Blood Bowl: Lambs to the Slaughter 1, The Tossing Of Gimli 1

Week Four of the Brighton Blood Bowl Season and the Lambs were heading to face the Tossing of Gimli, another dwarf team. This was our first interconference game, as the Tossing are playing in the Underworld division. Going into the game the Lambs were 0-3 and this time without the inducements to hire a star player to beef up the struggling squad.

However, the Tossing were 1-1 themselves, coming into their third match. The Lambs had enough coin to hire a couple of Bloodweiser Babes for the match, but in the end they didn't come in useful; 100k out the door.

Still, the Lambs had a full squad for this one. The coaching staff had put their heads together and come up with a more aggressive, less imaginative game plan which would focus on playing the man, not the ball. If we could inflict enough serious damage on the dwarves, possession of the football would come with it.

In glorious sunshine, which was going to make the passing game harder, the Tossing started the match kicking off to the Lambs. The Lambs' strategy was a simple one: use the Chaos Warriors as a hard core with Big Jim the minotaur at its leading edge, to smash a hole through the centre of the dwarves' line. If we ran the ball, if we created enough carnage, we'd burn up too much time for the dwarves to have a serious chance of scoring themselves in the first half.

You know what? It worked. Nothing fancy. No passing. No trick plays. The Lambs kept the Beastmen playing on the flanks while Big Jim and the Chaos Warriors did damage in the centre. The Tossing made the mistake of playing their linemen in defence in the centre, and Big Jim went through them like a hot claymore through a fat bar tender's stomach.

The Lambs moved the ball down the field, with #5 Gunther Goat Feet running behind a wall of Beastmen. Such was the carnage in the centre of the field that the Beastmen swept down the right hand side of the field unmolested and scored in turn 4.

With four turns left, we battled to hold the dwarves from scoring, although tragically Gunther strayed too close to the side line and was shoved into the crowd where he was brutally murdered by irate Tossing fans! He'd had only a few moments to celebrate his moment of glory.

The dwarves benefited from a very jammy kick off which saw the ball bounce back almost to the halfway line and almost into the hands of one of the Tossing players. This gave them the opportunity to blitz their way down the field to score just before the half time whistle.

In the second half the Lambs kicked to the dwarves, and this time the Tossing had further to march. The Lambs focused on breaking up their cage as quickly as possible - we'd learned our lessons from our experience against Bugman's Boyz. The Beastmen had been trained to make use of their Horn attacks on the blitz and #1 Gerhard the Grunter did sterling work with his Mighty Blow. At one stage there were five dwarves on the sidelines with various levels of injury.

It was also at this point that Big Jim got revenge for poor Gunther, goring dwarf lineman Candy Floss to death. The dwarves were running out of players, and the sheer ferocity of the Lambs began to take its toll, with a great blitz from the Grunter, which disrupted the dwarf drive and gained the ball for the Lambs. Speed 6 with Horns and Mighty Blow to a dwarf running down the sideline equates all kinds of carnage.

The Lambs were now within range of a score and a win, but foolishly the ball carrier Mikkel Iron Fist went for it and rolled a 1. The ball went wide, the dwarves recovered, but they were too far down the field to do anything with it before the clock ran out.

So the Lambs limp off with their first 'not a loss' of the season. With the earnings from the match they have been able to acquire a vital team re-roll, which they were missing. Big Jim was voted star player by the fans, and has been working out in the gym, so his Strength has gone up to 6.