It's Griff Oberwald!

Griff Oberwald, superstar Blood-Bowler! 28mm plastic figure from GW.

Having tasted the manic fun that is Blood Bowl, it was time to make sure a star player was available for my team. And here he is - Griff Oberwald, one of the best to ever take to the pitch! This is a multi-part plastic figure from GW - a kind gift from a friend, so I am extra-pleased to have painted him up.

Check out that helmet!

Griff is, well, the best. What else is there to know? Who else brings a hawk festooned with championship medals to the pitch? I gave him number 19 to wear on my team, but used Roman numerals to help remind everyone how much better he is than the peasants around him, who must contend with normal script.

Lots of flash, of course, to fit in with his status as a star player, all in the colours of the Carroburg Crimson Commanders!

This model is, in many ways, GW at its absolute best, with excellent, crisp details on a beautiful sculpt. It may be plastic, but the details are all there to be painted. Long gone are the days when a single coat of primer on a GW plastic would cause detail to vanish...GW today continue to set the standard for these kinds of miniature designs.

Attaching the hawk to the model is not easy, but I do love it - the poor thing is actually forced to wear so many medals it sort of buries the animal's head...very Griff...

At the same time, this model also very much shows the gulf between the world of multi-part figures designed with computers, the sub-grad-student auto-chat-bot that spits out the assembly instructions, and the actual real world of hobbyists who have to put this thing together. This is a beautiful figure, but that connection between the hawk and Griff's left hand is mostly theoretical. The model also has his face as a separate piece from the two halves of the head...just insanity. Even worse, the instructions give zero guidance on how the hawk is to be attached - beyond just pointing at the arm - and try to tell you to glue the face to the body BEFORE assembling the helmet head around him...only a computer would come up with stupidity like that.

Ready for action on the Blood Bowl pitch!

Thankfully, issues were avoided, and the model came together nicely in the end. It was a treat to paint him up, and I look forward to getting him to the pitch some time! We all know that newly-painted figures are generally doomed to fail during their first game, but this is Griff Oberwald we are talking about, so I suspect dominance will be assured...