Dreadball 2nd Edition

Recently my brother acquired a massive bundle of Dreadball stuff secondhand. And he got quite a bargain - apparently somebody was no longer into the game, and just wanted to offload what they had quickly. The lot included 5-6 full teams and various miscellaneous odd models. 

With this windfall renewing both of our interest in Dreadball, we played a couple of games using the 2nd edition. The biggest change (at least that I noticed) was the 1st edition Skill attribute has been split into Skill and Speed. Jacks also now get +1 die on Dash tests, giving them a much needed boost. 

For the first game I decided to try out the Kalyashi - a very fast but fragile team of 4 Strikers and 4 Jacks. Against this Vaughan took his main team, the Vyr-Meen - also a fast and fragile team (but not as extremely so as the Kalyashi), with 6 Strikers and 2 Guards. 

The Vyr-Meen Team

Kalyashi Team

Initial deployment

This game was very much a tennis match, with both sides scoring during most of their rushes. The score never beyond 2-3 points in favour of either side. Apart from a couple of early Slams which merely pushed a couple of my Jacks around, it was a non-violent affair. In the end I held onto a 1 point lead. 

After a bit of a break for lunch, we played a second game. This time Vaughan took the Kalyashi, and I took the Neo-Bots - a very mediocre, average at everything team, with 3 Guards, 3 Jacks, and 2 Strikers. This game went wrong for me in pretty much every way it possibly could have. My brain simply seemed to have shut down for the duration... starting with me absent-mindedly making the mistake of putting all 8 of my team on the field, rather than just 6 with 2 on the subs bench. Neither of us noticed this for the first few rushes. And by the time we did, Vaughan's Jacks had successfully smashed two of my Guards into the injury box. 

Vaughan's strikers just ran rings around me. While I had placed Jacks or Guards to defend all of the strike zones, he very successfully used gang tactics with 3 of his players taking on one of mine at a time. That, combined with some exceedingly poor dice rolling on my part meant he rapidly built up a massive lead, and I was never in this game after the first rush.

Still, it was good fun. Dreadball is a great low-investment boardgame with some fun and cool looking models. Vaughan has given me the Nameless army from his haul (he already has one) so I'll have to get started painting these up.