Just wondering if anyone had tried varying the star player draft so teams only get access to stars from their own race (and the common pool freebooters)?. Seems like it'd play well theme wise -and race-matched stars often seem to fill team gaps anyway (farblast, strong branch etc etc)...

Think it'd detract from anything important in the game or might be an amusing variant?

(I imaging mechanically teams and common pool decks all get sorted and separately shuffled and you randomise or choose whether upgrades come from common pool or race specific decks when awarded)

I was just telling my group of BBTMCG regulars about this: think someone suggested this in an earlier post.

Anyway we're on to Season 6 of our "local BBTMCG league", so will start this "racist" variant then. I think the obvious issue is that the Humans might get too broken (one of the Team Upgrades rewards fans for Reikland players recruited), but since our house rules reward game record percentages as well, it shouldn't matter too much for us.

The game is obviously balanced around the fact that teams can draw from the entire pool of star players, so limiting this could hurt and help teams more than intended. Also, would freebooters be removed entirely? They are a very valuable asset to some of the teams that are already a bit weaker (ie teams without Sprint), and not having them available would just make the problem worse for these teams.

It sounds like it could be kind of fun, but I think game balance will suffer if you do this.

@suplex no I wasn't planning to remove those -keep it so a team only gets common pool freebooters or race specific ones (maybe they could choose between the two, or roll a dice and 1/3 of the time draw from the freebooter deck and 2/3 of the time pick from their own racial deck

I was less worried about losing access to the 'entire pool' of stars as I point out each race's own stars tend to counter/fill their natural gaps anyway (ref the farblast passing dwarf example etc)

Humm yes I forgot about the reikland card... maybe that needs a house rule to cut it's benefit by 50-70% or so

ok, so I talked a bit about this so long ago lol about the fiew times my group and I started the game, everyone was like what we don't use our own teams star players??? and well we made what we called opened and closed team games, open being the regular pool like it is intended and such, but the closed team pool where you only draf from your own teams or races star players. now we had a balance that tends to work better than most. now yes the humans would defiately benefit the most from this closed team match, however to balance it as best as we could. we had a separate deck for mercs and free booters. so what we did was everytime someone would gain the star player we would flip the BB coin and if its heads draw from the team sp deck and if its tails then draw from the fre booters, and you flip for every card drawn so yes the humans would get three flips and possibly get tails all one to four time depending on what team upgrades they may already have,so it slows em down a bit on that, now used to lol before the coin flipping we all decided to leave it up to the dice lol role one and apply result explosion- you get to pick deck to draw from, blank auto draw from the mercs and if an x than the first player(the one holding the coin gets to choose which deck you draw from) now if the player him or herself has the coin than the decision is left to the player who will get the coin next so no one ever gets to choose for themselves. lol its great like trust me its better I think to just play the game as is, but on accasion to spice things up playing it this way really puts things in perspective lol like ive had a guy choose from me to draw from the mercs and then it kinda becomes a hot potato deck till someone draw morg n thorg lol I mean I got em right off the bat so the guy immediately regretted me drawing from that pile lol

but those are my two cents or more on the subject. hope this helps and as allways hope you have fun playing the game regardless of the rules you choose to play by

in the thread I read and commented in myself, several months ago maybe, one person said their group, draw cards regularly but then when they would draw a card from another team they would place it on the bottom of the starplayer deck and draw again lol like its kool if that's what you wanna do, and ive playerd it that way twice, it has a unique balance to it but I like the other ways better though. how ever to each their own

Good point on the freebooters. So we decided that everyone can choose from his own race's SP stack or still-commonly-accessible freebooter pile. Everyone can have a fair stab at Morg N Thorg then

For the Reikland Reavers Team Upgrade, we've also rules that the custom-made dream cards for Humans, are from the Bad Bay Hackers. Different Human team, so no fan bonus.

Just got my Foul Play set and trying it tomorrow. Will try out this racial variant out and report back if we find anything interesting.

Weak teams get weaker, strong ones get stronger.

Examples:

Dwarf - Without access to elf and human sprinters, they are stuck with the same weakness as always: having to play Linesmen all the time. Weak team gets weaker

Human - With guaranteed Reikland Reavers, one of their big advantages - fan generation from the Star Player based team upgrade - gets even better. Strong team gets stronger.

Undead - With a load of upgrades that are geared specifically towards undead tricks, they benefit from grabbing their own race. Strong team gets stronger.

You also have the question of what to do with freebooters.

If you leave them out, weak teams get weaker again: the weak teams are weak because they can't sprint past their linemen and into better players. Using freebooters is the best way for that team to make the bad draws better (and thus reduce need for sprint).

If you leave them in, the weak teams just get freebooters all the time, which misses the point of the whole theming angle.

I think as a variant, it is unfortunately too unbalancing to be workable, which is a shame, as I love the thematics of it.

No, thematics around this are truly awful.

Impact on game balance has been discussed above already (and I fully agree with what has been said so far), but thematically it does not make any sense to me to restrict the players you can draft to your own race. The drafting mechanism is among the best things in this game and also replicates what you would find in normal sports. These are not nations, these are teams from different cities across the old world.

Game-wise, it allows you to spread out your strengthes by including players that are good at things you're normally bad at (which is crucial for certain teams), and helps you palliating your own weaknesses by making your team more resilient to race-specific issues. See, when I hear about such restriction, I don't feel like it would be fun to implement at all. Fine if you want to test a specific race's capabilities with no foreign player implication, but from a gameplay and thematic perspective, I'm all for mixing up players. **** man, tossing in star players in matchups from the same race as your opponent must be the most hysterical part of the game. Also don't forget the drafting mechanism works with a dedicated deck. Is it so bad to draft an Orc player for your Chaos team?

I would actually try to implement the exact opposite to what you are trying to do. I wouldn¨t mind at all mixing all star players deck all together. Who cares? It would allow some crazy combinations. Component wise there is no limitation to such thing. You could also keep all 4 decks separate but every time you draft a player you would decide which deck to draw the cards from, or several of them if you draft more than one. That to me sounds like a thrilling thing to do. Yours feels like a tough restriction to the game that takes away some fun rather than adding to it, it's somethng I would have come up with myself back in the days when I played this game with the minis by fear of mixing things too much and not being able to recognize a player's team. In this game, no. You put your team token next to it, that's it.

But I mean, do as you want if that's how you want to enjoy the game. I just wanted to give my opinion, if I was in your playgroup I would be firmly opposed to play the game like this.

I respectfully disagree to some extent to the above post. The restrictions in the game (preventing say, an elf from playing with orcs) is mostly due to the background of the "pseudo" warhammer world that Blood Bowl takes place in, and the normal restrictions in the current tabletop BB game serves to the same effect. Each team get a relatively restricted pool of star players they can get. Mechanically, it serves to restrict teams from becoming complete all-rounders...at which points everyone wants to end up with the same sort of combo (dwarf linemen, high elf thrower, wardancers, pro elf catcher and a chaos minotaur).

While team manager takes on a more "global" aspect of the game and the drafts are random, it's still "fluffy" enough not to allow Jordell Freshbreeze being friend with Nobbla Blackwart. I sort of care for those kind of limitations, probably due to the tabletop game though.

Here we decided (from the start) to play with race-only star players, but we get drafts completely differently too so it works for us.

If you think the game is more enjoyable this way then go for it by any means

My point however is that you are not obliged to take this Warhammer background full on if you don't want to. It's fantasy football, period. Then whether Chaos Dwarves and Orcs share animosity in the Warhammer stories, or if the Reikland Reivers are completely despised by Dwarves in the Warhammer stories I have no idea about and find this totally uninteresting from the perspective of playing the game. I could definitely find myself reading some trivia about the world behind BBTM, but that would be all. Again, throw as much flavor and background as you want into BBTM. I personally won't because I don't think it brings anything to the game experience. I respect that other persons do not share this view, but on the other hand I wouldn't want the players to become too elitists and strict about what can be done or not because of this Old World background, especially on these forums. If it stays within your playgroup, fine. Just don't want newcomers to think that they need to dig into the Warhammer trivia in order to play this game. Which is not what you mean, I know, but you see what I mean, lol.

I have to say though that the downside you mentioned where you say that all teams would be all-rounders really seems marginal to me, because the chances of drafting the star players you need to make your team completely all around is near zero anyway, considering the amount of players available, the number of star players you would need to draft to do this etc. Another thing in my mind is that I don't think this all-around aspect you mention would be a downside at all, in fact. Teams keep their playing spirit/style, they would just be complemented by players who can do other things than your linemen. Plus it would give a serious hand to those teams which are completely trapped in some subpar sets of abilities (or lack of) compared to the other teams. Still, I don't think you would "break" a team by adding Jordell Freshbreeze to your Goblins, even if that sounds like heresy to Warhammer afficionados.

Anyway, play the game the way you think is best.

That's a valid view, of course, as it's really just a game and for many, the Blood Bowl game may not bring those great memories of the tabletop games played. That being said, i do encourage you to delve into the actual BB game if you have time (it's a wild show ).

My comment was mostly put there to illustrate another view point. As long as people like the game (no matter how) FFG will support it and bring more expansions so by all means, i don't want to impose anything on others.

Here are some tips for you and if you think it's useful please share it with your frieds.TKS

Here are some tips for you and if you think it's useful please share it with your frieds.TKS

"Here" where?

I was thinking of running a game using the "Abbreviated Season" Variant but instead of having players choose 4 random from their conference affilliation I instead would have them choose 3 of their 5 team affiliation star players, choosing 2 (thinking about 1), and then shuffling them back into their conference. I'm gonna try this next game night and see how it goes.

A fun draft variant that makes teams thematic might be this:

Have all teams be 12 players, but have up to 3 of those (of your choice) be replaced by Star Players of your own race.

Whenever a Star Player reward is gained, instead gain:

*: +2 fans

**: +3 fans

***: +3 fans

Replace the Reikland Reavers team upgrade that gives fans for star players with "Gain +3 fans at the end of the game".

This makes for a game where those no linemen from the outset, which weakens the sprinting teams relatively, but they can still use that sprint to get into their star players faster. Every team plays characterfully in their own style, and best of all, a lot of the comparative imbalance between the races evens out, and deck cycling becomes a more relevant tactical issue.

Obviously I'd not suggest making this variant the default, but I think it could be fun.