Building an Ogre Blood Bowl Roster

In my previous article, Building My First Blood Bowl Team in Twenty Years, I assembled my new Ogre Blood Bowl team and started thinking about how I wanted the team to develop.

However, building the miniatures is only part of the process.

Just because I have assembled a team does not mean I have a roster.

As someone returning to Blood Bowl after almost twenty years away, I wanted to spend some time understanding what Ogre teams actually do, how they develop and what sort of starting roster I wanted to take into a league.

This article forms the next stage of my Blood Bowl journey, which began with Returning to Blood Bowl After 20 Years.

Understanding the Team

Compared to many Blood Bowl teams, the choice of players in an Ogre teams is remarkably simple. The roster contains just three player types: Gnoblar Linemen, Ogre Blockers and the Ogre Runt Punter.

The stars of the team are undoubtedly the Ogres. Whether fielded as Ogre Blockers or a Runt Punter, they are incredibly strong, with a Strength of 5, and surprisingly resilient. An Armour Value of 10+ combined with Thick Skull means they can absorb a considerable amount of punishment and continue playing.

Unfortunately, they are also Ogres. Every Ogre suffers from Bone Head. At the start of an Ogre's activation, there is always the possibility that he simply forgets what he was about to do. Roll a 1 on a D6 and the activation immediately ends. Worse still, a Bone Head Ogre becomes Distracted and loses his tackle zones until he recovers.

That last point is particularly important.

An inactive Ogre is still occupying space and forcing opponents to work around him. A Bone Head Ogre suddenly stops controlling the area around him altogether. On top of this, Ogres lack agility and will not be dodging around opponent's tackle zones, intercepting or realistically even trying to pick up the ball.

At the opposite end of the scale sit the Gnoblars.

They are weak (Strength 1), fragile (a combination of Armour Value of 6+ and Stunty) and unlikely to survive repeated encounters with opposing players. However, they are incredibly cheap and come equipped with both Dodge and Sidestep along with decent Agility (3+), allowing them to be surprisingly annoying to an opponent. Their job is not to win fights. Their job is to support the Ogres, get in the way and occasionally do something unexpectedly heroic, like pick up the ball and run away, preferably into the end zone. However, Skrappa, my favourite Gnoblar, appears convinced that he is actually the star of the team and is ready for a fight.

The Importance of Re-rolls

The more I looked at the Ogre roster, the more one thing became obvious. I need re-rolls, Lots of re-rolls.

With four or more Bone Head players on the pitch, there are going to be turns where one of them decides now would be an excellent time to forget how Blood Bowl works. When that happens, I want the chance to reroll the 2+ required to carry on with the turn.

Coming back to Blood Bowl after twenty years away, my memory is that four re-rolls should be more than enough for a half. In theory, that provides a re-roll for every Ogre on the pitch. Of course, experience suggests that the first failed Bone Head roll of the match will occur at exactly the moment I need that Ogre most.

Option 1: Four Ogres and Reliability

The first roster I considered starts with all four Ogres from the team box.

If I am being honest, this was never really not an option. The entire reason I bought the team was because I wanted to play with Ogres. Leaving one or more of them in the stands rather defeats the point.

Four Ogre Blockers cost 560,000 gold pieces. To reach the required eleven players, I then need seven Gnoblars, costing a further 105,000 gold pieces.

My next priority was re-rolls. Three re-rolls felt like the minimum, but after doing the sums I realised that I could comfortably afford four whilst still adding an Apothecary to look after the expensive players.

Rather than take an Ogre Runt Punter, I have decided to take a fourth Ogre Blocker and keep the remaining 5,000 gold pieces in the treasury. The Runt Punter is an entertaining model and I fully expect to add one later, but for my first few games I would rather have another standard Ogre and a small amount of gold in reserve.

The resulting roster looks like this:

• 4 Ogre Blockers
• 7 Gnoblars
• 4 Team Re-rolls
• 1 Apothecary
• 5,000 Gold Pieces in Treasury

This feels like a sensible starting point. It gives me all four Ogres, plenty of re-roll support and an Apothecary to help protect the most valuable members of the team.

Option 2: Fewer Ogres, More Support

The second option was to drop one Ogre and remove the Apothecary.

Doing so would free up enough gold to purchase two extra re-rolls and three additional Gnoblars. The team would still have three Ogres, enough to occupy all three squares on the Line of Scrimmage, but I would also gain a deeper bench and six re-rolls.

There is certainly some logic to this approach.

Gnoblars are cheap and have a habit of being carried off the pitch unexpectedly. Having additional reserves would make the team more resilient over the course of a match. Likewise, re-rolls become twice as expensive (140,000 gold pieces) after the initial draft, so purchasing them at the beginning of the league has merit. The problem is that six re-rolls feels excessive.

Whilst I fully expect Bone Head to cause problems, I struggle to believe I will regularly need six re-rolls in a game. More importantly, dropping to three Ogres feels like moving too far away from what attracted me to the roster in the first place. I chose an Ogre team because I wanted to coach Ogres.

Option 3: More Ogres

The third option was the opposite approach. If four Ogres are good, perhaps five would be even better.

Adding a fifth Ogre is certainly tempting. However, fitting that additional player into the roster would require some significant sacrifices elsewhere. Realistically, it would mean dropping two re-rolls. The roster would still contain seven Gnoblars, providing a useful reserve player on the bench, but it would leave me with only two re-rolls to support five Bone Head players. That feels unreliable. Every additional Ogre increases the likelihood of a failed Bone Head roll, and there simply would not be enough re-rolls available to compensate when things started going wrong. 

In many ways, Option 3 feels too heavy on Ogres and too light on re-rolls, whilst Option 2 has the opposite problem. Option 1 sits comfortably in the middle, providing what feels like the best balance between muscle and reliability.

It also lets me set up exactly how I envision an Ogre team. Two Ogres on the Line of Scrimmage and one Ogre in each wide zone appeals to me far more than concentrating them all in the middle of the pitch.

Team Value and Inducements

One aspect of the Ogre roster that I particularly like is the Low Cost Linemen special rule.

Low Cost Linemen: In League Play, when a team with this special rule calculates its Current Team Value, treat the Hiring Fee of any Lineman players on the team as 0 gold pieces. Any value increase is included as normal.

Since Gnoblars are Linemen, their hiring cost does not count when calculating Current Team Value.

The roster itself costs 995,000 gold pieces to build, but the seven Gnoblars are ignored when calculating Team Value.

As a result, my starting Current Team Value is only 890,000:

• 4 Ogre Blockers = 560,000
• 4 Re-rolls = 280,000
• 1 Apothecary = 50,000
• 7 Gnoblars = 0

I suspect this will prove extremely useful in league play. 

Most teams are likely to have a higher Current Team Value than my Ogres, particularly as they begin gaining skills and advancements. This should frequently provide my team with inducement gold before a match, allowing me to purchase temporary benefits that help level the playing field, for my Tier 4 team!

In many ways, the rule perfectly reflects the status of Gnoblars within an Ogre team.

The game effectively acknowledges what everyone already knows: Gnoblars are expendable.

How I Intend to Develop the Team

Having settled on a starting roster, I also started thinking about how I want the team to develop over the course of a league.

Ogre teams have access to a special rule called Brawlin' Brutes. In League Play, players on the team earn 3 Star Player Points for causing a Casualty rather than the usual 2. The downside is that Touchdowns only generate 2 Star Player Points rather than the normal 3.

As far as I am concerned, this is excellent news. Whilst touchdowns are technically the objective of Blood Bowl, my plan for the early games is quite straightforward. I want the Ogres hitting people. 

With Strength 5 and Mighty Blow, the Ogres are well positioned to cause casualties and that is precisely where I want their Star Player Points to come from. Realistically, I am going to spend the first few games paying very little attention to the ball and concentrating far more on introducing opposing players to the turf.

The long-term aim is simple. I want every Ogre to gain Block. Block is a General skill and Ogre Blockers can only access General skills as Secondary skills. This means I need to save up 10 Star Player Points before selecting it as my first upgrade.

Whilst random skills may be tempting, Block is simply too valuable. Ogres are expensive players and anything that makes them more reliable when they eventually throw blocks is worth pursuing.

The sooner the entire team has Block, the sooner they become the sort of team I ultimately want them to be.

The Gnoblars are a different matter entirely. Realistically, I do not expect many Gnoblars to survive long enough to become established stars of the team. Due to this, I will probably lean towards random Primary skills whenever possible. Gnoblar can take the Devious Skill category as a primary skill. This seems very appealing. Gnoblars seem ideally suited to running around causing mischief, fouling opponents and generally behaving in ways that referees strongly disapprove of. If they get sent off, never mind. If they kick and injure someone while they are down even better.

At the moment, my development plan is therefore very simple. The Ogres will attempt to gain Star Player Points through violence and hopefully being the MVP. The Gnoblars will attempt to survive.

I suspect one of those plans is more realistic than the other.

The Plan So Far

For now, the roster is chosen.

• Four Ogres.
• Seven Gnoblars.
• Four re-rolls.
• One Apothecary.

Including one very enthusiastic Gnoblar called Skrappa who appears convinced he is the most important player on the team. Whether that confidence is justified remains to be seen.

The next challenge is getting some paint onto the miniatures before my first game.

Next Time: Choosing a team name, selecting a colour scheme and painting my Ogre Blood Bowl team.

Related Articles

• Returning to Blood Bowl After 20 Years
• Building My First Blood Bowl Team in Twenty Years

You can find all of my Blood Bowl articles on the Blood Bowl Hub.

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If you have any thoughts, questions or experiences of your own, I'd love to hear from you. Feel free to leave a comment below and share your experiences of coaching Ogre teams or developing players in league play.

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