The rust, it is real

I haven't been playing Blood Bowl much the past little while and in the first game of my new season it showed.  I was playing dwarves against dark elves, a matchup I generally like.  I kicked to my opponent to start and got a lucky turnover that let me grab the ball and dominate the field.  I crunched five elves and scored right at the end of the half to be up 1-0.  My position was excellent, though unfortunately between the apothecary and elves waking up from KOs my opponent still had a full roster for the second half.

In a small bit of hubris I even used my troll slayer to get the touchdown because he really needed the experience.  I don't normally do this a lot, but I figured with the entire elf team lying on the ground, having given up on the half, it was worth the risk.

But although the first half went great, the second half was a catastrophe.  I received the ball and made a crucial error.  I could have just decided to hold onto my lead and cage as hard as possible right off the bat but instead I left the ball back field some with the ball carrier guarded.  I put a ton of pressure on the elves all over the place, and it looked like my opponent had pretty crappy chances at the ball carrier.  However, he made a ton of dodges and go for its and managed to get a single die block on the ball carrier which worked.  Then my counter attack failed to do anything useful and he made a bunch more blocks, dodges, and a pickup and scored.

My play wasn't monumentally stupid, but it wasn't correct.  I should have just let the elves do whatever they wanted and rushed the ball to the middle of the field.  Doing that would have meant more blocks on my lower armour characters, and probably real difficulty moving the ball, but that didn't matter.  I didn't need to score again, I just needed to keep the dwarves in a pile that the elves couldn't penetrate.  I successfully forced my opponent to roll a ton of dice and they came up favourably for him, but I could have made it harder.  I could easily blame luck, but I don't think I should.

With the game tied 1-1 I received again and got the ball into a good strong cage.  The elves attacked hard, risking their poor, snappable necks, and I was faced with a decision.  I could just rebuild the cage and accept a tie or I could go for it and try to score to win.  I wasn't at all sure that I could win if I just sat there because I had already burned several turns of the second half and dwarves are not fast.  I figured out a configuration where I could get the ball carrier far away from all the elves and have a dwarf with guard protecting him.  My opponent needed an absurd number of dodges to get elves onto the ball, and also a bunch of go for its.  I decided that I should go for the win rather than just sitting tight and hoping for a draw.

I watched my opponent test out various lines of play to try to get the ball and some of them involved single elves rolling six different dice, each of which would end their turn if failed, and there were still other elves rolling a bunch of dice that would be required to stop me.

So the elves rolled all of their dice, made all of their rolls, and took the ball.  Every turn I did my best to make the elves roll as many dice as possible to try to get the ball back, and every turn they made their rolls, and on the last turn of the game the elves made a collection of dodge rolls, walked around the dwarves with ease, and scored to win the game 2-1.

It is tempting to blame luck when your opponent rolls a huge number of dice and makes improbable plays come home.  I know that a lot of the key plays were statistically like to fail, but worked anyway.

But I shouldn't have allowed those key plays to happen the way they did.  If you keep giving the opponent a 25% chance to take the ball, you can't complain when it comes home sometimes.

It is tricky sometimes when trying to deconstruct my play when we are on 2 minute turns.  It is simple to criticize plays from your armchair when you have all the time in the world to consider and you can see the dice results already.  I don't expect that my plays will be perfect when I look at them this way.  However, I think it is important to write down what I screwed up and why.  I had reasons for my plays at the time, but those reasons were not good enough.  I need to play more like dwarves, and make sure that if my opponent gets a shot at the ball it is with a player that is surrounded by dwarves and who will get crunched even if they succeed.  I need to play tighter, and be willing to grind out tough 1-0 wins.  I don't need to get more points, I just need to make sure my opponent gets none.

Now I hope I can put those hard lessons into practice in my next game against the rats.  Thankfully the rats are squishier than the elves so I should have an easier time getting a numbers advantage on them.