World Mental Health Day - 10th October 2026
At the outset it's worth mentioning that in a Mental Health emergency, please contact NHS 24 Mental Health Hub or Samaritans.
Today is World Mental Health Day.
Mental Health is a topic much discussed recently. From the perceived male loneliness epidemic, a skewed work-life balance and some seismic changes that society is undergoing right now, many people seem to be living through a time of crisis for their Mental Health.
Whilst this article is ultimately positive in message, it’s worth taking a moment if you are sensitive about mental health situations. Best take this as your trigger warning for Mental Health issues.
Whilst we may not always think it after our 3rd double skull of a game, board games are generally considered to be beneficial for a person's Mental Health potentially leading to "improvements in confidence, assertiveness, and real-life social engagement, especially in neurodivergent players". Therefore with the co-incidence of our hobby and World Mental Health Day, I thought it was a topic worth exploring. When I proposed an article focused broadly on mental health for the blog, I had no idea what I’d get back. Mental Health is a broad topic that can be approached and tackled in many different ways. In the end I received two submissions to add to my own thoughts on the topic. The submissions are very different in scope & tone, and they encapsulate different aspects of the overall issue of Mental Health.
The results are below unaltered and unedited, other than perhaps some slight formatting changes to fit on the page. What I've posted is what the authors submitted to me for publication. When reading them please remember that these are deeply personal reflections which the authors have shared. Please consider the following with compassion, consideration and if this helps someone somewhere then I feel it’s done its job.
Spooner
We love Blood Bowl. We hate Blood Bowl. Both these statements are true for every long term player I know. I recently had an opponent describe the game as "Type 2 Fun" . You have a terrible time doing it but you have an amazing time afterwards and that to me perfectly describes how I feel about the game (thanks to Powerhouse for this phrase I am absolutely stealing). I love the community, I love the laugh we have, I love the boozy nights out. But let's be honest, it doesn't always make up for what is happening at the table.
So, how do we stop burn out? How do we keep ourselves in a position where we can continue playing? Hopefully over the course of this blog I will help you keep yourself on an even keel and more importantly, be able to help a friend or opponent from having a mental crash. I would say the best place to start is to be honest with yourself. What do you want from the game? Just saying "I wanna win" isn't it. What do you actually want? So you want to win tournaments? OK, break that down. Do you want to do it with elves? Bash? Control teams? How are you going to achieve this? Once you work out what you actually want, you can start working towards it. For example, you love playing as orcs and you want to win, cool. Learn about orcs. Learn what constitutes a good build, learn what the most effective playstyles are, learn what your good and bad match ups are, get dice in your hands, play games and learn. Learn, learn, learn! Always try to put yourself in a position to do as well as you can. If you don't set yourself up for success, you will fail in the long term, which in turn will just lead to more frustration. You have to learn to be ok with trying your best. If you feel you've done everything you can to succeed and haven't quite managed to achieve what you wanted, you haven't failed. Failure is not trying your best and then complaining that everything didn't work out.
Now, you must also be honest with yourself about your ability. If you've been consistently going 1/0/2 at tournaments claiming "from now on its 3/0/0 or nothing!" isn't going to achieve anything. You'll just get yourself in a mess. Aim for something more achievable, trying going for 1/1/1 and once you've got that down start aiming maybe for 1/2/0 or 2/0/1. This is where SMART targets come into play. I know most of us have heard our [REDACTED] of a boss bang on about this but please bear with me. S - Specific, M - Measurable, A - Achievable, R - Relevant, T - Time Based
I will use my own personal target as the example:
Specific - I want my Global Winrate back above 50% before game one of the 2028 Eurobowl.
Measurable - I can track my progress on the NAF
Achievable - I am currently (as of time of writing) on 79/69/89 with a winrate of 47.89%, so 10 wins away from my target, so yes it is achievable.
Relevant - yes, it shows I am improving my overall game.
Time Based - I want to do this by game 1 of the 2028 Eurobowl in Glasgow.
Because I have set myself a realistic challenge, I have something to strive towards. I have found having a point of focus has really helped centre myself. All I have to do now is make a plan of action on how I will manage this. I think chaos dwarves are going to fit my playstyle and there's more than one tournament criminally under tiring them so I'm going to give them a bash. I can't tell you how to achieve your goals, that is the catch with this blog. That's something you'll need to put the work in yourself for. I can only help point you in the right direction. Now, not everything you strive towards has to be about winning. I also, personally, can't play elves for the life of me and I know this stunts my overall play. So at some point I will bite the bullet and learn to play elves. But when I do this, I know I'll be facing a period where I won't be winning many games. If I only cared about results (which thankfully I don't) this could tip me over the edge if I expect myself to win and only win. However, walking away with a better understanding of the game, even with a hefty amount of losses, would be good for me. Again, be honest with yourself about what's ahead.
So now we have to address the elephant in the room. "But Spooner! You always say winning isn't everything! Why are you, a coach with a sub 50% winrate telling me how to win??!". Well, I'm not. I am trying to help people keep playing for longer. If all you care about is winning, I have some bad news. you WILL burnout. No ifs, ands, or buts. You will face a rough patch. You will have a string of games where you 1 reroll 1 four or five turns in a row, you will roll into a tournament and face bad match up after bad match up, you will have a bunch of games where your opponent rolls 15-20 dice to score and when that happens, if all you care about is winning, you will leave feeling like a failure and there is a very strong chance you will give up playing altogether. I have seen a coach I consider to be one of the best in Scotland glummly having a cigarette outside a venue questioning everything they love about the game because they hit the rough set of games at that tournament. There is nothing wrong with taking a step back and moving away from the competitive end of the game. Playing goblins, completely unburdened from the concept of winning, can be the key to feeling better about this game. Occasionally it is good to start getting on the silly sauce and playing a meme build, as long as you remember it's a meme build, it's there for fun, not for wins. I personally got over my burnout at the end of 2023 by taking a few months out of the game and focusing on coaching. I realised I was having more fun teaching people to play than I was chasing a 200 CR with lizards.
Which brings me on to my next big bit of advice: Know your limits.
Too much of a good thing is something we all have to be careful of and that goes for playing too much Blood Bowl too. You do not have to go to every tournament to feel apart of the community. You need to know when to say "aye, maybe missing out on X tournament will do me the world of good". Again, I can't tell you what is right and what is wrong when it comes to "too much". I personally play 50ish NAF games a year and would play more if I could but I know there's plenty of people out there that flag when they get to around 24 and that's fine. You need to work out what's best for you. I have also made the decision to stop room sharing on away days. This means I will probably get to go to fewer two day tournaments due to the extra costs incurred but it's something I now have to do to stop burnout. I was finding I needed more down time away from people to recharge my social battery.
You also need to work out what is physically your limit. What I mean by this is for example: I will travel from Aberdeen to Ayr and then back in the same day for Destruction Bowl. I will spend roughly 8 hours in a car as a passenger. Not everyone is able to put themselves through that, and again, that's fine. It's a lot to go through just to play 3 games. I have also had to start using a dice tower (shameless plug for Cowan Designs, their stuff is 10/10) due to me getting swelling in my knuckles, caused by repeated slams of a dice cup over 3-6 games. This in turn was causing me to need more recovery times after tournaments, which was affecting my personal life. I found a workaround that's allowing me to continue playing.
Recovery and down time are important. We often don't give ourselves enough time to decompress after tournaments and I'm here to scream at you all to think about your health for Nuffle's sake! Please remember, top level chess players can burn up to 6,000 calories a day(!) due to the sheer amount of thinking they have to do. Do we, as Blood Bowl players, think that much? Of course not! But it's worth keeping in mind when thinking about the stress we all put our bodies under sitting at the table. I now make sure I take a day off work after 2 day tournaments. A day to sit around the house, thinking about anything and everything that isn't Blood Bowl so I can feel better. I can't tell you what recovery time you need, and when but I can remind you how important it is.
Now we segue into the final part of my blog about avoiding burnout: taking care of each other.
I won't name names but I recently had a chat with more than one person over a few tournaments who were having a real bad time and I said roughly the same thing to everyone of them. "Please stop for a second and think about what you're doing. Are you with you friends? Yes. Are you having a beer or two and a laugh? Yes. Is there a roomful of people in the hall that love you, care about you, and want you to have a good time? Yes. Are you ultimately playing a game you love? Yes? Then I don't know what more you can ask for."
We all sometimes need to step away from the table for a second and remember that. If your having a bad time and say to your opponent "Please let me have 5 minutes, I need a breather" and they complain, they are the problem. If you're running out of time, get the chess clock out and take it off your time. The time you lose off your own clock will be worth it to feel better. And in turn, if your opponent asks for 5 minutes, let them have it. It should just give you time to calm down yourself (or strategise, dealers choice). And please, if you’re having a bad time and a teammate or opponent says "hey, I think you need a minute. Want to go refill your drink? " or something to that effect, don't be offended. They are ultimately just trying to look out for you. They are trying to help you get back to a position where you can enjoy yourself again. Because of all this I really don't like the phrase "It's just a game". I really dislike it because I feel it diminishes how important gaming communities can be to their players. For a lot of people this might be their only social interaction they have outside of work and/or family. The game is the vehicle that drives all of us to be together, sharing an experience, making friends, blowing off some steam, and ultimately having a laugh.
So please, know your limits, be kind to yourself, be kind to others, and remember it's more than just a game!
Fromherashes
Monday 16th February 2026, sometime around 10pm. I’d made all my arrangements and I sat with a belt in my hand, crying and looking at the stair post that I’d determined would hold my weight long enough to end the noise in my head that felt like a long, slow motion scream. It was a sliding doors moment and I knew that it was one that would either change or end my life. In the end I couldn’t do it as I didn’t want my kids growing up without a father, they’d already been through enough with their mum and I divorcing. I was scared and felt the most alone I have ever felt in my life but I knew I had to do something.
In the morning I reached out to my GPs surgery and they got me in to see a GP as early as they could. I spoke to an old work colleague who I knew had been through similar and she got me through the wait for that appointment. It was tough, really tough. I also spoke to my 4 closest friends and opened up about how I was feeling. Those conversations helped me more than they could ever know and I’m eternally grateful for them being there for me at a time when I was at my lowest.
I think it’s a common thing for men, in particular, who are in a similar age bracket as me to just not want to talk about things that are deeply personal, it’s the fear of being a burden or seen as less manly, so the thought of having such an intimate and exposing conversation with another person filled me with dread. My ex-colleague assured me that the doctor would listen without judgement and I’d hit a point where I just couldn’t find any other way to change the way I was feeling without support, so I just had to trust that it was the right choice.
The day of my appointment came and as I talked through how I was feeling with the Doctor, I was honest and left nothing out, about the cumulative things that got me there and I was genuinely surprised at the compassion and validation for the way I felt. There was no cold and clinical judgement, only understanding.
We agreed a trial of medication and a counselling plan. Not going to lie, the first month or so of medication was full of ups and downs but as things evened out the weight and burden of life lifted a little and I started to feel a bit like me again.
You might be asking yourself what this got to do with Blood Bowl or the hobby in general? Well, a number of things for me personally. In the last two years I’d completely lost any love I had for it. A change in personal circumstances meant that I gave up a career I’d started building doing a part of the hobby I loved, painting, to go back to something I hated (and still hate). From that point until very recently I had been unable to paint anything without feeling a crushing disappointment. I was going through the motions playing in the league and tournaments to try and hold onto that aspect of my life but even that was slipping into the gloom.
The podcast that I’d spent building over the last 6+ years with Alistair was about the only thing that kept a tether to the hobby for me and that was less so to do with the content and much more to do with the fact that I had someone to talk to where the clouds were lifted even for the briefest of time.
Therapy has helped immeasurably as well, it’s got me to the point where I’ve managed to pick up a brush more regularly and start to fall back in love with painting. Through small steps and lifting the weight of expectation I’d placed on myself I’ve painted more things in the last couple of months than I had in nearly 2 years and it’s started to feel like my safe space and the sanctuary of mindfulness that it used to be for me again.
I wish I’d tackled the problem earlier, I wish it hadn’t taken that sliding doors moment to make me realise there was an alternative and I wish I’d talked more to the people that matter most to me. If you take anything away from from reading this, please let it be that. If you need help, seek it, it’s there. You just have to ask. If you’re worried about a friend, talk to them too as you never know what’s going on in their life. Talking does save lives.
Stripeydave
For the longest time “Mental Health” was something that affected other people. I’d had some minor struggles with work and family life - who hasn’t - but nothing particularly unusual and nothing I couldn’t handle. But in 2024 my wife, Tracy, started showing some unusual, but (at the time) forgettable symptoms - loss of co-ordination, tiredness, etc - then, more worryingly, she started slurring her words and fell a few times at work. After months of tests and hospital admissions, she received the feared Motor Neuron Disease (MND) diagnosis in January 2025. For anyone unfamiliar with the disease, it’s what Stephen Hawking, Doddie Weir and Rob Burrows had: Incurable, debilitating and inexorably progressive.
As anyone might imagine, the news was a devastating blow and it took a while for both of us to process: she, her limited remaining time and me, the inevitability of time without her. Luckily, Tracy’s positive outlook, perpetually sunny attitude and determination not to be bowed by the diagnosis meant that we tried not to concentrate on the inevitable and we constantly lived in the moment. Unfortunately, as her condition deteriorated towards the end of the year it grew more and more difficult to live a normal life and we were increasingly housebound.
In 2024 I’d signed up for Granite Bowl in Aberdeen the following year - 2025 - and I was resigned to skip it, but Tracy insisted we go. I booked a hotel across the road from the venue with a wheelchair accessible room so we made the trip north. Between rounds - and in a couple of cases during games - I had to go back to the room to see to something she needed, but she was determined that I finish the day’s play. In the end I finished 2-0-1, missing out on the title at the death in a hard-fought game vs eventual winner Mailljm0404. Amidst the stress and worry what stands out for me that day was the support of the community in general and TO Phil Cairns in particular. I walked back to the hotel that afternoon with the Kilted Kiwi award and a lump in my throat. To anyone else it’s a small plastic kiwi trophy, but to me it’s a reminder that amidst the fear, worry and downright bleakness of those days I had the support of a genuine community. Sometimes the smallest things mean so much.
I’ve been fortunate that I haven’t yet succumbed to the black depths that I feared throughout last year, but I worry that even now I haven’t quite yet processed the enormity of it. Sometimes I relive the pain of those dark days of December 2025, but what brings me hope is knowing that the world is a better place for Tracy having been in it and all I can hope to do is to reflect some of her love, beauty and irrepressible positivity back into the world.
Again, if you are struggling and need immediate help, you may want to try the following:
I also found services encompass Mental Health help alongside their regular specialist services, such as (in my case) Care for Carers and MND Scotland - but you will find other charities offer similar help such as Marie Curie and Macmillan.
If you are affected by any of the issues raised, I’d encourage you to seek help - either from friends, family members or professionals.
But remember above all: you are not alone.
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