Wow, what a great turn out. A second week of carnage in the Ordo Bowl, whilst no Goblins were killed, two more Dark Elf Blitzers were, along with my hopes of a perfect start.

I’ll be honest. Norse vs Dwarves is a crap match up for the Northmen. Whatever Burk may be thinking on the matter, a bunch of dudes with AV 7 and Block is going to come off worse than a bunch of dudes than AV9 and Block, The troll IS a problem for the dwarves, but he’s still only AV8, so a slayer with an assist can hope to get lucky and hurt him, or at least stun. This early in the league when he has no improvements, he is vulnerable.

To be clear, in my view Blood Bowl Dwarves are the anti-christ. In a starting roster you can have all your positionals and 3 re-rolls. Over half the team is AV 9 and has tackle, and 90% get block to start with. That makes them a nightmare for all my favourite BB teams, and a kind of fun black hole.

I went into the match with a pretty clear plan in my head:

• Kick in the first half
• Defend solidly in the midfield to force the dwarves to pick a flank to go down
• Attempt to stop a score in the first half, but not at the cost of  too many casualties
• Keep the troll off the line of scrimmage and use him to Blitz key players.

I felt confident that if I was at player parity at HT and the score was 1-0 I would be in good shape for a draw, and that would do me just fine against my least favourite opponents in all of Bloodbowl.

The first two parts went well. I won the toss, gave Burk the ball and then set up a solid centre with open sides and the Snow troll waiting in the midfield to pounce. However, that’s where the good news ended! Early in the drive, Burk had committed to a flank, I had started to cover its advance and was about to land the troll on one corner of it. Blitzed in, double skulls, decided I didn’t want to waste the reroll on a loner in Turn 3 and he promptly picked up a MNG. I ummed and aaahed over the apothecary but saved it on the basis that no permanent damage had been done. The same turn 2 more players entered the KO box and things went downhill from there. The last place you want to be against dwarves is players down.

I didn’t really have a play here, so was just trying to pick at the edges of the formation whilst Burk rolled down to score on his turn 8. So I was at 1-0 down at the half, but I was also a troll down. This was going to be a problem on offence!

On the plus side, all my KO’d dudes returned for the second period, so I set up filled with hope for a better second half. Surely things had to look up… right…

The second half didn’t start that well. I re-rolled double skulls to double skulls with my 3rd block on the line. Fortunately the ball was safe and Burk wasn’t really able to capitalize too much. If anything he left me a bit to much space either side. I picked up the ball and began a relatively convincing dummy down one side – so convincing that I nearly lost the ball by underestimating how much Burk would commit – he managed to put two tacklezones on my carrier…!

None-the-less I was able to extricate the ball carrier, and then finally had a nice couple of turns with the blocks stunning 4 dwarves over 2 turns and switching totally to the other flank. With 3 turns in the half left I felt good. I move a sideline half cage up into scoring range with not much but a runner in its way, and then  made 2 fairly stupid mistakes.

I was too cautious with the ball carrier. Not wanting to GFI without any rerolls I left him a square too far back, unable to get cover from my guard and putting him in range of a player to move in behind. I then left Burk a nice chain push towards my carrier allowing him a 2D blitz on the runner. Numpty. The dwarves duly rolled all the right dice at all the right times and the ball got bounced into the crowd. They obligingly booted it deep into my half, just in the right spot for a Dwarf blitzer to amble over to it, pick it up and mosey back towards my end zone whilst his teams mates punched a bunch of my guys in the face.

I had a last gasp play for a 1D on the ball carrier with my Blitzer but he failed the final dodge roll before the block and so Burk was able to secure a well earned 2-0 win. To be fair after his match last week he probably deserved it!

Post match I picked up 40k GP in winnings, a new regular skill on a lineman who managed a completion to add to his MVP from week 1, but slightly annoyingly my MVP this week landed on another lineman. Ho-hum. I should at least be able to re-buy my Ulfwerener next week.