Project 5: Wood Elf Custom Blood Bowl Team

The newest team is a joint one with my daughter who loves doing crafts of all types so we are doing this project together. Well she is doing most of it, I am just helping with tips and the odd idea.

We are both relative beginners at green stuff so we are using a combination of card board with PVC and simple green stuff shapes.

To keep costs down the team is built from Mirkwood Rangers as they have a range of dynamic poses.

The weapons are clipped off and quivers removed. The simple green stuff tails are used to cover up marks.

The box comes with 10 elves, so we have bought a single tree man from old sprues of Sylvaneth Dryads from ebay. You can often get them from places like www.letthedicedecide.co.uk.

Here is the full team of 11 for around £30, depending on how the painting goes we may fill out the ranks with custom war dancers. We have added the odd shoulder pad with card board and sculpted a ball for a thrower and added a severed orcs head to scare the opposition.

Shout Out! Unite All Action

At the birth of this blog one of my aims was to create a blood bowl set for around £30. It has fallen by the wast side of late, but I came across this post on uniteallaction.blogspot.com which detailed putting together a team for my favourite team the Skaven at a bargain price!

Mantic Elves

In an effort to create the second team for the challenge I bought two boxes of the Mantic elves. I also bought some green stuff and instant mold. The later two are excellent and I'll make a post soon on them. But the Mantic elves are the wrong size. See picture. I have included a few other models in the picture so you get a feeling of size. The dwarfs from Mantic were perfect.

I am also working on a human team called the 'Copper Catchers'. Not sure of I am taking humans or lizard men to the NAF championship.

The Challenge: Blood Bowl Pitch

As part of the challenge we need a pitch to play on. There are a few mat's on the market but our budget doesn't stretch that far. So the remaining option is to make one.

There are already a number of good jpeg's out there to download. 'Adam Souza', Wood Elf pitch is one of my favourites. But I wanted to create a pitch you could downloaded and modify easily. The excel file is available here. The pitch includes items for dugouts and a scatter marker. If you want to change any parts you can just open the document in excel and copy and paste parts to move dug outs or turn markers.

If you would like to change the background you just need to go into page setup and add you own tile set to repeat. By changing the image in the header. Also just incase you did not know *.xlsx can be renames to a *.zip and you can explore what is inside the excel file. Look under 'renamedfile.zip\xl\media\' and you will find the image jpeg you should be able to swap out.

The Challenge: Let the Elf Decide

The 10 Wyches have been assembled. Which was quite fiddly with my old stubby fingers as the models are very thin and you have to be extra careful not to bend or snap them when removing them from the sprue. The plastic which holds them to the frame is thicker than the flimsy spiky pads on their shoulders..

The models have had all their guns trimmed but I have left weapons like daggers and swords as they still seem to fit the Dark Elf theme of cheating and stabbing their way to victory. The box only comes with 10 miniatures, but like with most Games Workshop models you get a range of body parts so you are only a pair of legs and body to get to your 11th or 12th man.

That is where this excellent site comes in www.letthedicedecide.co.uk. They sell bits of sprue's so all I need are legs and body to complete the team. This meant it only cost me an extra £1 to complete the team. Bringing the team to £15 ($24).

The Challenge: Second purchase Dark Eldar

So this is the second team. It takes the budget to £30.50 (damn you VAT increase) but I bought them just wanting to assemble, paint and make them into a team. I may yet see if I can buy cheaper miniatures and show a few different options to make up the Blood Bowl set. I am thinking the final challenge posts could be made up of a few different sets to show a range of budgets.

Anyway on to the miniature overview. This set of figures is £6 more expensive than the Mantic dwarfs. You don't get the plastic box for transporting the miniatures or the extra theme pieces.

The miniatures just come in the standard cardboard box and a basic assembly manual. What is better than the dwarfs is the amount of detail in the plastic and the greater range of optional arms, heads, bodies etc... The models themselves are also in more pieces. This allows for a greater range of posers which is good for making them into a Blood Bowl team. There are more pictures here if you want to see what comes in the box.

The Challenge: Dark Elf Team

One of Games Workshop recent releases have been updates to the Dark Eldar. In particular the set we are looking at as a possible 2nd team are the Dark Eldar Wyches. These could look like dark elves with their own version of Blood Bowl armour, lots of padding and spikes.

My local game store www.wargamestore.com does the set for £14.00. It was cheaper but with the VAT increases in the UK it has gone up in price. You get 10 models with this set so we are 1 away from a full team. Buying this team will take us over budget to £30.50, so we have a dilemma. Buy a Mantic set for £8.00 to stay under budget or blame it all on the VAT increase :)

The Challenge: Possible team 2?

When I looked at purchasing the first team my primary goal was price. I came up with 2 possible teams the dwarf team which are now painted and an undead team. We could go with the undead team or purchase the Elves from Mantic. Which could look like a Pro Elf team with a little trimming. But for the second team I'd like to buy a team, which I would like to play and from a different manufacturer.

My first look will be an orc team. I like the way orc's can play as an attrition (a team which relies on brute force to win a match) team but still move the ball quickly. A good set are the Ork Boyz from Games Workshop.

I started to put together an Orc team before I started the blog so I already have the set. They cost £15.50 from Games Workshop. But I managed to pick them up from my local game store for £14.00 as they do a 10% discount on all Games Workshop stock. The www.wargamestore.com has to be one of my favourite stores around, you can always pop in there for a chat and buy some miniatures. Like I said I have already bought these miniatures but thought I would post to give you more options when buying your second team.

I have not yet finished painting them but here is what they look like at the moment. The set comes with 11 miniatures so you could use them as a complete second team.

Linemen...

Blitzers...

Throwers...

The Challenge: Team 1 Dwarfs Painted

As you can see the first team has been painted with a total of 12 miniatures for the price of £8. Depending on budget I may replace the blue troll slayers with miniatures which look more like a troll slayer. But for now they will have to do. Overall I am pleased with the miniatures. But now they are all done I regret just going with green. I actually prefer the Blitzer's with white helmets. The troll slayers are blue, which meant I had to buy a 5th paint pot eating up my budget.

The team make-up is the following:

1 & 2 are Blitzers and have white helmets and cloaks so they look different from the Blockers.

3 & 4 are the Runners and are carrying orc head's like footballs.

5 - 10 are the blockers all have green helmets.

11 & 12 are my temporary troll slayers and come a extra theme pieces in the mantic set.

The Challenge: Blood Bowl Rules

Up until now the posts for the Challenge have been focused on sourcing miniatures and painting. This one is going to be focus on the rules. The Blood Bowl rules are free to download from games workshop. They also have a very good document ‘BB Art of Blocking which you should either print out for daily coffee table reading or for in your bathroom if you do that sort of thing. The booklet on blocking is probably the most important reads in my opinion as fellow more experienced player will always remind you of the general rules while playing.

The Games Workshop edition is good but I personally prefer the edition by the Yorkshire League edition 'TYBBL Turf Edition Rulebook 2009 v.1.7' which you can get here. It’s layout is very intuitive and has the rules for the experimental teams as well as all the star players.

The Challenge: Dwarf Blitzer

Here are a few pictures of the latest Dwarf from the first team. To differentiation the Blitzers we are using the Dwarf with cape miniatures from the Mantic set and also giving them white helmets.

The first picture is just the base colours of white, green and yellow to keep within the limited paint set. The second are the finished miniatures with a team emblem on the shield. As you get a bulldog with the team I have drawn up a simple image in windows Paint then printed out a scaled down version and glued it with PVA and stuck it to the shield.

The Challenge: Painting the first Dwarf (+video)

I have finished the first model for the dwarf team. He will be a dwarf runner used to handle the ball, hence the orc head held like a football. The limited colour set is reflected in it’s colour scheme. I had to mix the brown from red and green, using a little more red to get the deeper brown. I am no expert painter but I think the result’s are good enough for a game of Blood Bowl.

The Challenge: A new set of paints

So after the cheap acrylic disaster I needed to find a set of paints. Getting a starter set of paints is not really an option as the starter Games Workshop set comes in a budget breaking £18.00. So the idea is to see if we can come up with a scheme to use minimum colour’s. As we can mix and dilute the paint to get different colour’s and washers. I decided to settle on 4 colour’s to try and reach the goal. Black, white, green, red and yellow. Yellow gives me a better colour to lighten the red and green than just using white. Shading with just black and white can sometimes lead to grey looking tones.

Now I just needed to decide one who’s paints to use. My own collection is a mix of Games Workshop and Vallejo paints. GW’s paint’s are great and the washer’s are my favourite paints to use. But GW paints cost £2.25 a pot, so would cost me £11.25. Vallejo also do excellent paints and have the advantage of coming out at only £1.70 a pot which means a total of £8.50. They also come in handy bottle form which let’s you use droplets of your paint on the palette.

Another alternative is enamel paints from Humbrol or Revell and come out at an even better price of £1.12. But they take a while to dry and you have to use white spirit to wash your brushes. As a test though I think I’ll try to paint a model using the enamels (a friend has kindly let me use his set to paint) just to see how they compare.

The Challenge: Not all acrylics are created equal.

In an effort to keep costs down, I thought I would see how just a normal set of acrylics came out. The set of 12 was £3, with the 3 brushes at £1.50 the painting material’s came out at £4.50. This would leave me £17.50 for my second team and game material’s, which seems achievable.

I picked my Dwarf runner mounted him on a paint pot and applied the white undercoat. The paint did not cover the miniature very well. It was thin, gloopy and provided a very uneven surface. Keeping my chin up I applied another coat and then the main base colour’s. The end result was horrible. The paint had a weird shine to it and the whole process of painting (which I usually love) was awkward. The brick that crushed the camels back was when I tried to apply a wash made from the acrylic. This can usually cover your dodgy paint job but only made it a million times worse.

So off to a jar of Dettol and water to strip the plastic miniature. If you want to see a guide to using Dettol to strip you miniatures a good article can be found here.

So I’ll have to re-buy my paints and try a different avenue. Does this mean the challenge is over? The answers is no, I plan to cost only the things that contribute to making the Blood Bowl set. Therefore this experiment will have to go into the lessons learnt pile.

The Challenge: Dwarfs Assembled

So the team is assembled and consists of 12 players (though 2 maybe temporary depending how the challenge goes).

We have 2 Dwarf runners sporting Orc heads as balls.

The Blitzers will be the ones with cloaks and Blockers the ones without shields and the two with shields but no cloaks.

The full set of pictures can be found here. One of them is now sporting a scar as I slipped with the Stanley knife, typical Dwarfs always getting themselves into scrapes.

The Challenge: First Purchase Dwarf pack of 10

As the Dwarf’s came out the cheapest I have bought the pack of Dwarf Ironclad troops from Mantic. They come in a plastic box. At first I thought this was a waste till I realised they are meant to be a carrying case to hold the set.

This is a neat idea and sets the tone as the box isn’t just a little set of dwarfs but a few well thought out extras.

You get two identical sprues which hold 5 dwarfs. You also get on each sprue an Orc head, tankard, bull dog model, dead dwarf and a few extra arms and dwarf heads.Maybe the dead/drunk Dwarf could be used a team members saving the £4. I may leave the Slayer model to the side to see if we have the money towards the end of the challenge. The other pieces like the bull dog models could be used as themed turn and re-roll counters. Even the spare Dwarf heads could be used as the ball.

About 6 of the model’s come with the shield as a separate piece which is good for a Blood Bowl team. One of the arms on these miniature's are also separate so you can put them in different poses.

The over 4 figures come with their shield attached to the extent I not could separate without destroying the piece. Two of these figures also have their axes attached, but these shouldn't be to much trouble to remove. It is a shame. But then again these are not fantasy football miniatures and we are only using them to keep costs down. Saying that I think the set should look good and I am pleased with the extras. The bulldog’s might also give me the theme for the Dwarf team, I may try and find a bull dog symbol to place on the shields. Here is a link to all of the pictures taken.

The Challenge: Undead Team

As I said in the last blog entry the other team is Undead or Khemri. Though the Khemri team is more of a dry skeleton's and mummy’s, I could get away with just changing the paint work to sandy colours rather than wet rotten reds and purples.

This set of ghoul’s could be modified to make the main set of your team.

Or if you wanted to have skeletons this set could fill in for them again at £8.

Games workshop also do a cheap set of skeletons for £5.Or if we wanted to spend a little more we can get this troop of 10 for £15.

If we had spare money in the budget I would definitely go for these mummies from Willy Miniatures.

So at a push this team at it’s cheapest would be £13.

The Challenge: Dwarf Team

The first team I put together is going to be the cheapest I can get it and cost will dictate the team selection. I have two ideas a dwarf and an undead or Khemri teams. An issue to putting a team together is the variation of model and player. So an Orc team made up of goblins, troll and different positional Orc players might be to many model variations to do cheaply.

Possible Dwarf team

Due to them consisting of the same race and don’t all dwarf’s look the same anyway I have found my first possible team.

I am hoping I can modify this set of Dwarf’s enough to create Blockers, Runners and Blitzers.
As no Dwarf team would be without a troll slayer, I am thinking the following model could be modified to be my slayer.
The miniatures for Mantic would come in at a cost of £12. £8 for the dwarfs and £4 for the Berserker. Looking through their miniatures I could source both teams from them, but I also want to look at other miniature manufacturers.

The Challenge

As well as my usual posts, I am undertaking a challenge. The challenge is to see if I can get a decent Blood Bowl setup for around £30, I picked that amount as that is the price of a single team and under the cost of the box set by £20.

So the requirements:
Two painted teams, and all the things you need to play a game of Blood Bowl.

The restrictions:
I will not buy used items, so no buying a cheap team from eBay. This is a real option when buying teams but I wanted to create teams that someone else can repeat if they wanted too.
The teams and setup need to be good enough so they wouldn't embarrass someone who wanted to go to tournaments. So no bit’s of paper to represent player’s.
Saying that I will not include the price of glue, paper, printing and delivery but will include paints and paint.

The plan:
I want to blog the process of doing this and include links to what I buy, so feel to comment and give suggestions.