+ inload: Blood Bowl, Battle Builder, and B-Spearhead +

+ Kick off! +

Blood Bowl season kicked off for me with the ever-so-chic Argo Owlbears taking on Lucifer216's Victory Vultures – with both teams taking quite a kicking! 

Victory, fittingly, went to the Vultures, with a stonking 2–0 result.

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After a weekend of gaming, Omricon's Jeldenberg Jets are top of the table, with a game in hand over the Karaz City Griefs. The Owlbears are lurking at the bottom of the table!

I do love Blood Bowl – one of those great games that it's fun to play even when you're getting your teeth kicked in!

The new edition/season is good fun – recognisable to old hands but with lots of 'quality of life' improvements. Too many to got through here, but suffice to say that we're all looking forward to getting more games in. 

The Owlbears, I'm sure, are just gearing up; and with some new (randomly-generated) skills under their belts and a newly-signed Catcher on their line-up, keep an eye on them creeping up the table.

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+ BattleBuilder nameplates +

I've enthused about these before in relation to personalising your Titans [+noosphericinloadlink embedded+], but I hadn't tried them for 32mm bases.

As a little treat for Coaches in the Tallowlands Invitational, I thought I'd pick up a couple of 'players to watch' from each team – these were allowed to take a free skill by the Commissioner (Omricon), and this struck me as a nice way to pick out these talented rookies.

Adding nameplates is a fun way to make things more immersive – it's much more fun to say 'Loriel Elvies dodges past Ofdahn Pitt' to make the touchdown than 'this lineman throws a block against your catcher', and it's a nice way to distinguish the models, too.

If you'd like to try out some plates like this, you can use this affiliate link [+noosphericexloadlink embedded+] and the discount code 'MournStarfall' to get 10% off.

... and related to Blood Bowl, I picked up some Referees.

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In the Tallowlands

The weekend also saw the PCRC try out Spearhead, a sort of boardgame-cum-wargame that's like a cross between Warhammer: Age of Sigmar and Warmachine. Set tables, set armies, and a set of cards. Interesting gameplay, and I'm interested to try out some more.

This is running adjacent to Warmtamale's Age of Sigmar campaign, which the models below are being built for:

Some of these date back a decade, being built and bought for a Mordheim event that I was invited to, but sadly couldn't make. nice to exhume them and bring them up to scratch.

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+ inload: Blood Bowl painting +

 + Reaching a fever pitch +

+ Blood Bowl fever +

Chaunterwick Unathletic, pictured above, saw the field for the first time in a long time at the last PCRC geekend, and they'll be handing the field to some up-and-coming stars, the ever-so-chic Argo Owlbears:

Work on these prancing dandies has been ticking along since the last inload. They've all now got their basic tunic colours in place and I've started picking out the mid-sized areas. I want to make sure that they're at least presentable for their first game, and getting the faces and bases up to scratch is the absolute best way I can think of to do that.

Painting a model is one thing, and painting a group quite another – especially when they're meant to be in some sort of uniform. Blood Bowl teams are made more complicated by the fact that the models are individuals who need to be picked out for the game – the other player should be able to identify who's who, because a particular skill can be critical. 

This is doubly awkward for these elves, as their positions and roles aren't really clear from the poses and equipment in the way that (say) a trollslayer is distinct from a dwarf blocker, or a knight from a peasant. This popped up in my games with Chaunterwick Unathletic – I've added names to the base rims, but while that's great for colour and flavour, it's not always useful for positions! I think if I do something similar, I'll have the names on the back, and the position on the front.

Coming back to the chic Argo Owlbears, once they're completed, identification should be relatively easy, as they'll have numbers painted on (and potentially nameplates). At this stage, however,  I have to rely on things like hair colour to pick out who's who. With that said, you'll spot little tufts on the bases. Partially these are to add some texture to the green astrogranite pitch, but you'll also spot some pink tufts. These add a flash of colour, and also denote positional players (throwers, catchers, blitzers and the like), just to make things a bit easier to parse for the other player.

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+ Puggy Baconbreath +

Renewed interest in Blood Bowl prompted this little spontaneous purchase:

I had the 1988 metal version of Puggy way back in primary school – a model that I don't think ever saw the Blood Bowl field, as the heavily-armoured halfling was busy fighting his way across an Advanced Heroquest board with my (very indulgent) older brother and his (equally patient) mates.

He was painted rather garishly in orange and deep blue, and I quite fancied indulging some fond memories in repainting him. He won't fit in any of my teams, as far as I'm aware (unless he moonlights as a standard halfling in Chaunterwick Unathletic), so I think he's just going to be a good old fashioned painting project.

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