The Wheel of Chaos Rolls Over Frank and Norm

A brief introduction: Frank and I play Blood Bowl. Blood Bowl is best played online (sorry, purists). Online, there are sweet tournaments, such as the WHEEL OF CHAOS III! Frank and I both qualified, though with relatively unprepared teams. Remember my our grudge match teams? Those were our entrants, plus a few extra rookies to buff up our benches. Each of us were paired with a tough-looking team; Me against Lizardmen, Frank against some blodged-up Dark Elves. Here's a transcript of my match report (original report and java replay available here.)

Click through to read the report on our site instead, because we love you.

Yo! I'm fly. I'm the female boss. I'm number one.

I decided it was time to step out of the shadows of this blog and into the light. You've seen my influence around the blog and you don't even know it! How does that feel? Is it strange? Let me back up, I'll tell you the story from the beginning.

Frank started teaching me how to play 40K about a year and a half ago. Due to moving from one state to another and then other responsibilities, I've learned some, but not nearly enough to comfortably hold my own on the table. I play Blood Angels. This is my captain which Frank sculpted for me!





I had a decent list that I could occasionally beat Frank with (though I'm convinced he was letting me win), but when I took it into my first tournament (infantry only), I was sorely disappointed with how poorly it did against other teams. This scared me off of 40K for a little while, but eventually Frank got me to play again in the team tournament where we played together (re: Texas Tag-Team Tournament ). That's right, his dark apprentice is here... on Just a Rhino. Writing about... wait for it... 40K from a beginning girl's perspective (keep reading, don't give up yet). I know what you may be thinking, what could this girl tell me that I don't already know? A girl talking about learning the ins and outs of 40K will be boring right? WRONG! You are so very very wrong. Ever wish your girl friend, wife or girl who you sort of know who lives down the street that waves to you sometimes would play with you? Point her to this blog, I'll show her anyone can do it and it is fun! Are you a girl whose S/O plays miniatures games and you have no idea what he's talking about? I'm here to help. Plus I'm funny and my hair is blue so you have to like me.

Anyway, in the time that I've known Frank, he and Norm started Just a Rhino. I take 85% of Frank's pictures of the grudge matches and edit 100% of them. I also created the JaRBBL poster as well as filming and editing the grudge match videos. So as I said in the beginning of the post, you've already seen my influence around JaR, but now you'll see more of it. Don't worry, I'll post about other things as well, like Space Hulk (which by the way Frank has never beat me in... take THAT) and perhaps Super Dungeon Explorer or other board games.

My hope is to entertain and perhaps lure some more girls into the miniatures gaming community, it is kinda lonely over here! I was trying to find some witty all encompassing picture for the end of this post to reward those of you who worked so hard to finish it. I mean it is the end right? You should feel satisfied for your efforts and the time you put into this, but all I could come up with was this:





No seriously here you go.

Lets Get Ready to JaRBBL

The next grudge match is fast approaching. I know that Norm has been training his Blood Bowl team up, so I decided I would do a little secret training on my own...



For those of you wondering what the hell JaRBBL means, I'll clue you in. Just A Rhino Blood Bowl League! This is the Blood Bowl League I started at our local gaming store.

Blogpires, or: $100 bucks worth of flash and paint pots that don't stay open.

Yes, dear readers, it is Blood Bowl time again. Frank somehow convinced/reminded me that I like Blood Bowl, and -more importantly- challenged me to a match. As you probably already know, page 31 of the newest Competition Rules states that a declined challenge counts as a 2-0 win for the challenger. Since Frank has never beaten me at anything, ever, I felt that a de facto concession would be a rather weak way to end that streak. Thus:

A brand new Blood Bowl team. Also pictured: Comic books, Magic cards, baseball cards, and a Tootsie Roll coin bank. Jesus.

I decided to go with Vampires.

Strategy Thy Name Is: Blood Bowl

Hello out there JaR fans! It's been a long week over here at JaR but I'd just like to take a little time to introduce our newest game and Grudge Match III. For those of you who are not aware I love strategy games, on computers, on the tabletop in my own head. When ever I can find a good strategy game I'm sure to spend countless hours playing the game as well as pouring over articles or materials that go along with the game. I'm even more partial to strategy games with squares...Like X-Com, Disgea or one of my personal favorites BLOOD BOWL!

If you've never heard of BB then there's probably a deep forbidding hole in your soul that you've maybe tryed to fill with substance abuse but it won't close, that's were BB goes. And just incase you really haven't a clue what it's about then I'll give you a quick synopsis.

The Blood Bowl universion is the "same" as the Warhammer: A Game of Fantasy Battles universe. Except it's taken with a much more tongue in cheek theory on the background of the teams and technologies of the game. But basically each coach (that's you) chooses one of the 24 races available and creates a team of players from their rosters, like an army list each coach get's the same amount of gold to start their team so everyone starts out with the same strength teams (assumedly). After their teams are ready each coach's goal is to: "Get the Football in the Endzone." -John Madden. A feat that isn't as easy as Madden may have made it sound, the other team will surely try to stop you with all manner of techniques, from breaking the ever living sheet outta your bones with their fists, to using chainsaws and skeletons to take elimate your players. But if you survive all the werewolves and explosions the world has to throw at you and do manage to score the most touchdowns then you'll win the game! In a one off game this is the entire meaning of play, and it will usually feel pretty good, however like all other intensley deep strategy games, the true fun of blood bowl is to develope your team over the course of many games. And so instead of just reseting each time with a new team the survivors of each event get to level up, gain new skills or stats, you can hire additional support characters like wizards, doctors, barbers, assistant cheerleeders and so much more. At it's best Blood Bowl is an extremely deep and vast system of growth and play, you'll never play the same game twice and even if you stick to only 1 race your whole career there's still an almost infinite number of strategies and techniques you can learn to play with. Each team also usually has a distinct tactical advantage in some area: Hurting, Passing, Running, Dieing for example, but most teams can be tailored to support almost any style of play.

So BB is great and I love it, and Monty loves it to. And when we've spent the past week playing our little hearts out in one of the toughest Blood Bowl divisions in the world. The Black Box Division of Fumbbl. If you don't know Fumbbl is, well... it's like Blood Bowl online, actually it's exactly that. It's free to play, free to join, and there's 100s of games played each and everyday, and so many coaches you'll probably never play the same one twice. It's a pretty awesome community that Myself and Monty both are a part of and support. I'll put some links in at the bottom. But back to Monty and I's training. We're each Training up a team in the Black Box to fight against each other in our most heated Grudge Match ever, a game that we are both equally skilled in and both adore. We're each going to train our teams up to 1600 Team value, and then once we reach this goal we're going to construct our teams in Real Life form and pit them against each other in battle for the ages. We'll also doing some "Weekly Report" style blogs about our teams performances over the days and maybe some particular match updates that are rather thrilling. It's going to be E Plurbis Awesome! Don't miss it!

Fummbl

Monty's Team vs Kid's Team

Mechular Proliferation

An Retrospective on How We Got to Be In This Place In 40k Gaming

Hello again readers today I'm going to take you on a journey through the gross gelatinous nimbus that is the 40k "meta." What is Metagaming? Well Wiki tells me that:

"Metagaming is a broad term usually used to define any strategy, action or method used in a game which transcends a prescribed ruleset, uses external factors to affect the game, or goes beyond the supposed limits or environment set by the game. Another definition refers to the game universe outside of the game itself. In simple terms, it is the use of out-of-game information or resources to affect one's in-game decisions." -Wikipedia

Thanks Wikipedia! So Metagaming, Meta or more specifically 40k Meta refers to the climate of the gaming troposphere in essence what the people playing the game are doing to effect the way the game is played. And in this day and age of Psyphilemen Dreads (I had this term and it's face) Razorback spammalam and every unit having meltaguns the "climate" of the 40k meta is Mech.

Tigers, Tigers, and Tigers! Oh my!

Hello again wargaming bloggoninites. This past weekend I was lucky enough to participate in a Flames of War tournament at the local game store. It was my first go round the FoW tournament track and it was pretty fun. Some of the scenarios and terrain set ups seemed pretty conducive to a single sides distinct advantage however since my tigers did much better than I had assumed they would I wasn't really complaining. My list was taken from Earth and Steel the 101st Schwere Panzer Company:

Whittmann

3 Tigers

2 Tigers