Bob: "Welcome sports fans, to our special piece on the little known Eirie Downs League, coming to you live from the Ostermark Province of the Empire. Stuck next to both Kislev and Sylvania, a dreary land of fog and rain on the best of days...why would anyone want to live here?"

Jim: "Well Bob, I asked the same thing when the sponsors, JustSwords, dragged us all the way here -  but all that makes for some great football and some diverse teams! One local story is that of Teebald Guymar, former pride of Reikland University and College Football. After a unfortunate incident involving a Halfling and minor Princess who's father had some pull with the league, he ended up banished to this backwater. We'll be following his progress with interest!

Our special correspondent, Richard Von Macanov, will be introducing the teams and following the league for us all whilst the Colleges of Magic broadcast the games to the civilized world, so stay tuned folks!"

In this blog series I will be reporting on our first Blood Bowl league. The league will be held in JustPlay throughout Winter 2016/2017, and is expected to run for around 8-12 weeks depending on numbers and Christmas/New Year.

I need to consume the new rule book and Death Zone to check for any major changes but we expect to run a standard league; each entrant should take on every opposing team twice, with a schedule we'll publish beforehand and a few weeks to play the currently scheduled block of games (to make sure everyone has ample time and opportunity to get their games in). At the end, there will be a Grand Finals to finish it all off; stay tuned to this blog series for more details on this!

So get your new copy of Blood Bowl, get painting, dust of your old teams and get involved! The league is COMPLETELY FREE to join so get ready and get set!

In addition, Richard Von Macanov is looking for teams to highlight for his league coverage, as he tries make it big and bag a major coverage job! So if you want to get involved, be thinking about your team, its history, and the story you can tell as your players develop. If they're from the Eirie Downs area check out the above map for ideas, or come up with your own! We'll be running league coverage articles right here on the blog so this is your chance to get featured!

If you haven't preordered your copy of Blood Bowl yet (and Death Zone, or the Skavenblight Scramblers), you can find it here at a special discounted pre-order price of just £55!

Don't forget to sign into the Blood Bowl event on Facebook!

Thanks sports fans!

Richard Von Macanov 

“Welcome sports fans to the new season of everyone’s favorite sport, Blood Bowl! It's back bigger and better than ever and we are looking forward to meeting all of the new coaches can vying to lead their team to victory!”

To celebrate the launch of Blood Bowl, we will be holding a number of events over the launch period, starting with us staying open through Thursday night until 1am Friday morning on the 25th so that you can grab your game and teams ready for the weekend!

Blood Bowl is just £55 at JustPlay if you preorder, or £58.50 on launch weekend - 10% off Games Workshop prices (available for preorder on our website on 12th November!)

In addition, we'll be running Blood Bowl intros all night on Thursday night with our classic Blood Bowl sets so you can learn to play whilst you wait to pick up your toys!

All events over the weekend will award raffle tickets in varying amounts for taking part, performing well and more, as well as simply for picking up your copy of Blood Bowl at JustPlay. Then, on Saturday evening we will hold the raffle for £25 worth of store credit!

 

Friday (Store Opens 12pm)

• Dungeon Bowl 2016

 

 

Saturday (Special early opening at 9am!)

 

• Dungeon Bowl continues - the same rules as Friday!
• Free Play Blood Bowl all day; bring your team, grab one of our pitches and score some goals (or some heads!)
• Display Your Colours - Painting Contest

 

(Bring your own paints and brushes!)

 

Sunday (Doors open 10.30am)

 

• The Victory Doughnut Autumn Cup

 

Cheers, and we look forward to seeing you for some Blood Bowl!
Jim, Bob and Ritchie

We have been talking to many of you since we announced our Store Champion Program and today we are pleased to let you all know that we have selected our first!

Nathan Foster is already heavily involved in all things Age of Sigmar at JustPlay and is currently running a ladder in store for the game. Nathan is planning to attend many events already and encourages others to attend, which in turn helps us to reach a larger crowd and brings new players to the community for you all to play against!

You may reconise our store model ! 

So, thank you Nathan for stepping up and offering to help grow the game you are passionate about.

Nathan will receive free entry to all tournaments held at JustPlay for Age of Sigmar as well as additional 10% discount on all Age of Sigmar products.

If you are interested in applying for your favourite games system check out our post with all of the relevant details. We are still looking for people to champion the following games:

• A Game of Thrones: Second Edition
• Android Netrunner
• Blood Bowl
• Bushido
• Guild Ball
• Magic: The Gathering
• Star Wars: X-Wing
• Star Wars: Armada
• Star Wars: Imperial Assault
• Vs System
• Warhammer 40,000

Thanks for reading!

Ritchie

October 30th saw sixteen pilots battling it out for a cut to Top 4 and a chance to be crowned Champion in another awesome monthly X-Wing tournament at JustPlay! On the line this month were Summer Kit prizes as well as £30 store credit to the winner and £20 to second place.

Faction Breakdown:

• Imperial 5
• Rebel 6
• Scum 5

After 4 rounds of action the final standings looked like this

With Tom 'Twiggy' Williams going 4-0 in the swiss part of the event, this left 4 players on 3-1 with Stephen Jones just missing the cut on Margin of Victory (one more damage to a K-Wing on 1 hull in his last game could have made that difference but time was called and he escaped!)

Top 4 Lists:

Tom Williams (Scum Aces)

Edward Holmes (Palp Defenders)

Christopher Zee (Han/Poe)

James Durr (Palp Defenders)

The Top 4 saw James vs Tom and Edward vs Chris in the semi finals, Edward convincingly dispatched Chris but on the next table a long duel was taking place between Fenn Rau and many Tie Defenders - one by one he took them all down, a feat which he would try to repeat in the final!

Edward, seeing the damage that Fenn was doing to the Defenders and already losing to Tom in the swiss intended to deal with him quickly in the final game but after Fenn Rau ended up far out of position due to a misjudged maneuver against the Imperial Shuttle, Kavil's Y-Wing went down first. Luckily for Edward the Imperial Shuttle carrying the Emperor held out a turn or two longer than expected against Fenn Rau allowing him to deal with Manaroo on his own. Once again it was Fenn vs Defenders, but this time it was not to be; Fenn took down one Defenders but then eventually lost the duel after a Critical hit reduced Fenn's pilot skill to zero making it eaier for the remaining Defender to catch him in-arc, the final shot coming right on the edge of range 3.

Congratulations to Edward Holmes!

Our final Summer Kit tournament (with additional store credit as prize support as always!) is on 26/11/16; you can grab you tickets here and don't forget to sign in on Facebook!

-Ritchie

In response to yesterday's blog post, a lot of people have (with good reason) asked questions about the wisdom of running two standard events on the same night. Rather than answer the question ad infinitum, I thought I'd write another quick post about it here. This is a stream-of-consciousness post so apologies if any of it reads less than perfectly!

We are part of a wider group of WPN stores in the UK that, along with WotC's Organised Play guys, discuss the topic of Magic - events, formats, growth, and more - on a daily basis. We discuss where Magic is going, how stores are doing, national trends in players, what is working for stores and what is not. It is an invaluable feedback tool and helps a lot with decisions making when parallels can be drawn between other playgroups and communities.

One of the things that is most often discussed is the matter of new players. How do we grow the game? How do we ensure that we attract new people to the hobby and make them want to play? Without new players, the game will die, so this is very important to any community. There are many answers but some of them are overwhelmingly common, particularly these ones:

*new players might not be able to, or be ready to, build complete decks - for reasons of time, money, investment, and so on
*new players often do not feel ready to compete in a "tournament" - even an FNM level tournament
*new players want to play with other new players

Now, as much as we (that's me, and Ritchie, and you guys - our locals) are always happy to educate new players in the ways of the rules, deckbuilding, play ability and more, we have to accept that that is not always what people want, and it is also not always what they need. Sometimes new players simply want to play a fun event with their current peers. They may be interested in learning how to play what I've been terming "full fat" Magic, or they may not; that choice is up to them, and therefore JustPlay should support it.

Whilst on the surface it may seem that two Standard events on the same night may conflict, they really should not. These events may have the same format but the players they are aimed at are (for the most part) players with different goals. Also, consider the advantage for new players who are playing Standard alongside experienced players; they can see awesome full-fat standard decks in action first before having to commit the resources to build one. As a new player, you can watch a game, pick up tips from experienced players, and chat Magic with them. You might not get this if the non-standard format is Modern; people look at a whole plethora of cards they don't know, or are never planning to own, and switch off.

To summarise, what we're trying to do with our new player Standard events is to give newer players, inexperienced players, or simply players who want to "try before they buy" a chance to do that in a tournament with a lower overall barrier to entry. As a new player, you can grab a free intro deck or two and join in the event. You can play with your Magic league deck. You can play with whatever you want. 

Of course, our hope is that everyone wants to start playing in more and more awesome premiere Magic events, and playing in "full fat" Friday Night Magic, but having somewhere to start is always helpful. And the choice is there for new players. That's what's important here; we are offering a choice, and that should in no way impact one event or the other.

PS:

After player feedback from our post yesterday, we've also decided to switch our bi-weekly eternal rotation from legacy to modern. This means that we will now be alternating Modern and Standard every week (alongside new player Standard, every week) with Legacy temporarily out of the rotation until we figure where to put it.

Introducing new players to Magic the Gathering is easy. It's an incredible game, it's easy to learn, and there is lots of support from your local community (and of course, us!)

The next step to learning is getting involved with all of the great events at your local game store, and for some players this seems a lot more daunting - this is something that we frequently see new players face.

We want to do our best to try and offer support to new players looking to play in more local events, starting with FNM. We want you to know that FNM is not the "local pro tour" but a fun place to hang out with fellow players, play cards and enjoy yourselves. As such, we're restructuring our FNM’s to include a low entry fee, participation-based standard tournament each week.

Starting Friday 21/10/16 we will have a £3 entry Standard tournament every week with every player receiving a booster pack on entry along with an FNM promo.

This will run alongside, not instead of, our current FNM (£5 entry / 400 JustPlay Points in the prize pool per player). Now that we're coming to the end of the new set draft scycle, we'll be returning to running Modern and Legacy formats at FNM, alternating with standard. This means a regular month of FNM at JustPlay would look like this:

Week 1

Standard - £3 entry, each player receives 1 booster on entry 

Modern - £5 entry, each player adds 400 JustPlay Points to the prize pool

Week 2

Standard - £3 entry, each player receives 1 booster on entry 

Standard - £5 entry, each player adds 400 JustPlay Points to the prize pool

Week 3

Standard - £3 entry, each player receives 1 booster on entry 

Legacy - £5 entry, each player adds 400 JustPlay Points to the prize pool

Week 4

Standard - £3 entry, each player receives 1 booster on entry 

Standard - £5 entry, each player adds 400 JustPlay Points to the prize pool

If this seems in any way confusing, we're making it very easy to see what your options are week to week; our events calendar is always up to date week to week as is Russell's local event round-up in the Magic the Gathering: Liverpool Central Facebook group.

Coming up for the next two weeks (21/10 and 28/10) we'll still be running

Draft (£14pp)
New Player Standard (£3, booster on entry)
Standard (£5, 400 JPP per entrant)

And then switching to the new format cycle at the start of November. All of this is in the calendar.

We look forward to seeing you at FNM - no matter your level of magic experience or the format that you enjoy we have something for you at JustPlay's FNM!

 

 

 

 

Today I'd like to talk about a new program we're launching, which we're calling Store Champions!

As players in a hobby that is generally a little niche, we're always looking to recruit new players. Whether those are existing gamers that play other games, or people that are completely new to the hobby, one thing is always true; without passionate players to champion games, our community doesn't grow.

JustPlay, like any games store, has some players that do just that - give demos to potential new players, help people organise games, and sing the praises of their favourite game. We want to recognise, reward, and most of all support the players who do that at our store which is what the Store Champion program is all about.

What is a Store Champion?

We feel that a perfect store champion is someone who...

• Is outgoing, approachable, personable, and gives a great impression of our gaming community
• Is at JustPlay on the game night for their game come hell or high water - that way potential players know that they can always turn up and get a game without having to ask "is anyone playing tonight" on Facebook
• Is proficient, prepared, and easily available to demo their game to potential new players - mostly on game night, but potentially on other nights too
• Actively participates in their game's wider community - frequently attends events, is an active member of popular forums, facebook groups and twitter
• Actively participates in our community - helps people to find opponents on Facebook, introduces new players to the area, and is passionate about the game
• Wants to help organise and promote both their own and JustPlay's events
• Is willing to become an official rep for their game where applicable - Guild Ball Pundits, Malifaux Henchmen, and so on

What do I get for being a Store Champion?

• Actively help the community for your favourite game grow and flourish
• Become (or continue to be) a community leader for your game
• Dedicated support from JustPlay for any events that you want to run or cool things that you want to do for your game
• Additional 10% discount on products for your game at JustPlay
• Free entry to events for your game at JustPlay
• Other free benefits in the future as the Store Champion program matures!

What games are you looking for Store Champions for?

We are currently looking for Store Champions for the following games:

• Star Wars: Armada
• Star Wars: Imperial Assault
• Flames of War

How do I apply to become a Store Champion?

Get in touch with us in store, or via Facebook or email (hello@justplaygames.uk)

Thanks for reading, and we look forward to hearing from anyone who's interested!

Today sees the launch of JustPlay Points, our combined tournament prize and rewards program!

JustPlay Points lets you generate yourself free store credit every time you make a purchase from us either in-store or online. You can also earn yourself free store credit for simply signing up to the program, sharing our page on Facebook and Twitter, and more.

The highlight of our rewards program is our "refer a friend" bonus - give your referral link to a friend and they'll get 10% off their first order, and you'll earn yourself a cool £5 in JustPlay points!

To get started earning free stuff, simply head to http://justplaygames.uk, click the "rewards program" button in the bottom right corner, and get started!

In addition to free stuff for helping spread the word of JustPlay, our events that award store credit will award JustPlay Points too. This means that you can see easily at a glance how much you have to spend your well-deserved points on; spend them quickly or save them up for something later on, the choice is yours. And of course, you can combine them with points earned from sharing and referrals to get even bigger free things!

Thanks for reading - we hope you're as excited about free stuff as we are about giving it away.

Go to https://justplaygames.uk now and get started earning free things!