Star payers. I love them!

I love star players in the game of blood bowl. My gaming club, "The Thursday Night Heroes", love star players. Yeah, I know the stars are not that hip these days, but I think they add another layer of fluff and fun to our game.

When the 2nd edition hit the game stores, our club started to take the league a lot more seriously. By that, I don't mean ‘win at all costs’, or ‘find the best star on the list and get him’, what I mean is, we started to run our league twice a year and it got to be quite the ‘game about town’. At our peak, we had about 30-35 coaches vying for the "old tin jug". 
We had new faces at the start of every season (we always play set format like the NHL/NFL, none of this ‘lets see who turns up’, nonsense), and it got to the point that we were using the town rec hall because the FLGS or our basements were not big enough, no brag, fact. The GW supply guy at our FLGS said we ran the biggest league on the east coast of the US in the years 1995-98.

These days, we have between 15-22 players each season (now in our 36th). We have a bunch of things most leagues don't; between game stuff, star players, trades etc. We have a file index with about 225 star players. These are from many sources: the 'net, official GW sources, home grown stars etc, you get the idea. They are all pointed as per JJ's formula, and they are bought for a team sorta like 3rd edition, you buy the player and he's yours until:

-he gets killed

-he gets an injury and he’s released

-he's traded

-some between game mayhem gets in the way

Once that star is chosen, as he’s unique, he plays for your team until one of the above...

As our league doesn’t play teams past the current season, the stars are put back in the pool before the next season. It’s been working for very nearly 22 years. I see them as a part of the game. The stars don't over balance the game as they can fall victim just like a common lineman. I have found that most coaches are very vocal about NOT using star players. Broken, is the cool way of describing stars. For the life of me, I just don't see how a Star Player bothers Blood Bowl. I  mean to say, you have x amount of gold to buy y (players, rerolls, apoth, cheerleaders, etc). If I ‘waste’ gold on a star player, yeah, he’s got a bunch of "plusses", but he can't advance and he’s a "spp" sink. He’s also just as fragile as any non star player. I’ve had a star player killed on turn 2 of game 1 in one of our seasons.

Anyway, we like them. Now, if I could just get people to help me get a painted figure for each of our stars. Out of about 225, we have, in our club (which means my massive collection, mostly) about 150 already painted. I try to get a few more done every month.