Blood Bowl 7s Pitch

So my youngest is now getting to the age where he can be taught Blood Bowl.  I have tried to teach people the game in the past but it takes a long time to play a game with a new player so I normal get through less than a half when I am showing it.  Blood Bowl 7s to the rescue.  With only 7 players on the pitch for each side and 6 turns per half with very limited rerolls, the games go quicker.

I have been slowly picking up the new plastic teams to add to my collection so wanted a pitch that would fit the bigger models.  The plastic teams work well for sevens also since the often missing models for a optimal league team do not matter with only 4 total non lineman allowed.  I looked around for a pitch from several vendors but no one really listed it as a standard product.  After contacting some of the different makers for quotes, I decided to purchase one made by Mats by Mars.

The mat is vinyl.  It rolls and unrolls nicely.  Since the Sevens pitch has fewer squares it still fits nicely across the table.  I still have not adjusted to playing sideways with the BB2016 pitches.

 

The pitch has integrated sideline items.  Turn markers, Score, Fame, and Reserves up to the Morgue.

Blood Bowl 7s kickoff table on one side.

Pass Table, Weather Markers, and scatter on the other.

Overall I am quite happy with it.  I got it in the standard grassy style but they have a whole ranges of background patterns if you want to match your favorite teams.  Now onto training the Next Generation.

Blood Bowl: Miniature Size Comparisons Orcs

Now for Part II of the size comparison between the models in Blood Bowl 2016 and previous releases.
From left to right I have aligned the 2nd Edition Plastics, 2nd Edition Lead, 3rd Edition Plastic, 3rd Edition Petwer and Finally the 2016 Edition Plastics.

Blizters

Blockers

Lineman

Throwers

As you can see the size varation is more pronounced that with the Humans but also all over the place with the 2nd edition plastic being often the biggest until the newest edition.  Strangely the 2nd edition metal Blizters and Blockers seems smaller than the lineman or thrower from the same edition.

Blood Bowl: Model Size Comparisons Humans

So the new edition of Blood Bowl dropped last month and I got a copy for my collection for Christmas.  One of the first things people commented on during the rumor and reveal time was that GW was following the Age of Sigmar path and increasing the size of the models.  I am sure this is only to allow more detail and not to try to get people to rebuy stuff so that it is not funny looking next to the new stuff.

Now that I have the set I was able to leverage my collection to compare the different models from the game over nearly the past 30 years to see how consistent they have been in scale.  Long story short is that they have never been very consistent.  The models from the Humans are from 6 different official GW products.
From Left to Right: 2nd Edition Plastics (Monopose), 2nd Edition Metal, 3rd Edition Plastic, 3rd Edition Metal, 4-5th Edition Metal, and 2016 Edition Plastics.

Blizters

Catchers

Linemen (2nd and 3rd Models are Human Blocker and Human Lineman from 2nd Edition Metals)

Throwers

Overall we see that the 2nd edition plastics were larger than most of the other models until the recent release.  The 2nd edition metals are bulkier than the 3rd-5th editions but generally not taller.  The most recently released metal team is pretty similar in size the new team.  If they were on the pitch together the 3rd edition plastics would probably show the scale change the worst of these.

Get a Copy of Blood Bowl Rules Before They Disappear

With a new version of Blood Bowl due soon, GW will ofcourse be trying to sell rules that are very much like the last edition.  Well you can still get a free pdf of the best version of the rules every made.

The Eagles Crash Back to Earth

After a win in my second game of the league season, my Slann team crashed in their third game.  This game was very much like the first as it was against a developed team which even though I outnumbered them had almost 400K more team value.  I told my wife before I left that my opponent moves faster, hits harder, and handles the ball better so it was going to be a tough game.

Innsmouth Eagles Stand Tall

In their second League game my Slann Team, The Innsmouth Eagles, were able to pull off the win.  It was a better matchup than my first game which was against an experienced Norse team.  This week I faced a rookie roster Pro Elf team.  I totally failed my fans roll and ended up at +2 FAME disadvantage which was exasperated by a card the opponent drew giving him essentially +3 FAME on kickoff table rolls.  Luckily only 1 event came up where this mattered and no pitch invasions.

Innsmouth Eagles Fail to Soar

We had the opening week of the local Blood Bowl League and my Slann team did not come out very well.  I had never played Slann before and while I have a ton of miniatures I am not a great coach so it was a 2-1 loss.  One of the better coaches(Came in Second at Zlurpee with Slann) was watching over my shoulder and I am pretty sure laughing to himself about what I was doing.

I Quit

Says the Hobgoblin.  He somehow does not think this is fair and would like to retire.

No I have no plans of actually using the model from the Reaper Bones II Kickstarter as a Beast of Nurgle for Blood Bowl.  I already have the newer beast metal model or a chaos spawn for that role. It would clearly be a model for a more powerful thing that would not be found on the pitch regardless of the teams affiliation.  Just thought it was a funny concept to take the problem of big guys not fitting in their squares to the limit.

Just got my email about scheduling the next season of the local Blood Bowl League.  Taking my Slann so I will probably be going from a play off coach to the cellar dweller for the next season as I have never played or seen Slann be played.  Lots of on the job training.

Blood Bowl: Chaos Dwarves Retrospective

I finished my second season with my Chaos Dwarf Team Black Death recently.  Made the playoffs again after only losing one game due to a bunch of ties but lost again to the player who had beaten me recently.  Overall pretty successful as I am not a great player regardless of how big my collection is and my league has regular tournament players who go to many events a year around the midwest.  One time I was randomly reading a blog post about an event and saw that the winner and runner up where both in my league.  When I sent out a league email congratulating them on their success, another player commented what about him for 4th place which I did not know since I did not see him in any pictures.

Black Death Prepares for Season Two

The Blood Bowl league is about to start the next season and I am bring back my Chaos Dwarf team, Black Death, for another go.  I went 2-3-2 in the regular season and made the final playoff spot by 3 way tie breaker.  First round of the playoffs was a draw game that never got finished(long story) where I advanced to the finals to lose the game 2-1 to Khemri.  The defining moment of the game was at the end of the first half where the Khemri player needed like every ball handling skill to sure hands a ball, the pass a long pass, and then had the inaccurate pass scatter back onto the one player likely to score.  Due to the skills and such the success rate was like 15% for the play so not so impossible but enough that getting that outcome really tilts the balance for the rest of the game.

My current team has 3 Guard Dwarves, 1 Might Blow Dwarf, 2 Unskilled Dwarves, 1 Bull Centaur with Block and Dodge, 1 with Block and Break Tackle, 1 Kick Hobby, My Scoring Hobby with Sure Hands and Block, 2 Unskilled Hobbies, and a Standfirm Minotaur.  My team value is pretty high now at like 1630 so no more players or purchases.

The league has an interesting mix this season with Khemri, Nurgle, Pro Elf, High Elf, Norse, Slann, and 2 Skaven teams.  A lot of lower armor teams though so hopefully I can put some pain on them as they will probably be able to score on me pretty easy.  Time to work on my defense.

Blood Bowl 2nd Edition Minotaurs

Here we have 2 additional minotaurs from the Blood Bowl 2nd Edition collection.  These are both single piece models and are of a pretty reasonable scale to actually use in the game without displacing to many near by models. 

Blood Bowl Old School Ogres

Here is my collection of old school ogres for Blood Bowl.  I have 6 total so if I do not give any to other teams could field an ogre team with them and my 2nd edition snotlings.  The guy at the top left is not an official Blood Bowl ogre but is of the same style.

They are in various states of priming/painting/stripping since most of them are second hand pick ups.  The two shinny ones are the ones that have been in the family blood bowl collection since they were first produced like 25 years ago. My dad made me spray varnish all of my leads back in the day to cut down in the lead contact which is why they are still so shiny.

I should probably do close up on them all so will do that next time I have them out.

Blood Bowl: Black Death at Legends of the Thrall

Welcome to Moonday Night Blood Bowl, I am Mik Terrorco and this is my partner Run Grinden.  What do be have in store for ours fans tonight, Run?

We have a great match up of the Black Death visiting the Legends of the Thrall.  I have been really impressed with what I have seen out of the Legends this season.  Most people will tell you that the vampire is an unreliable player and their enthralled human minions are not much better than a hobgoblin but I think it really comes down to coaching.  Legends has a great coach who knows how to keep his vampires focused on the game and not the thralls or spectators.  The Legends have signed Wilhelm Cheney for the game to bring a little more speed and punch with Marisa Hematomei out this week.  He might be able to make some short work of a few dwarves with those claws.

Blood Bowl 3rd Edition Halflings

Certainly nothing exciting in these guys.  There are 6 different miniatures made up of 2 variations of 3 basic poses.  I lack the tree men to really field this team with just two in total but even if I had them they would be pretty low on the list.  I would probably do goblins first as they at least get the secret weapons which can be fun if not really effective.

Here is the Third edition Treeman Star Player.  Since Halflings generally have a lot in inducements you generally will have 2 tree man plus the tree man star.


This post is really just to fill in the hole in my Blood Bowl Collection Page.

Blood Bowl 3rd Edition Goblins

Filling in more from my blood bowl collection.  Here we have the third edition Blood Bowl goblins.  There are 5 sculpts to build your team from.  I think I got these guys in blister packs and not a team box so have a couple of each of the bare pewter ones but for some reason that left me without the guy on the end who I had to pick up second hand.  The basic goblins are then upgraded to a team with trolls and special weapons.

Blood Bowl 3rd Edition Chaos Dwarves

Today we take a look at the Games Workshop Blood Bowl 3rd Edition Chaos Dwarves.  This is the team I am using for my current league since they were assembled and mostly painted (came that way from second hand purchase).  That team's name is Black Death since that is one of the Chaos Dwarf Team names from back in the old days.  The 3rd edition team is from GW's silly period like most of the 3rd edition stuff looks funny compared to the 2nd edition stuff or more modern works.  In the 40K world, it is the time between the Rogue Trader and the Grim Dark phases.

BlockEm Blood Bowl League Game 2

Due to some scheduling issues, I ended up playing my second game for the Blood Bowl league I recently joined about a week early.  The planned order was adjusted to allow me to player another player who was going to miss the next league night so my chaos dwarves arrived for battle against another fresh start team of Nurgle Plague carriers.  I received the opening kick off and got to work trying to progress the ball down the field.

BlockEm Blood Bowl League Game 1

So I got my first game in last night for the new season of the local Blood Bowl League.  This season there are 8 coaches so we are doing a round robin with a game every two weeks for the regular season.  Teams in the league have to stop playing after three seasons so their are a lot of new teams in the league.

Full LRB 6 Book Up on Cyanide Site

Cyanide is nice enough to be hosting a full version of the LRB 6 Blood Bowl Rules right now as GW has disavowed the game.  Since the GW website reboot the official copy of the rules have not been found on the GW site.  Hopefully fans have downloads of all the rulebooks that used to be up their for their games.  I know that I have copies of Blood Bowl, Epic, and Dark Future but would have like a copy of Mordheim and Necromunda also which I never downloaded.

The Blood Bowl version hosted by Cyanide has the art, diagrams, background sections and also has the Chaos Pact, Slann, and Underworld teams right there in the team roster section.  Most complete version I have seen so go get yourself some rules.

DungeonBowl

I got together with some of the members of the Blood Bowl league I am joining for a 4 player game of Dungeonbowl.  Now the rules for Blood Bowl are pretty well established having been mainly the same for 20 years now with just fine tuning on the skills and league stuff.  There are a couple variations on the rosters to make the teams more balanced that you can find but the core is the same.  Dungeonbowl is really not like that.  There was an official 2nd edition release for which I show my board from above.  There were then releases done through White Dwarf for 3rd edition which used heroquest type tiles or online but nothing truly official in a long time.