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.

Nerd Heaven

This weekend I got the chance to go see Star Wars in Concert. One of my friends won 4 free tickets from a TV station website. Since his wife did not want to get a babysitter to go with him, he made a guys night out of it with me and 2 other friends. We got together for dinner then headed over to the show. This was my fourth time to this venue in like 2 months after never having gone to it before in like 15 years.


The show consists of 80 musicians plus a large choir with a huge screen behind then plus lighting and laser effects. It traces the story arc of the six movies from the rise of the dark forces to the creation of Darth Vader ending in his redemption. The musicians play the theme of each segment as video clips are shown on the screen mixed in with live images of the musicians. We all said that you get engrossed in watching the screen and the music sounds so good that you almost forget it is being played live in front of you.

Narration was provided by Anthony Daniels in person to go from clip to clip. It was a great show for a Star Wars fan like myself and I am sure the really fanatical people out there just loved it. I am sort of on low side of the fan ladder. I have all the movies on DVD, art books for the original 3, some video games, a t-shirt, a set of star ship blueprints, a stuffed ewok from my youth, and toys still stored at my moms house. I do not have a costume or any replica lightsabers.

It of course did have parts about the pod racing from episode 1 which could have been cut out like a bad memory but nothing is perfect but Jar Jar did not have any real screen time or any dialog.

The show also travels with a memorabilia exhibit of costumes and props plus people from the 501st Legion come out in costumes. I only took a couple of photos since the place was full of all the people looking at all the stuff.

Blood Bowl 2nd Edition Goblins

These are my second edition gobbos. I had 8 basic gobbos and 2 pogo star players. The chainsaw looney is a new edition from my wooden spoon prize for the Tzeentch Challenge. Again not enough for a team but enough to use them as I did as part of the Underworld Creepers. If you look at the figure so can see that one of the guys is sort of grey. This was caused recently as I have been stripping the figures. They were never painted but they had a lacquer coat my dad put on them to limit the skin to lead contact. I tried to get it off with simple green and while it did remove some I need to go to a lacquer thinner to really get them clean. The grey guy was the result of the simple green bath followed by the thinner bath.

Goblins used to come in 2 flavors. The basic lineman like these four guys.

Or Catcher goblins like these 4. Goblins stats have changed a lot since second edition with now only the standard goblin lineman available all at strength 2.

Here are the secret weapons. 2 Pogosticks of Doom and a chainsaw.

I even had 2 cheerleaders for the goblins. I think these must have come in the packs with the goblins I do not think I would have bought them seperately. These are actually the only off the pitch figures I have in my collection. No other cheerleaders, refs, or coaches were ever purchased.