October '96:

Summer holidays were over and my older friends whom I'd use to go to school and play soccer on the street just woudn't shut up about this game they'd find out...this was lasting more than a month and aldough I wasn't particularly interested in it, I just couldn't stand to be outside their "cool conversations"!

Asked them to teach me how to play it and thus Blood Bowl entered my life when I was 11. They enlisted me on their "home league" and lended me the spare team - some really poorly painted dark elves.

We played 3rd edition on a pitch printed on four a3 sheets glued with tape - it was hard to get stuff on those days. Damn, I remember that pitch as the palm of my hand, as I got beaten over and over by every other coach - I guess when you're a kid it's ok lose every match in order to hang out with the coolest kids on the block. I still got that pitch on my closet as a memory.

One year later they introduced me to a miniatures store club, where I purchased my first teams and started to hang out more and more - older players loved to play against me, it was easy spps :p But I also started learning with them the dirty tricks of getting better at fantasy football.

When entering my teens, BB was the gateway to those kind of games as I ended up playing Spellfire, Magic, AD&D, Warhammer Fantasy...but GW's fantasy football game always held a special place on my heart and was the only one that stick until this day.

That store club eventually closed and I didn't had anyone to play for years - my older friends entered college and studying, partying and dating left no time for that; teaching new guys my age to play was always hard, they would always find the game very long and complex... That's when my passion for music filled that void.

In 2004 I ended up meeting new "nerd" friends who eventually led me to a new club: to my suprise many of the guys I met there were the "old" players I already knew, so we set up a new BB league - damn, I was super hyped to take the dust out of my minis!

At that time I wanted to make a good come back, not only I opened my board regularly at home to see setups and plays, but also with internet it was way easier to get better as some coaches started sharing some tactics and ways to approach the game: with Skaven, Dark Elves and Pro Elves I ended up reaching 2 finals and a semi-final on the first 3 leagues; also the first BB tournaments started appearing here.

Eventually after 2 or 3 years players started scattering again to other games, as nothing new on BB was coming up except for NAF's Living Rulebook, and I got no opponents to play again for the following years.

In 2009 I've found FUMBBL: man...I got as addicted as a drug junkie on the first weeks. I remember spending my whole weekends, morning until night, playing. I discovered my level of playing wasn't as good as I though too (*hard slap in the face*)! Eventually I stopped coming here often, because I had a hard time managing time I needed to invest on real life with a place where I could play BB anytime - just like in a love story!

In 2014 though, some friends developed the habit of playing boardgames and BB got back into my life, as I introduced them to the game: we got together on a Saturday morning, I taught the rules, put them making 3 simultaneous friendlies against each other while I helped them out, made some videos of them playing with "sport commentaries" and even wrote a summary of their matches on a "sports journal" after that. Oh, we laughed a lot...they loved it!

So we founded "Penha de França's BB League" on Saturday mornings at my place, probably the best league I ever played on a social side of things: it was just a laugh, with videos, replays, comments, mandatory interviews at the end of each match, joking everytime we did stupid plays or deploys, or even when someone got pissed off - one of them actually left my house rushing, not saying a word, after failing a gfi with rr for the touchdown, and fell on the building's stairs...we got it all on video, we cried laughing and still open some of the videos nowadays to laugh together :D

Good news on 2016: Games Workshop was releasing the new version of Blood Bowl! Finally!!!

Along with that, one of the players from our home league discovered a store who was doing a release tournament: arriving there, deja-vu, some of the guys playing were the same guys I grew up playing against on previous clubs; other new guys came knowing BB only from the video game. It was a merry day, people loved the reissue, the event was a success and we ended up founding a Blood Bowl league at Versus Gamescenter.

We started with 12 coaches and numbers just started rising at each League's edition - BB was a huge success in Lisbon, in one year it topped as the most played miniature's game and League's numbers were rising to astonishing 40...then 50...then 60!

2017: I received Haktar's, captain of Portuguese team for Euros, message through a forum, inviting me and some other coaches to play in Eurobowl taking place in my country! I ended up being the only guy from Lisboa coming to play in Porto: met a bunch of lovely "northern" portuguese guys who, together with the organizers Haktar and Oon, welcomed me very warmly.

I was so hyped for the 2nd day of my first NAF tournament that I couldn't sleep all night...just to fall asleep 1h before! I didn't heard the alarm and when I woke up it was 5m for the round to start!!! Got dressed as fast as I could and drived like a maniac to the venue just to arrive 20m past the time. My Belgian opponent was pissed off, it wasn't a fun match and it ruined a bit the mood...but my team mates, whom I also deeply appologised, made me forget the incident and ended up being a nice day.

Lessons learned:

- put several alarm clocks if it's important;
- Always bring gifts for your opponents;
- Welsh play very well;
- Never understimate the Germans;
- Finnish are crazy funny.

After this experience, tournaments ranked first in my favourite way of playing Blood Bowl! I wanted to take this spirit back to Lisbon and organize NAF events too: besides the social part, doing a series of matches in a row against different coaches teaches you more than playing once every 2 weeks. Just love the spirit of "trying to do better" on the next match regardless of your previous result..."and oh, the next match is in 10m!"

Inspired by Eurobowl, together with Lord_Kln, we started preparing our first National - Lusobowl - for 2018: it'd be the first NAF tournament organized by local portuguese, a yearly 2 days NAF tournament inside a fictional chapter of Portuguese history. You can know more about it here:
https://lusobowl.com/

This event led me to meet NAF TD Purplegoo, who liked the way we were doing things and eventually invited me to be Portuguese NAF TC: with his help and Lusobowl's first edition's success I'm proud to say it inspired more coaches and stores to organize NAF ranked tourneys here and we multiplied tenfold the number of NAF portuguese active players.

We took more players from our community to play in Wales' Eurobowl 2018 - loved Cardiff, loved the event, hated the food... - and we managed to gather 3 teams to the World Cup in Dornbirn one year after - best BB event so far, still hated the food :p

Glad to say BB in Portugal was living it's golden years until the pandemics, as it grew to be the most played miniatures game for the last 5 years! It's community is healthy, organized and full with coaches with initiative - not only in playing better by the day, but also in organizing good and regular events, doing podcast, youtube channels, streamming, sharing paintings, workhops, lessons, teaching new players, keeping up with the latest news, and also finding new friendly ways of insulting each other... (it's a cultural mediterranean thing!)

Since the lockdowns due to the pandemics I've been spending a lot more time in front of a pc, so this was my return to fumbbl as a regular thing. I always liked this place, full of incredible coaches, so I also started helping fumbbl's online NAF LIVE! staff in March 2020; in September, together with neilwat and Stimme, I was invited to make part of Fumbbl's Online NAF staff, replacing Purplegoo and Strider84 - very big shoes we're trying to fill, I'm sure most of you don't imagine the investment of time and organization Strider alone was doing for the last 4 years...

Aldough I have small objectives on BB that aren't that important if I don't ever reach them - win the next match, play better, play against the best, learn and top them, maybe reach top 10 or even organizing a tabletop World Cup? - at the present time my main focus is to to help the game keep going healthy and strong! I hope my contribution to portuguese BB community and fumbbl is meaningful and it inspires others to do the same, just like some inspired me - knowing I won't have the time to be doing this forever, it's important pass the legacy of assuring everytime someone wants to play or learn this magnificent game they have an opponent or tutor to do so!


Cheers,
Alex