Kent Team Championship 2026, 21-22 February 2026 in Canterbury

Last weekend we ran the 4th iteration of the Kent Team Championship (the third as a NAF approved event). 

Every year I am overawed by the number of people that trust that we will put on a great Blood Bowl event. The first year as a NAF-event blew my mind. We had 120 coaches, largely unexpectedly. I had thought that we might hit around half of that number. In 2025 we switched to a 2-day, 6-game event when the numbers dropped slightly (I imagine that it is trickier to get a team of 4 who are able to commit to a whole weekend than it is for a one-day event), but in 2026 we were back up to the 120 mark.

Thank yous

Whilst I am the lead, there are so many people who help to make the experience what it is, and I want to thank them straight off before I forget to do so. There are:

the referees - eldritchfox, whitehot and andiroo

the advisors - saltyseawench, starferret, hexbaron, torquemada, cptoats, purplechest, misspelledtree

the streamers - New Dice Please (videos of the top table are available here) 

the sponsors (and we were incredibly lucky with their generosity this year) - Charlie Victor, Hearthforge Games, Austromancy Crafting, Black Orc Down, Boss Bunka, Ashdown Gaming, Docminiature, Artis Opus and Troll Trader

the food purchaser - damology

the artists - paganagent (for the artwork on the rulespack) and gazatollah (for an amazing job painting the top table pitch donated by Hearthforge, pictures below)

It is a testament to the community how many people will come together and help to make a Blood Bowl event awesome. 

Rulespack

I had originally put together the rulespack after doing a deep dive into large Blood Bowl events. Where we were looking to pitch our event has been to be as middle of the road as possible. Whilst that might seem a bit boring, we want a rulespack that will appeal to as many people as possible, and we are aware that we are the largest Blood Bowl event in the South East (and the 7th largest in England in 2025) and we may be the only tournament some players go to each year. We want to focus on a combination of a competitive tournament and a good user experience.

This year, we switched to providing most of the lunches ourselves, with the venue providing only the chilled items - sandwiches and wraps. This allowed us a sizeable cost saving which will be invested back in to enhancing the user experience in future years. 

Somewhat annoyingly, after putting a lot of research and effort into creating a rulespack, Games Workshop decided to release a new edition meaning we had to rewrite it a few months before the tournament itself. There were therefore a few changes. Firstly, we ditched the squad point system. Not knowing how teams would play meant that we wanted to avoid anything that would skew roster choices towards one race or another.

As it was, we had a significant number of Old World Alliance teams (17 out of a possible 30) with nurgle, amazons and orcs all registering 10 or more teams. I think potentially OWA need to be "Tier Zeroed" if there is no change before next year. Having played as and against them, they are exceptionally strong with very few bad match ups. 

With the introduction of elite skills in the Season 3 rulebook, we wanted to adopt them. However limiting them to 4 seems a bit harsh on some teams. As such, we essentially put in a rule that meant every team had to have a minimum of 1 non-elite skill. 

The NAF had also released their BB2025 recommendations before the event. We adopted these in full for gameplay, but we did not include Slann as a playable race. This was partly due to how close to the event the revised roster was released, and partly because personally I don't think that we should be playing any non-GW rules.

By the same logic, whilst the NAF have allowed tournament organisers (TOs) to make the stalling rule optional, it didn't sit right with us that we did so - especially when so few games have been played under the new rules to see if it really is an issue at all. 

However, we were cautious about allowing the usage of stars. We limited it to just the stunty teams (excluding snotlings who were not in the stunty tier) and we banned a lot of the stars that were thought to be egregious, so there was a fairly long ban list. 

In previous years we have had a spreadsheet for teamsheet submission - borrowed and adapted from the German Team tournament. As there was a significant change to a number of rosters, we moved away from this and suggested that coaches create their teams on BB Roster. The idea was that we would export rosters and put them through Sann's tableau, however the csv export functionality isn't currently available. Instead we created a list of all the rosters and also uploaded them to the software we were using - BBTM. 

I'd been working a lot with Seanh1986, the developer of BBTM, to implement and test functionality within the software which allows team events to run with an odd number of teams - something that has permanently been a worry for me! It will pair off 3 (or more, but usually 3) teams where they will play a mixed match up, and will win the match up if they win more than they lose, draw if they win the same number, and lose if they lose more than they win. It's really neat functionality which should mean we are able to run the event with fewer people needed as spare players in the future.

There was one issue with the software - although it was a user error - where because of a result not correctly being logged, the runner up individual was wrong on the day (although we noticed within an hour and everything will be corrected!) but otherwise it worked well, and I feel is much less of a distraction than Tourplay which some coaches will try to keep up to date as the game progresses, which can cause games to slow. 

The winners of the tournament were Hacktics and Globetrics - a team comprising members of the Hackflem Globetrotters and Tactics and Theatrics - comprised of Breakmonker, Elplanet4 El_spoonio and Punchymcragefirsts. 

l-r breakmonker, punchymcragefists, el_spoonio and elplanet4

One of the strange things about running an event of this size and trying to make sure everything is going smoothly is that you're not really noticing who is and isn't doing well a lot of the time. Going into the final round, there were 5 teams on 8 points, separated only by the tiebreakers. We had the first tie breaker as the number of individual wins but have been discussing this and may look to change in the future. As it is, the winning team beat the only other team on 10 points on all the common tiebreakers - head to head, strength of schedule and number of individual wins. I've had conversations with a couple of people around whether this should change and if so, what it should change to. 

The next steps for me are to write a full guide about how we've been running the event. This is my fourth year of running it and I'm really pleased by how it is going. I'd like to run 1 or 2 more before handing over to someone else to take the reigns - either on their own or as part of a committee. If you're interested in helping out in any way or potentially even taking the lead in future years, then do get in touch for a chat. 

If you were at the tournament and haven't already done so, please can you take a few moments to fill out the feedback form. It can really help us to understand what you thought of the tournament and what you want from future tournaments to try to make them as great as possible. 

Next year we will be looking to run the event on the same weekend, so it will be the 20th and 21st February 2027. Information about this will be shared in the coming months as we put it all together. 

Finally, we also have a little lost and found, so if you've lost or found and of these let us know!

Missing
- 1 x small Docminiature case containing dice and tokens
- 1 x goblin black and yellow D8

Found
- 1 x SKABB Summerslam ball token
- 1 x Season 3 official cheat sheet
- 1 x KTC 2026 dice cup
- 1 x Wood Elf Pitch (box only)