the lower tiers, and as TO cptoats has declared skaven to be dead and put them in tier 4, I decided to try to prove him wrong.
Round 1 v Callum (bassmanuk)
This was until I sat down to play my first opponent. Callum is a lovely chap, but he was a try hard with OWA and he kept inventing skills on his team. "Oh, my dwarf bltizer has diving tackle", "my human blitzer has tackle", "my treeman doesn't have loner", "my catcher is strength 3", "my dwarf lineman have block".
Holy heck, have OWA been improved. They are now seriously sickeningly good. If everyone doesn't start giving them the vampire/amazon/underworld treatment and denying them everything, then they are just going to be literally everywhere.
I kicked and Callum made sure he avoided stalling by dodging his dwarf linemen around. He did give me an opportunity to dodge a gutter runner around the back, who then stabbed his ball carrying thrower into the knock out box. I was a 4+ with a re-roll away from stealing the ball and running off with it but it wasn't to be unfortunately. The OWA recovered and scored in turn 8.
I tried the one turner but failed the 5+ pass needed. Looking at it now, I should have had a gutter runner in the middle of my half for an easier pass and then a handoff if that worked out better. I will definitely remember that for next time.
Receiving, I was looking to score quick and then hopefully turn the OWA over, but there was no way through. The ball got knocked loose and then recovered by the dwarf blitzer. I was able to use my last re-roll to get a POW and knock it loose, with a gutter runner then picking it up and running away with it.
The annoying strength 3 human catcher wrestler the gutter to the ground and it looked like it was over, but the rat ogre was heroically dodging all over the place and managed to push a player onto the ball. My blitzer dodged free and rushed twice into the endzone. My thrower dodged twice and then picked up the ball in a tackle zone. Just a 5+ pass with pass and then a catch to get a tie. My thrower obviously let me down again.
After the game, I was a little down about the result, but the team were very much in the game, and there were two 5+ passes which could have led to a score, and also a 4+ pickup with could have both denied the score and possibly led to one of my own. On most days, I would have got something out of this game, so it proved that the team is still very viable.
Round 2 v James (gj703)
I'd been chatting to James at lunch. He was playing my favourite team - wood elves - so I knew what needed to be done to stop them. This is the match up that the other way round I had lost 6-0 at Brassbowl.
I've played James a few times now, and this is the first time I've managed to beat him. Initally it looked like it was going his way, with 2 casualties on the line of scrimmage. However he snaked a handoff to his wardancer, and things went entirely my way from that point onwards. I swarmed the ball and then got a ridiculous number of casualties (it ended with 6 in total). He tagged my gutter runner with the ball, allowing me to stall and so it was 1-0 at half time.
I slowly moved up for a second, but the woodies score back quickly. I manage a third, meaning a 3-1 win.
Really weirdly, pretty much every kick off seemed to be brilliant coaching, despite the game really being heavily reliant on my armour and injury dice.
Round 3 v Alex (dralps)
Alex is the reigning stunty champion in the London Tournament Series, and he was playing ogres. With 6 casualties, I was near the front of the pack and thought I might be on with a shot at most casualties being up against a lot of armour 6 pieces.
I kick the ball (I think I had the choice in all three games and chose to kick) and start to target gnoblars. They leave the pitch fairly swiftly. I bide my time and on a turn when an ogre bonehead leaves me a shot at the ball with my blitzer, I take it and run away with the ball. An ogre also gets casualtied and Alex plays most of the game without any gnoblars on the pitch. I end up with a 4-0 win in this one, which is a bit excessive but is enough to win me the most touchdowns award despite not having scored in my first game!
Conclusion
With a 2/0/1 record, I finished 12th out of 32. I really don't think skaven are dead. The loss of gutter runners is annoying, and you have to be more careful to protect the 2 left, but underworld have done alright and they only have 1. The strip ball on the blitzers is really nice to have. It didn't come into play in the OWA game, due to the thrower having sure hands, but it did in the others and having it on a strength 3 piece rather than a gutter runner, and also allowing the gutter runners to have other skills is really handy. Stab on the gutter runners isn't plan one, but I used it in every game, and a risk free armour roll is not to be sniffed at.
I think I could definitely play this team better, and in a ruleset which doesn't restrict skill choices to two of any skill, I might skill them up differently, but I was really happy with how the team played, despite being rather nervous about how they would play!
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