Blood Bowl Black Orc Team

 After Greg put on a Blood Bowl game a few months ago, I ordered the boxed game. One of the teams that come in the box is the black orc team. It also includes a trained troll, tokens, balls and a star player. I added small magnets to each base and ball, so they can be moved from player to player with ease. The armour is probably a bit cleaner than should be appropriate for an orc, but even they need to consider showmanship!

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...  

Are You (Really) Ready for Some Blood Bowl???

So Conscript Greg was back for a visit a couple weeks ago and suggested we play a long-delayed game of Blood Bowl, pitting my Rat-thletic Club Skavenblight team against his Carroburg Crimson Commanders. As I've been wanting to play this game for over 10 years (!) I was really enthusiastic to get it on!

 

I'm not gonna go through a blow-by-blow account of the game (being new to the rules we managed to play only one half) but it was super-fun and I totally get how Greg's LFGS crowd is really into it. We used the old Astrogranite board which I painted years ago, and just one note - the squares fit my old-school 25mm round bases much better than the new-fangled 32mm bases that Greg's team sports.

The game itself was a hoot - Greg's hapless Ogre's stupidity was matched only by the viciousness of my own Rat Ogre, who managed to put at least two of his OWN TEAMMATES (!) in the infirmary. 

There was certainly a lot of the old ultra-violence. Neither the Skaven nor the Imperials had much other than a ground game :-)

Both teams came close to scoring (the Commanders with a long run down the sideline just barely stopped by a Skaven Lineman playing safety, and a Blitzer; the Skaven with a run down the opposite sideline that came to grief with the Blitzer failing his "push it" roll and fumbling the ball on our last possession) but the half ended scoreless.

The game was great fun (I think even Dave V. and Mike F. had fun watching the mayhem) and I'm sure we'll get at Blood Bowl again, I even went out and bought the current rulebook which is a really nice hardback. I also have two metal teams to paint so there is some hobbying to do yet!

Hey, Nice Hat!

Hoping to see some sports violence on a pitch soon...

When you take a break from something, it is sure easy to...not go back to it. I find that to be the case with Blogger these days - the platform is buggier and junkier all the time, and Google appears set to let it whither on the vine, which is unfortunate. All this to say, while I haven't posted in a while, I have still been painting - here is a little post to try and get me back into the blogging part of the routine. Here we have a second thrower for my Blood Bowl team, as well as new pictures of the Ogre - but note, he now has a jaunty hat!

The team box I purchased came with two throwers...and it seems like, sometimes, it makes sense to have both of them on the roster at the same time, even if, I would expect, they are not on the pitch at the same time...? Anyway, best to finish this off.

Such lovely, whacky models from GW.

And then the jaunty hat? Well, it was a bit I was searching for that I thought would help tie the monstrous Ogre in a little more with his team. I think it looks hilarious - many thanks to Jamie M for sending me this bit from his bits pile!

"Let's all Hit for Hochland!"

So, how is Blood Bowl? Well...I still don't know. I eagerly joined a local league here in Northern Ontario, only to discover that the gaming hours for the league don't match up at all with my work commitment (games are nearly all played in the afternoons at the local store). So I still await my first match with these fellows. If that ever happens, I'll be sure to report back!

That's all for now, but stay tuned for more 30k stuff as the new edition of the Horus Heresy game approaches!

Painting Challenge Submission 15 - Are We Ready For Some Blood Bowl?

It's Blood Bowl time! Here come the Hochland Hammers!

Spring has arrived - on the calendar, if not in the climate - and that means another edition of the Analogue Hobbies Painting Challenge has come to an end. The final couple of weeks of the AHPC tend to be a real mad dash, as Challenge participants cram to finish off projects old and new, and rack up as many points as possible. You can see from the frenetic activity here on the blog (which is awesome - keep it up!) just how much paint the Conscripts tossed at figures through the final phases.

I will catch up myself now, with a series of posts showing my final work for AHPC XII. And to get started, I have this submission, which would push me across the line for my own points target. It felt it fitting to use a Blood Bowl team to push across the proverbial line. So I present the "Hochland Hammers", a team of Imperial Nobility, for GW's Blood Bowl. 

I think these are the bodyguards...I assume meant to protect the thrower, like offensive linemen or something.

So what can I tell you about Blood Bowl? Nothing! I have never played it. I have been aware of it for the entirety of my 30+ years of interest in the hobby and GW, but I have never, ever played it, or given it much more than a glance and a chuckle. 

My thrower...hasn't played a game yet, and he already looks like he wants to re-work his contract...

But, having moved to a new town, I am keen to meet new hobbyists and gamers. And here in Sault Ste Marie, Ontario, they play Blood Bowl. There is a league, entering its third season, and all of the players in the league, polite and fun participants in the assorted historical and 30k demo games I have been staging here at the local hobby shop, have been urging me to play Blood Bowl. 

The blitzers. I wonder how they will do against Khorne-worshipping linemen?

I was reluctant, feeling I could not get a team painted in time, as the league starts in March - but since it appears you only need 12 or so players, I thought "why not?". When in Rome, right? I want to meet new players, and get to know the local gaming community a little better. Plus, there are always hilarious Blood Bowl-themed entries in The Painting Challenge. I picked the Imperial Nobility box off of the shelf at the beginning of March, and got cracking with the brushes. I chose the colours of Hochland - the same colours of my very, very old Empire Army from Warhammer Fantasy Battle, that still sits on my shelf today. 

Ah, the colours of Hochland - quick and dirty to paint!

I already can't recall what position these two play, but the fact that they keep tankards with them at all times makes me confident they have "what it takes" to succeed in Blood Bowl.

This team includes a thrower, linemen, bodyguards, and a couple of blitzers - I think? I'm not sure. The box came with two thrower figures, but I only painted the one, thinking that you would not have two throwers on the field on the same time - although I don't know that, as I don't know a thing about Blood Bowl. 

Blood Bowl appears to involve a ball and violence. So this fellow should come in handy.

I've sourced a jaunty hat for this guy, but that is still in the post, so this is how he will likely play his first couple of games.

Multiple members of the local league, upon hearing that I was painting up the Imperial Nobility team, assured me that I would "need" an Ogre. So I ordered one of those too, and got him ready to go.

I also painted up some trinkets/markers that came on the sprues. I am trying to find figures to represent coaches, and an apothecary, but I am assured I "have what I need to play a game" at this point. We'll see!

Are we ready for some Blood Bowl! Hell yeah!

So...I am finally trying Blood Bowl! Travel plans will delay my first game, but I do hope share tales of my trouncing in the local league as it starts to occur! Thanks for reading!

Are You Ready For Some Blood Bowl???

I was putting away the Space Hulk boxes from the game the other night and had to move the Blood Bowl box to do it, which reminded me that a) I have a Blood Bowl set, b) I have painted a BB team, and c) I would like to play Blood Bowl next year. So I took a few pics of my team in the hope that it will motivate some fellow Conscripts to paint their teams so we can try this very cool game.

Also, it is coming up to "Bowl" season so this is timely, right? ;-)

The name of my team is "Rat-thletic Club Skavenblight" and they are inspired not by American football, but by "European" football (that is, soccer) and in particular, Athletic Club Bilbao, the home team of our friends that we visited in Spain in 2009.

So get painting, friends - we need to play some matches in 2012!