Is there any particular reason why they have Team affiliations?

Because is actual BB, SPs might only be available for one team (Grim for Dwarves, Zug for Humans, etc.), I'm guessing that's where the roots are. But to keep people from getting no SPs due to bad draws, they made them by division for BBTM.

The team affilation only represent where they come from, from which race. But they can play in every team according to the conference they are in.

also, there is an human team upgrade about affiliation (end game , 2 point for human affiliation, only 1 for others)

Its simple

BB based on Warhammer Forces of Order and Disorder

Humans can't play in one team with orcs or chaos

of course you can put all star player cards together and play with your own rules.

Dam said:

The way my friends and I play it, bad draws are bad draws and that is the risk you take when you go for Star Players. You cannot use Star Players affiliated with other teams than your own.

We feel this makes better sense than the actual rules and balance-wise it does not ruin anything.

Jutlander said:

I think balance wise it would hurt since that means that there's 2 5's of the deck that your team can't use. And it's even worse if someone else from the same conference is also playing.

With that said, power to you guys if you enjoy playing that way.

Not sure I understand the concept behind the merge of the star players decks and the "bad draws"? Do you mean that if you draft 2 star players, you draw two cards from the deck but can't draft any of these two if both don't belong to your team or are freebooters? If so then I wonder if you ever draft players, I don't know how many star players you draft on average every game but for us it's clearly not that much. Did I understand this wrong?

Volsung de Nichor said:

Not entirely true.

The divide of races into Order/Disorder was mainly a conceit created for Warhammer: Age of Reckoning, the mmorpg. The reasons fror doing so in that environment were clear: having two factions, rather than 6, makes the PvP experience much more straight forward.

In Warhammer Fantasy Battle and Warhammer Fantasy Role Play, the races and factions have always been very much pro-themselves and against everyone else. The Imperials might fight the Bretonnians, while the Dark Elves might fight the Orcs and so on. Of course, there have always been senses of who will ally with who in the right circumstances (Imperials and Dwarves are very close, while Elves and Dwarves have long ongoing grudges, and High Elves and Dark Elves, forget it!). WFB followed the good vs evil idea for the Storm of Chaos campaign, but that was very much a one off, with the "alliance of light" being an exceptional thing, and a major plot event.

Besides, if you look at the "order factions" in the BBTM game, one of them is Wood Elves. The Wood Elves seem pretty unlikely to ally with the Empire, and even less likely to ally with the Dwarves. It gets even messier if you look at the Dark Sorcery Syndicate, as there's no reason at all why the scions of Naggaroth would choose to ally with the Vampire Counts. In fact, if anything, the Vampire Counts of Sylvania have only ever allied with one other faction, and thats the Empire of Man.

But if you look back historically, the Blood Bowl board game was initially devised in a time when WFB fluff was minimal, and most of the background came from WFRP. At the time it was first conceived, the Human team was just the Human team, whereas now its got a much more Imperial flavour to it. Likewise the Elves were Elves, not Wood Elves. Teams like the High Elves, the Norse, the Amazons, these came later as the Warhammer world changed.

Now in the board game, even the Star Player availabilities weren't just order/disorder split. You could never have an elf star player on a dwarf team, for example.

Now Bloodbowl's world has diverged massively from the worlds of WFRP of WFB. I suspect that Fantasy Flight games chose to break the teams into Old World Alliance and Chaos Whatever They Are for reasons that related only to the card game and what worked well for the card game. Sets of three makes for a nice card set size for expansions, and keeps Star Player decks at a size that suits the rules design well. I'm sure they considered the human upgrade cards when they decided how many Reikland Reavers would be in the OWA deck and how big the deck was overall. FF are good at game balance!

What I'm wondering is.. Does playing the SP decks differently affect the balance of the game? Is there any team team that would actually benefit more from two different setups?

For instance:

Setup 1:

I'm playing as Wood Elves and in my SP deck are Freebooters, Dwarven, Elven and Human star players. I play as the rules indicate and when I draft SP, I can draft anyone (from the OWA).. even the Dwarf Death Roller..

Setup 2:

I'm playing as the Wood Elves and when I set up my SP deck; I remove Dwarven and Human star player, so the OWA SP deck only has Elves and Freebooters (and if i'm playing against the Dwarves or Humans; we've agreed to not draft each others player is drawn and put them to the bottom of the deck)

Is there a team that gains a signifcant benefit from playing under Setup 2? Just wondering because I tend to like the flavor of it better (especially if you're playing within your own conference.. and you pull your opponents star players)

I like the flabour of it better, too, though I'd note there aren't enough Freebooters to go around to make a Star Player team deck for everyone. Plus, some non-Freebooter Star Players are neutrals - Morg springs to mind.

Maybe put the neutrals and freebooters in their own deck, and when you get a Star Player you choose which deck to go for. With multple Star Player symbols you could take a mix of both.

In terms of game balance there's a few issues:

First, it makes the Human team even better. Getting Reikland Reavers guaranteed makes their VP-for-Star-Players upgrade better. I'd say house rule it in this variant so that all Star Players just give them 1.5 fans with the upgrade (or 2 for the first, 1 for the second, 2 for the third, 1 for the 4th and so on).

Second, it means you can't use Star Player cards to cover for deficiencies so easily. This hurts the decks who have deficiencies! Dwarves spring (well, clamber gracelessly) to mind, obviously. They'd be stuck with using Freebooters if they ever want to sprint, whereas right now the natural dwarvish inclination is to pick up a sprinty ball-handler who the Dwarves can guard… like Jordell Freshbreeze.

When i said "free-booters"; I meant to include neutral star players as well.. the gray bordered cards. So you'd say the Dwarves need those non-dwarven star players? Hmmm.. I'll have to keep that in mind.

Gave the variant a playtest last night. Undead vs Skaven.

Both of us took our respective Star Player decks, then divided them into a Freebooter deck and a Star Players of our team deck, and set the rest aside. We put the two neutral non-freebooter Star Player and put them into the Star-Players-of-our-team deck. Admittedly, we couldn't have done this if we were drawing from the same deck, but as the Star-Players-of-our-team deck was considerably smaller and as we wanted mainly to be able to control when we got freebooters or not, we decided that was appropriate.

Happily we ended up with matchups and tournaments that loaded us with Star Player draws early.

It didn't work that well.

As an Undead player, I considered the contents of the Undead deck, realised that I was more likely to get the much needed sprinting out of the freebooter deck, so I neglected my own deck entirely for the first four draws, clearing all the skeletons first, and then getting mumma-hotep.

The skaven player, otoh, had a much better skill spread in his Skaven star player deck.

We tried again, same variant, Dwarves vs Orcs. Both decks suffered this time, but especially the dwarves, who really need an Eldril Sidewinder or other nippy player to get the sprinting going. We ended up only getting one Star Player each, and then just concentrating on other prizes.

All in all, I'd say the game works better with Star Players being worked rules-as-written. It didn't feel much more thematic anyway, it just meant that we ended up with more freebooters than we would otherwise.

I suppose another variant would be to take out freebooters and neutrals altogether, and to just have the teams tap into their own upgrades. I worry though that this variant makes life even harder for teams that have a weak skill spread to start off, and these teams also happen to be the lower tier ones already.

I would keep all star players in one deck, so you dont know whether you'll pull a freebooter or not.

In games between teams of the same conference, if you pull a card you can't use, it goes to the bottom of the deck til you pull one (or two or three) that you can use and you draft from that.

Just my two cents