Blood Bowl: Classic Bases

When you are really behind on your painting like I am, your opponents can sometimes have trouble telling which lump of lead is a line man and which is a blitzer. This is a more common problem with newer players but can happen to anyone playing an unfamiliar miniature set. To help out my opponent's with this last season(they were all using proxies so I did not feel bad about unpainted) I switched over to using the classic second edition bases that came with the old plastic teams. Since I had all four of those plastic teams I have plenty of these to use.



These classic bases were nice for 2 reasons for this application. First they were is gray plastic which allows for writing numbers on them in pencil with good viability. Next many of them were 2 parts with a smaller in plastic base with a detachable colored edging. This way my opponent could easy distinguish the classes of minis.

The classic color scheme is:
Blitzers=Red
Blockers=Green
Throwers/Runners=White
Catchers=Yellow
Linemen=Grey

Of course most people do not have 4 sets of these bases lying around but you could always just paint the edges of the bases you are using in this scheme. The other problem with this scheme is that the slot width in the bases are smaller which causes a lot of the teams not to fit.

My Main Christmas Present

I have not gotten much hobby work done recently. The main reason is that I got Rock Band 2 as a Christmas present from my wife and daughter. I had Guitar Hero 3 before but found that the differences between what I was actually doing and the sounds from the game were almost distracting. I had played original Rock Band at a friends place a few months before getting Guitar Hero and enjoyed it more since I was able to play my natural instrument, the bass. Back like 15 years before 2 of the other 3 people I was playing with were in a garage band with me while the third we had played with a little. Having a real drummer playing the drums makes the game easier.

So I got the game mainly so I could play bass lines but also try out the drum kit as an impulse buy. The price was right during the holiday sales. My daughter was with us when we picked it up and wanted to see what it was about before Christmas so I showed her some of Guitar Hero but she became very concerned about the girls dancing in the cages so I stopped playing that.

I have enjoyed the game and also got Lego Rockband for its super easy mode with automatic kick drum so my daughter can play the drums with me. I have moved the diffeculty up to Hard for the base lines and find that I now need to actually make a decision about a consistant way to do the 5th note either by stretching out my pinky (tough to do 5 to 4 transitions) or going to second position. Currently I am doing a mixture on both but that leaves me often to lose track of my fingering. Also need to work on 2 finger strumming on the strum bar and decide one whether to use my guitar hero 3 controller or my rock band one. But that is starting to sound like real work.


I even managed to get my wife to play a few songs. She used to play electric guitar and says it is nothing like really playing. Ofcourse not, actually playing a guitar takes practice and they are trying to make something people can just pick up and have fun with.

Blood Bowl Competition Rules Pack

GW has released the Blood Bowl Living Rulebook 6.0 today without any fan fare as the Blood Bowl Competition Rules Pack. The formatting is strange as it seems set for a large format printer. So each pdf page is 2 text pages. Might print into a small book but the size of print will be small. Also all of the fluff and graphics are current gone. Not sure what the reasons for that is since they add a ton of character to the game that the rules themselves do not contain.

I will just hold on to my old LRB 6 print out.

Chaos Blood Bowl Team: Lords of Change

Working on a color scheme for my Chaos Team. I wanted to have a Thousand Sons look but has such trouble with the yellow I just did all gold. Might be too ultrasmurf. This guy will probably have to wait a while to be joined with other painted team mates since they need to be primed better. Currently I am working on getting the right color for the beastmen hair to go with the dark base color I am using for the bodies. Might have to swing by the FLGS to get more brown type colors which are not in my 40K palette.

My wife commented that I was letting my close proximity to Ann Arbor influence my color scheme but I think it is more Golden Bears where I did go to school.

Maybe I will have to name the Minotaur, Oski.

Blood Bowl Khemri Team

The undead have a long history for play in Blood Bowl with one of the Classic teams being the Champions of Death. Most of the teams are on the newer side for Blood Bowl with Necromantic, Vampire, and Khemri all showing up after the current box set was published. Today I am going to look at the official minis for the Khemri team.

Most of the official blood bowl teams have a very flat look with the models appearing very 2 dimensional. This is caused by the fact that the standard players for most teams are single piece metal casts. As you can see the the GW pic for Khemri above the Tomb Guardians look very planar but the other players have a bit more depth. This is because the skeletons are multipart models but that becomes a real problem during assembly. Lets take a look at the bits.

Not only are they multiple pieces, they are tons of pieces with the average model having 6-7 parts. You are free to put them together however you want but the pieces are tiny so actually gluing them together is a total pain. Also since the are metal, the bond you get with most fast adhesives is not great. The two worst parts are the torso to the legs and the arms to the torso. While the torso to legs seems like it has a good surface area to bond the problem comes from the fact that the torsos are attached to each other at the mounting surface. So you have to cut them free then try to recreate a nice flat surface at the right angle to get a reasonable fit. I am not that good a filing so I kept getting curved surfaces on this piece making the mounting hard. The arms are just small.

I found that I used a lot more collars than I planned to since they allowed additional attachment points to secure the arms.

Here is what my 14 player team looks like after getting 2 extra Tomb Guardians from GW Direct.

These Vulture heads are used to represent the Throw Ras which have an AG of 2 but do come with sure hands and pass. Not sure who you want to pass to with AG 2 across the board on the team but I guess you will need that reroll. Maybe a lineman with get an AG increase to 3 making him a reasonable target for desperate plays.

Blitz-Ras have these crocodile heads.

First 3 Standard Linemen.

The second 2 in this group I tried for some more interesting poses. One guy getting ready to punch you and the other in a classic orc catcher pose.

And the requisite 4 Tomb Guardians who make the team go. Even with the decay and lose of migthty blow nerfs in LRB 6.0 you need all four to really make this team work.

Gaming with the Family

My brother was in town this past weekend for an early holiday visit. A few years ago during the holiday visits we used to get in serious gaming time with whatever we got for christmas. One year was all about the chainmail mini game(not a bad skirmish game but was never given a real chance to develop a following by Wotc) the next it was Gears of War on my new 360.

This sort of slowed down now that my little one is old enough to demand everyones attention. She always wants to play with whoever is busy at the moment. I did manage to almost get through 1 game of space hulk. It was suicide mission and for some reason took forever. I was throwing nids at the termis which prevented them from advancing but they always seemed to kill the nid they had to to stay alive.

My daughter was watching and trying to play along so we changed the language from killing the stealers to placing them in time out. A lot of stealers were sent to time out.

Blood Bowl League Season 3: Roster Builds

We are starting preparations for the third season of our tiny local blood bowl league. One player is keeping his team since he played through a 0-7 season and now has several players with 2 skill increases including a S4 A4 Blodger while everyone else is making a new team. You might ask why we would all be making a new team. Two people have played their teams for both the first two seasons and are ready for a change while myself I just like to play my huge number of different teams.

You might think that throwing away all that player advancement is a waste but our commish decided on special team creation rules. First make a legal 1M starting roster, then add 400K of additional stuff just like during play. You can even buy 6 SPP = Normal skill for 20K once for each player. This is nice since it allows skills on hard to skill up players right from the start at the expense of no chance for stat increases or doubles.

The 1M plus 400K leads to new teams with 90% the team value of the continuing team. We did something similar last time with 350K where the first and last place teams in the regular season were the new teams. T

I think you can make some pretty brutal rosters with these rules. What can you guys come up with these rules? Currently the other players are thinking Dark Elves, Wood Elves, Necromantic, and Lizardmen. I field most teams (no amazon, vampire, chaos dwarf, or orge) so what should I take.

Space Hulk: In Stock at GW Online

How interesting that GW just found some spare copies of Space Hulk in the back of the US warehouse just in time for christmas? Maybe these were some excess that the GW hobby centers did not sell so shipped back.

If you missed the release and still have the money to buy it take a look. I am hoping to get a game or two in today with my brother.

Blood Bowl 2nd Edition Snotlings

Here are my second edition snotlings. These 6 I all got out of the random star player packs. The size is pretty interesting since they are on standard 25 mm bases. They are smaller than goblins but no were near as tiny as the current snotling models for fantasy. Of course 6 is no where near what you need for a team which would be a minimum of 10 to go with the six ogres in the current ogre rules. These are pretty much just comic relief figures.

Blood Bowl Fluff Question

Anyone out there know who the Everbold Unicorns are? They seem to be one of the few NAF teams that has no details at all in the fluff materials. They were not a bad team with a winning record in the year listed.