BOILeR League

I found Crumps on Twitch.tv a few weeks ago when he was doing speed Final Fantasy 2 runs (yes, I use the American numbering system). I had a BLAST watching him and listing to his interacting with his chat room. Since then, he's been running some league for a game I had never heard of before, The Binding of Isaac through a league called the BOILeR League

The league features head to head speed runs in randomly generated dungeon maps where items generated are different for each player. This makes it super exciting as someone can be way far ahead in the dungeon run, but a few lucky drops for the other player can make it a close game.

Crumps runs the league very similar to a National Football League (NFL) season, in fact he's named each participant with an NFL team name and each team plays other teams in their division. As a casual observer and someone who's never played the game before but knows the NFL style, it makes it easy to see the scheduling and follow along as they progress through their season.

It's a really fun league to watch though at first I had no idea what was going on. The chat is actually not as bad as Twitch chat is famous for. Normally asking a question in a Twitch channel is a for sure way to be flamed for the rest of your existence in that room but so far the folks in Crumps' chat have been great about explaining things I don't understand while making me feel welcome.

While the rules are listed on the website, never having played the game before the reasons behind them confused me. A quick question in chat explained that some items allow a whole clear of a dungeon level, giving an unfair advantage to one of the players in the head to head speed runs. The other rules disallow other items that would cause a similar situation.

I'm really enjoying catching BOILeR League a few times a month, and I encourage you to check it out if you're interested in some awesome entertainment.

Crumps has been a great find in gaming personalities for me. He's a great host, has quite a temper on Twitter, and runs some good, free stuff that's fun to watch.

If you have a chance, I encourage you to check it out, and see the fun some other games have out there.

I intend to check out The Binding Life of Isaac, even though my reaction time is horrible - just because it looks like fun. But until I get there, I can watch other people race each other while hanging out with some fun people!

Something totally off topic thing to note is that the website design for the BOILeR League was done by Chris Hanel! BUFF MAGES!