The Villainous Milliners

As mentioned in my last post. Here is the team that started it all for me, only a few months back. The mighty Villainous Milliners.

Just yesterday I finally got round to touching up the chips that had been caused by the two tournaments and one league season. I opted for Vallejo's liquid matt varnish which seems to be working just fine.

With the exception of my sideline items this is a Games Workshop team and I can stand proud and say I love the big hat Chaos Dwarf look.

After thinking long and hard I went for a simple colour and paint job. This is the highest number of models I have ever painted. Prior to this I can pretty much only count a handful of other items, since taking gaming back up. I was if I am honest quite pleased with the outcome and I already have two other teams on the painting table, with a third on the way. 

The team itself features only very minimum conversion. The other bull once sported a sword and standard. these where snipped away and exchange for knuckle dusters and in the spirit of recycling the Standard lives on as my turn counter. The counter next to it is for re-rolls and came about following me realising that rather than throw away that left-over blob of Green-Stuff I could instead make a little dice.

As this was my first ever team I also got very excited by the prospect of sideline characters. For the Chaos Dwarf squad there is nothing standard and so I set about hunting the web for suitable models. It wasn't long before I stumbled across the company Reaper who seem to make a model for every thing while also not forcing you to sell an organ to buy them.

My three gals were originally forge maidens. But with the help of some snips, bits and Green-Stuff they become my Babe, Apothecary and my Wizard. the conversions were pretty straight forward. the Babe being the hardest as the tankards were hand made, oh and the bloody tongue on the wizards staff. the originals can all be found here.

As first teams go I would advise any new player looking to try Blood Bowl to give Chaos Dwarves a try. They can be very forgiving while at the same time offer a great level of diversity.

I never get tired of seeing the shock on an opponents face when the Centaur moves nine squares, rolls two dice and pops free the ball which was thought to be well out of reach of my stunty legged team.

I am still to get that one turn touchdown with him though.

When the Pinback Crumb-Bowls

It had been a huge build up for the 1st ever Crumb-Bowl one day Blood Bowl event, organised by my good friend Glowworm and held last week in the village of Sutton Benger in Wiltshire UK. 

This was mostly linked to him asking me to knock together the trophy bases for all of the awards he had organised. Why did I admit to having so much spare timber....

As planned, I was sticking with my Chaos Dwarves, The Villainous Milliners (I will put up a proper introduction post about them next I promise). You see, had decided at the start of my Blood Bowl journey, that in order to learn the game I should keep it simple for the first year and so its all Chaos Dwarf for 2012.

But, with so many roster options I was lured astray from the simple roster build (that had served me pretty well at the Cake Bowl event only a few months back) by those shiny star players, leading me to taking the 200k and what i now realise, huge waste of gold, Rashnak Backstabber. 

The roster rules were pretty simple. 1.1 team value, 1 star player, 4 regular skills and 1 double (no stacking). with this I put together the following:

1x ReRoll

1x Fan Factor

1x Asst Coaches

1x Cheerleaders

2x Bulls: Both with Block. I know allot of people will be screaming Break Tackle at me. But, at the moment I like the dependability of Block on these guys and I am never too worried about that 4+ dodge.

6x Dwarves: 1 with Mighty Blow and one with Leader. Yep that's right no guard for me, which came down to me figuring that with one guarder I was always bound to be sticking him in the wrong spot, as I was often doing in league play.

3x Hobgoblins: 1 with Sure Hands.

1x Rashnak Backstabber: Much of the reason came from me simply having the model and a desire to field it, following its fresh new paint job. I was also keen to see what stab was like. 

On paper, to a rookie like me, stab seems awesome. "Whats that.... I just roll for your armour...... No chance of me getting double skulls????". I discovered over the course of my three games, that this is not the super skill that I had imagined it to be.

Game one was against local friend Be4ch (of Nufflelovesdoubleskulls blog fame). A mere week before we had faced off in a Crumb practise match, that had resulted to me winning the game and me dropping my Minotaur from the roster, after him doing little more than growl and snarl at the opposition. 

I will admit I was a little confident. But, it was not to be. Be4ch had nailed the tactics for all that Guard he had deployed and I came away from game one with a loss. 

However, I also came away with a lovely spot prize of a chainsaw Orc model, following Be4ch's first block of the game resulting in his chainsaw gutting poor Rashnak. Huh, i guess he was good for something.....

Game two and I was pitched against a league friend Kungfupanda, who's Norse simply managed to out pound and skill me, leaving me with my second loss of the day....

It was about this time I was starting to realise I may be in the running for the dreaded spoon..... So far I had only managed two touchdowns and two casualties. 

My last game of the day was against a new coach AlanRoy and his Orcs. I had never played against Orc's before and all I thought about was how full our KO and Injury boxes may end up with so much blocking and so few dodges.

Nuffle it seemed, had a different plan. For an entire 32 turns, not one injury occurred. In fact armour was only broken a handful of times. We ended our game on a 1-1 tie. We also ended our game last, which meant a few spectators had gathered to watch my final attempt to long bomb it to my Centaur for a turn 16 winning Touchdown... Thank you Nuffle for letting every dice succeed on that, excluding the very last one.

Even with the not so great results I still loved every minute and came away having learnt a few more tricks from the more skilled players that I was matched up against and those I had watch play. 

But..... What about the spoon? Yep I came home with it. On the plus side though, its my 1st Blood Bowl Trophy and there is no way I can do any worse at the next event......... Right?

As for next events. That will be Thrudball on the 11-12th August in Bognor Regis. Sorry Rashnak, no invite for you.

You can play games with these little guys?

It took me a long time to wake up to what the world of table top gaming had to offer. Its not that I had no idea, its just that I had spent most my youth buying, building, what can loosely be described as painting and then displaying my 28mm characters, rather than reading most of the rule books that accompanied them. There was simply not enough time to learn all these games, when all you want to read is the latest issue of Spider-Man.

It was only really five years ago that I discovered how much more was on offer and that's mostly thanks to a work colleague (and now great friend) who used to be a minion of GW and who at the time had run short of local gaming buddies.

It didn't take him long to persuade me. To be honest, when it comes to stuff like this I am pretty easy to convince. 


So, with a gap of over fifteen years, I leapt back into the table top hobby world, excited and thinking the same way I am sure most of us big kids think, which is that now as a grown-up you can buy all the things your shitty paper round earnings had denied you all those years ago.

This all meant that I started big and within a matter of a few months I had gathered together a huge Warhammer Fantasy Empire army. At the same time I had also convinced my younger brother to join in with the madness and he also ventured into the FLGS leaving with more models than he should have.

But, I could no longer get away with just sticking all these lovely new models on a shelf. I had committed to learn some rules and add to that I had discovered that I had become far more fussy about the quality of a painted figure. This is great if you know what you are doing. I however no longer did it seemed. Nostalgia was telling me I was a master at this. My sausage fingers where telling me a very different story.

It didn't matter to much though, you can still play games with primed models and if they had all waited for me to paint everything, I am sure we would all still be waiting. In fact I know it, as they to this day remain unfinished.

Grasping the rules was not so bad. I am more of a learn as you go person and I picked things up okay. As a kid I had played a little D&D (I realise now not so well). So things didn't seem to alien. But, that WHFB rule book ain't so small.

2010 ended with me moving away from what had become a great Warhammer gaming group. Luckily however, we had all started to look beyond Fantasy and the Cyanide Blood Bowl game had reminded that very same work mate what he should have got us all playing to start with.

I loved the game, I never got into the on line league side of things. But I love the fantasy aspect of it all (much of the reason I enjoyed WHFB) along with a simplicity and speed that is fantastic when compared to the Warhammer marathons I was used to. It also meant I could keep gaming with my now distant mates.


The only thing that was lacking however was that tactile interface. To me there is nothing that compares to rolling the dice and moving the miniature. So an evening on ebay later and I had won myself a Chaos Dwarf team, with no real idea if they were any good at all. I just wanted them, as they were a race I liked from the fantasy game. I was also ecstatic that I only needed to paint what seemed like a handful of models. 


It was at this point that I started reading everything I could find on line about Blood Bowl. It didn't take to long to find TFF, The NAF and most importantly my local league Cakebowl and I was soon finding every journey filled with the soothing tones of the Three Die Block guys or the  Zlurpcast crew (and now also Both Down).


In the roughly twelve months that I have been playing this awesome game, I have completed my very 1st league season, coming in 4th and played my 1st Tournament, where I managed what I felt was a respectable mid-ish table finish. 


What I have discovered, is that the community is hugely welcoming and great at helping a rookie like me learn the ropes and its those experiences that I want to share in this Blog.