All ABOOOOARD!! It’s time to get the hype Light RailLink rolling as we head to the 2025 Goonhammer Open in beautiful* Linthicum Heights, Maryland – home of the Thurgood Marshall Airport!
We’re pleased to bring back yet another running of the Swelter Bowl, Blood Bowl’s sweatiest tournament, for its third iteration. Of all the airports near our illustrious* nation’s capital, none are located more in Maryland than BWI. Lather up with your Old Bay body wash, re-watch The Wire, and get ready to roll some POWs!
*For a given definition of the word
The Deets
What: A 3-round, Swiss-style, NAF-accredited Blood Bowl tournament… with an extra-hot twist
When: July 5th, 2025
Where: The Sheraton BWI – 1100 Old Elkridge Landing Rd, Linthicum Heights, MD 21090
Who: Up to 16 of Blood Bowl’s sweatiest coaches.
Tournament Schedule
- 8:30 AM – 9:30 AM: Registration
- 9:30 AM – 12:00 PM: Round 1
- 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM: Lunch
- 1:00 PM – 3:30 PM: Round 2
- 3:30 PM – 6:00 PM: Round 3
- 6:15ish PM: Awards
What Makes the Swelter Bowl Special?
Simply put: The heat. The sweltering heat! It’s July in the DC area, and as a quick history lesson, most of this land was reclaimed from the fell swamps of the littoral Potomac. The people may have forgotten, but the land and the weather do their best to remind us. To help them, we’ve set the weather for every game of Blood Bowl to Sweltering Heat and locked it in. In fact, when the weather does change, it’s just another heat wave! Your players might not be able to beat the weather, but you can – water bottles and deodorant, coaches. Please.
With Goonhammer’s resident Blood Bowl expert dittka away for a few months, I’ve stepped in to keep the flame alive. This tournament brings a new puzzle to roster-building, asking what team you can best play short-handed. Personally, I completely whiffed in both of the previous iterations, building a tall roster out of habit instead of adapting and building wide. Teams like Halflings and Skaven, that concentrate their skill into a couple key players, can find themselves up the creek if those players succumb to the heat. Remember, you could lose as many as 6 (!!) players to heatstroke on any given drive. This is a great tournament to stretch yourself as a coach and try a more versatile team.
Oh, and most importantly? This was last year’s trophy for the winner of the “Milk Was a Bad Choice…” award, for the coach who lost the most total TV to Sweltering Heat over the course of the game. Be warned, it’s not for the faint of heart or stomach.
Dan’s* Advice for Beating the Heat
- The first thing you want to do is include a couple of extra players in your roster. There are going to be drives where you are down 2d3 players, not counting KOs and Casualties! If you roll up with 11 or 12 players on the roster, you might be walking into trouble.
- Next, try not to stack all of those eggs in one basket. Throwing multiple skills on one player might be sound in other tournaments, but at the Swelter Bowl, they’re gonna pass out and you’ll be down your best player.
- While normally I advocate for skipping it, maybe consider an apothecary this time around! The apothecary really only works like 60% of the time, which to me makes it untenable in most tournaments. But at the swelter bowl, that 60% might loom large if it keeps an important player on the field.
- Keep the pricey stars on the shelf. A 1200 TV tournament is usually packed with the best Star Players the game has to offer. But at the Swelter Bowl, that expensive star might just be passed out on the field for a critical drive. As said by the great GZA, diversify.
*In memoriam, this section has been lovingly stolen sampled from Dan Boyd’s previous Swelter Bowl articles.
Final Thoughts
If none of this has convinced you to spend a Saturday hanging out with the coolest warmest collection of nerds this side of the Mississippi, well, there’s probably not much that I can say. Instead, I’ll leave you with an image that has lived rent-free in my head for two years now:
The first year of the Swelter Bowl was won by a local coach who had never heard of Goonhammer before. He stumbled across it on the NAF website, showed up, and kicked goon ass for three rounds. For his pains, he walked off with a Gregbot medal and, presumably, a very strange story for his next league night at the LGS.
Go here to sign up for the Swelter Bowl III and become a part of the weirdest day of someone’s life. Happy blocking, sports fans!
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