Ready for Kick Off

I laid out some targets for the year in my last post, and I can now report some progress on the first of them. The Squig-fuelled Stabbers, my goblin Blood Bowl team, are now ready for the start of the club's 2013 Blood Bowl season.

The team photo - take a good look while they're all still standing...

I went for goblins this year because I've used human and chaos teams for as long as I've been playing Blood Bowl (which, now I think about it, is about 20 years now!) and it was high time for a change. With goblins expectations will be low, but I'm hoping to overcome as many opponents as possible with a high silliness factor...

Apparently, both of these count as "cheating" for some reason!

I did consider a starting team of just normal goblins and eight re-rolls, but that limits some of the silly things I can do with secret weapons and trolls. Kieron was kind enough to donate a fanatic, a looney and two trolls, so all of those have made it into the starting team, along with ten normal goblins.

The trolls as they came from Kieron...

The trolls can fling goblins downfield (or at opposing players, heh heh heh), and are the most expensive players available to the team, so I've gone for two to start with since they'd be hard to save up for later. These were already painted when I got them from Kieron, but I wanted to give them blue skin to make them stand out even more from the little guys so they got repainted. I might normally strip them first, but these are pretty old models without much detail and were also varnished, so I decided it would be easier to just paint over the top. Never overestimate the power of laziness.

...and now with my new paint job

The colour scheme is based on that of the Sheffield Sabres, one of the real-life American football teams my brother coaches, although it ocurred to me the other day that it's also the same colour scheme as used by the Gotham Rogues in the Dark Knight Rises. Incidentally, how come there don't seem to be any fans of the Rapid City Monuments in the stadium in that film? Everyone in the crowd is in black and yellow. Anyway.

The original pogoer paint job

So that I have models available to replace the inevitable casualties, I've painted a couple of spare goblins as well as a pogoer and bombardier. I've painted the pogoer before - it belonged to my brother many years ago and I painted it for him then. I think I've managed to improve on it this time round!

The modern paint scheme on the pogoer, next to the bombardier

I realised when I came to paint this team that it's well over a decade since I last painted greenskins - I used to just slap a coat of goblin green on them, cover it (and, more often than not, any nearby soft furnishings) with orc flesh wash and hope for the best. That seems a bit half-hearted now though, so for these models I used the same colours as for my US Armor for Flames of War, but with more of the lighter highlights. It seems to have worked out, if I do say so myself.

Finally then, some numbers. I wanted to paint 22 models for this team - a full 16 goblins, 4 secret weapons and 2 trolls. I still have 4 standard goblins left, and the eagle eyed amongst you may have spotted that the number is missing from the base of the pogoer. So, although I probably won't use all 16 goblins I would like to have one painted and numbered for every position, and while I've got some momentum going I'm going to carry on and get the last few models done. At the moment I've got 17.5 out of 22 done - there'll be some rejoicing when I get that up to the full 22!

This year's losers!