Tuesday, May 14, 2013

Blood Bowl: One Turn Touchdowns

Way back in the day when we played Blood Bowl in Comfy Prime there were only three teams with the possibility of scoring in one turn (and I don't think Byung really went for that play with his Goblins). Sky had a guy who could move 13 spaces in one turn and I was happy to risk killing off my Halflings by throwing them down field on the chance of a quick score. Everyone else had to take multiple turns to score, and therefore stalling your score until turn 8 would have been a great plan.

When I first started playing again on the Cyanide game I again started with Halflings. I remember making some comment on Vent about liking how they could possibly score in one turn when they had to and Sceadeau said something about how with proper pushing even a guy with 6 movement could potentially score in one turn. Well, that's weird enough, and an interesting factoid, but I didn't really see how and mostly ignored it.

When I started playing on FumBBL I went through their help files and one of them was a summary of one turn touchdowns. Including one for the 6 movement guy! A blitz, a move, and 7 blocks! All of the hits need to be pushes except the last one. Then two go for its and you're in the end zone. No problem!

I read about them, and I kept my eye open for ways to do it, but rarely would my opponent set up in the position listed on the pictures and I didn't really understand what was going on so I couldn't adapt. I tried a few things with my human team without much success. I tried something against one of Brent's teams but messed up the opening blitz. But all those missteps helped to figure out a little bit about what was going on.

Here's the basic idea... You need to get yourself into a position where you can make a block which pushes an enemy parallel to the end zone. All 3 legal push squares need to be occupied by units of some kind. One of those squares should be the potential scorer (or I guess he could be further down the line?). Because the initially blocked dude went parallel to the end zone you can push your scorer diagonally toward the end zone. This will get you one of the 13 needed spaces. I did just this last week against Sky. I had a guy who could move 12 spaces but needed that one extra space. I probably could have made a couple more pushes to get rid of the go-for-its, but I was just happy to get that one step along.

How do you get into that initial position? Unless you rolled a quick snap you probably need to use your blitz to push someone on the line of scrimmage into your team. If the enemy clumped up in a pile this is pretty easy. Get behind them and push them diagonally into your line of scrimmage. That's the position shown in all the pictures on the FumBBL page. If they set up split up the twist I had to add was to leave an empty hole on your line of scrimmage. Then you can blitz the guy backward into that empty hole without needing to occupy all 3 potential push locations. Grab would also work great for this. Leave an empty hole and you can push the guy into the hole on your side of the field without using your blitz. That seems like it gives you an extra chance in case the first one fails. (You need all these hits to result in pushes so the guy stays standing and you can keep blocking him. Knocking him down is actually bad for you, oddly enough.)

Hmm... My Dwarf team has a guy with grab and a 7 movement dude... Also some dudes with frenzy which can probably help make multiple pushes! I should come up with some sort of plan for scoring in one turn with my Dwarves! Wouldn't that be surprising!

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