“I hate playing against dwarves, especially with my wood elves, but Swampserpent asked nicely and I do enjoy our games so I thought I'd give it a go. And I wasn't disappointed. It was a fun game, fairly tactical, and not anything like as painful as I'd been expecting.

There was something like 800K in inducements, so I went with Zara (ST4 vs dwarves would come in handy) and Jordell (AG5 vs dwarves would come in handy) and the almost essential second apothecary.

The DeFENDers received. I took a bit of pounding on the front line, and then was given a lucky break when one of the dwarf runners failed his catch. Wasting no time, I sent Jordell and my own AG5 wardancer down to get in the way and thanks to the DeFENDers not being able to get enough players back, was able to push the runner away, grab the loose ball and run it in.

Well that worked, so I thought I'd do the same again on the following drive. Unfortunately, Swampserpent had other ideas. This time the runner caught the pass, and then had the sense to stay close enough to the rest of his team to provide himself with plenty of cover. I played the slow-down defence, keeping the dwarves as far from the end zone as possible, and really thought I'd done enough leaving the dwarves a single turn with very little chance of doing anything with it...

Silly me. As I watched in awe and amazement (and, to be fair, a lot of disbelief), Swampserpent ran in and picked up the ball in two TZs, dodged away, and went for it twice to score. With a dwarf! Unbelievable!

With a front line of stand firm and fend against me, my subsequent one-turn attempt was a tricky one. However, we managed it and the MA9 catcher scuttled off downfield, only to fail his final dodge.

Nevermind, I took back the lead at the top of the second half with a nice quick long-bomb score, leaving the dwarves a whole seven turns for their final drive. And this was when the death roller finally made its appearance. To be honest, it wasn't that effective, but it obviously inspired the rest of the team, because suddenly the dwarves were blocking like...well, dwarves.Okay, so mostly the result was KOs, but it still left the wood elves with little more than half a team, and there was a kill in there as well (thankfully dealt with by one of the apos).

This time I wasn't really in a position to stop the dwarves scoring, but luckily they did it themselves, the ball-carrier failing a gfi and leaving the ball temptingly sitting there in my end zone. Sadly, I also failed a gfi trying to get there so it all came down to the pick-up roll on the dwarves's final turn...

Argh!

Time for another one-turn attempt then...

Careful set up...careful planning...I had it all sorted. Just needed to get the catcher one space further downfield, and I'd even saved a preroll just in case...

Pitch invasion. Half the dwarves go down, which would have been an excellent result if the one I needed to push hadn't also taken a dive. So all I could do was throw a long bomb, protect the precious half of the team and settle for a draw.

Which was, to be honest, a fair result. The dwarves made a really lucky score and I was denied both one-turn attempts through bad luck. But on the other hand, I was extremely lucky with my armour rolls - especially in the first half - and Swampserpent must have been wondering what he needed to do to clear any of the wood elves off the field.

And I do like to see dwarf teams who are prepared to throw the ball, make daring plays, go for it, etc. The reason I hate playing against dwarves is because so often all you get is a wall of guard/MB and 16 turns of glacial offence and this really wasn't the case at all here. I got the feeling Swampserpent was trying to play them like tough elves, and on the whole he pretty much succeeded. It was a pleasure to watch.

No wonder we both get some new fans afterwards. It was that sort of game.”