Kent Team Championships

 hi all,

Last weekend I attended the Kent Team Championships of Blood Bowl. This now annual event was hosted by South Kent Association of Blood Bowl (SKABB) at the Kent Cricket Ground. 118 coaches organised into teams of 4, were in attendance and the atmosphere was so enthusiastic and yet very chill.

As I stated before, i took my wood elf team. In previous tournaments i've taken lower tier teams and done reasonably well, but this time I was gonna try hard...

 

The first team I faced was a Norse team (sorry no pics) and I have to say it was an absolute beast to play. The weather conditions in the game was pouring rain which is a big disadvantage to the throwing game - which is the elves big advantage. The Norse when on to smack the snot out of the elves, KOing 5 of them before half time! Still I managed to sack his ball carrier and escape with the ball with a catcher. Only to get sacked by a 1 dice block from a Valkyrie, which knocked my player over. In turn 8 I managed to run my wardancer into the end zone and tried to throw the ball with my now standing catcher. With just a 4+ to go.... and I fluff the roll, with no rerolls in the bank....

Next half starts with him getting a blitz result for the kick off and he smashes the rest of my team up and I have my drive turned over. The game ends as a 1-0 loss to me.  Bad start.

2nd game on Day 1 and I face Ogres. My oppo was super smiley and just there for the laughs and the game was a real tonic after such a tough first match. My elves managed to out-bash an Ogre team, with my treeman ripping an Ogre in half! and the game ended a win to me. 1-0-1

3rd and the last game of day 1 was vs Snotlings. I was confident that this game should go as well as the last... However, my dice did not agree and my oppos were on fire! Added to that, his bomba snots were just so accurate. Every play I tried failed, and it was super frustrating. Despite this I managed to scrape a draw in the last turn, pulling off a one turn touch down. 1-1-1

So I go into day 2 completely neutral - 1 win, 1 draw and 1 loss. So what team did I draw in the first round of day 2... Norse! different coach and different setup, but they were still a bogey team for my elves (again no pics, sorry). This game was even more miserable than the first, with even my opponent sighing every time my dice came up double 1. Honestly, if it wasn't for how nice he was, the table would have been flipped! The weather once again played a part with Sweltering Heat removing my treeman and wardancer  for the second half. Another loss, another poor start. 1-1-2.

Game 2 of the day (5 overall), saw me playing against Necromantic Horrors. The first time I've played against these competitively. My oppo played as well as he could, but it seemed as if we'd swapped dice, with my sacking of his ball carrier and turning over his drive - twice! Nice chap but the elves were on fire and his ghouls and ghosts were playing a different game... So 2-1-2 heading into the last game.

Which was against Chaos Chosen, my oppo took an Ogre, Rat Ogre and a Troll and my elves with their light armour shivered. Very quickly i made it my mission to take out his Rat Ogre after it had ripped 2 elves to shreds. In turn 3 I managed to knock the beast to the ground and then surround him with elves before delivering the killing foul, removing  the awful creature. Even the other two big guys couldn't help and the welfs took the win, with me ending the tournament 3-1-2!

So, my Elves won out in the end with more wins than losses, so i'm happy with that and I ended up 52nd out of 118 coaches. Overall our team came out around middle of the pack (out of 38 teams), so I was happy with that too. All in all it was a great weekend and some good games of BB (and some shockers!) were played.

hope you enjoy

dGG

Woods and woodies..... and hills

 hi all,

A quick post before I pack up some things for the Kent Championships - a 2 day Blood Bowl tournament held in Canterbury. I've started building some terrain for Old World among other systems. I realised that I while I have trees (quite a few, actually), I don't have them in a clearly defined area as per the rules in TOW. So I set about correcting that, using my band saw to cut some 3mm MDF into an 8x12" piece. 

Which I then sprayed with black primer and then a brown colour. I then used a pre maid dark mud (sorry can't remember the brand) to give it some texture and define the places for the trees

I could then add some mixed grass  and some trees from my existing collection and viola! All told, without drying time it took around an hour to produce a nice piece.

I also decided that my terrain was way to flat. So I went a bit old school and made a couple of modular hill pieces. They can either be stacked or stand alone. Starting with some 3mm MDF, I cut some purple insulation foam to the same shape, angling the blade to get a gradient.

I then cut a smaller shape for the second level

After sealing the foam with PVA, I sprayed them black/brown, and then covered it in sand (i'd run out of mud) and painted the sand a burnt umber colour. After that it was just a case of turfing the hills with my grass mix and again, we have some cheap and cheerful terrain in less than an hour.

On the hill is my Wood Elf team, that I will be using over the weekend at the BB tourney. The minis are from Willy's Miniatures and the treeman is from Black Scorpion (I think)

hope you enjoy

dGG

Prince Andris and the Silver Host

 hi all, 

so what does the mighty host of Ulthuan look like, now it is all dusted off and the final models painted (15 years after they were started!)

Well first up, the main man himself  - Prince Andris Deftblade,  Lord of the Alzuri Heights, Keeper of the Sacred Chalice, Protector of the Shrine of Alfeyri Nubaris. Thankfully he just needed dusting off. I could have painted more detail, as my skills have improved somewhat over the last decade and a half, but tbh I just wanted him on the table, so he got a coat of varnish and voila. Mounted on his favourite steed, the Griffon - Razorbeak and armed with a lance, full plate armour and shield, and carrying a longbow (just in case there is a turn he has nothing he can do). He is a mobile death machine and can strike the flanks and rear of his enemies, confident that he will turn the curs and run them down. Originally, I modelled him with a dragonscale shield, made out of putty but that magic item is no longer available in the new (old) game.

Next up are the magi. Archmage Webril Feylight, the prince's best friend and most trusted advisor. She is mounted on an elven steed for mobility and a bit of protection (barded save). She also has the silvery wand, which means she can take 5x High Magic spells, which is awesome. With her is Aolex Crystalgaze, her apprentice and protegee. Aolex is currently studying the lesser magics of the monkee (humans) and is a level 2 battle magic user. She also has the silvery wand (a common item for elves), so can take 3x spells. Again both of these models were painted before and just needed dusting and varnishing.

Lastly from the characters section, we have Captain Stefire. Stefire is a Chracian noble who charges into battle on the "Kurnus's Pride", a massive lion chariot. He carries a giant Chracian great blade and wears the Lion pelt over the top of his full plate armour. He also has a Dragon Helm and carries the seed of rebirth, in an effort to keep him in the fight. Another old model, that has been dusted off etc.

For my core units, what High Elf armour would march to war without ranks of long bow archers! Once again, just a quick dusting and varnishing. 

I then turned to an old favourite of mine - the Lothern Sea Guard. Unlike the other units, this was incomplete. I had painted 75% of the unit and had to paint the remainder. That meant purchasing some GW paints (I now use Army Painter almost exclusively), as I didn't have the purple that I had used as a main army theme. I also didn't have the right shade of brown for the base edges or turquoise for the streamers either, so I had to put in an order and wait for it to arrive.

The next units had to be painted from scratch as they had only received a black primer spray. I tried to keep the painting in keeping with my style from 15 years ago, but i couldn't help it and I spent a bit more time on the smaller details, that I just used to paint over back in the day when i painted mass armies.

First up is a small unit of Phoenix Guard, these beasts are a hard hitting unit and stay in the fight longer than their small size would suggest.

next is an eagle claw bolt thrower, i must admit to really liking the painting of the wood chassis of the war machine. 

Then we have Bartilla and his Dawn Patrol - a small unit of Ellyrian Reaver Knights. This tiny unit of skirmishers killed off a Bull lord minotaur in their last game, so....

Lastly, we have the mage from the Isle of Blood set, I don't actually use him in my army but it was the last high elf i had left, so finished him off too.

And that's them. My High Elf army in all its glory. All painted, and blooded! Having their (and my) first game of WHFB in a decade and a half. We even managed to scrape a win against a hellish beastmen tribe. Incidentally this is the first army I've completely painted ever! despite owning 6 armies of various completion (before i'd get bored and move on...)

**edit** I realise I haven't photographed my small unit of Swordmasters. Oh well, please imagine a gorgeously painted (?!?) unit of SM.

hope you enjoy

dGG

Full Circle...

 hi all,

As the title suggests, this blog and myself have come full circle. For a long, long time I've resisted the allure of mass battle wargames, considering myself more of a skirmish type player. The advantages are the low model count which often mean a cheaper buy in, with a lot of the games publishing the rules to the games online - for free! something GW did with the earlier AoS stuff but have since gone back to their corporate ways of charging through the a**e for everything. I mean why have one rulebook when you can have three and army books and compendiums and FAQs.

But....

My very first draw into this hobby was Warhammer Fantasy Battle 3rd ed. This blog was started due to me being drawn back into Warhammer (8th I think? what was Island of Blood?). Last week, I was at the Thanet Wargaming Club (TWC)  minding my own business, playing a game of Malifaux, which I was totally intending to blog about. When the table next to mine started laying out a game of The Old World! I could have resisted, until one of the players began deploying High Elves...

They were magnificent, the ranks of spearmen, the deadly archers, eagle claw bolt throwers. I was smitten, I imagined charging my own high elves into the filthy beastmen, cleansing the board of their chaos taint and preserving the sanctity of Ulthuan. HOOK. LINE. SINKER.

So it was fitting that I dust off my Silver Host, prime the remaining figures, and start painting. Thankfully there are less than 20 miniatures left and it shouldn't be long before I get the whole lot on the table. Except, the paint I used for the colour scheme have dried up... Now I've got to wait for replacements to finish them, but at least I can get the bulk of the colours completed in the mean time.

No pictures for today then, but I will link the first few blog posts below so you can see some of the minis that will make up the army. Now I need to download the rules and army books to read up on the mighty elves.

early posts

hope you enjoy

dGG

Carnevale - the full board

hi all, my apologies for the gap in the blogging and the whole skimming over xmas etc. Unfortunately winter pressures in the NHS is no small thing and the sheer amount of norovirus and flu has meant i've been super busy in the real world. Worse one of my last patients before xmas decided to give me an early present - norovirus! The subsequent fays afterward are best not discussed...

Sooooooo, anyway. I prepared this post before xmas and never published it, so here it is. I will post up soon about some of the goodies that have since made their way into da Grotto.

As promised here are the rest of the buildings I made specifically for Carnevale, but I think will be pretty useful for anything else, like Malifaux or Mordheim.

The first building I made was fully interactive and included an interior that I scratch built. Shout out to my buddy Dan who 3D printed all the windows and doors for all of the buildings.

However, when I read the free online rules I realised that the characters don't go inside buildings during the game, as the citizens of Venice lock up at night very tightly indeed...

looking at these pictures though, i felt the board looked very flat. Oh I don't mean the buildings, but the tiles themselves were a wee bit 2 dimensional. So I set about creating some terraces for the buildings to sit on to give the tiles more of a 3D feel.

Most games don't encourage the use of as many buildings and blocking terrain, but Carnevale is a small skirmish game and encourages Parkour type movements. In fact the game rewards players who perform the most daring of move sequences including leaping from building to building and running along roof tops - hence the packed streets and waterways of Venice.

hope you enjoy

dGG