A bit of a distraction

July has been a month where I have once again been distracted by another project.   How did this state of affairs come about?  I thought I would give you a brief outline of how I went from playing Hordes of the Things to painting Blood Bowl figures.

Recently, I played a couple games of Fantasy Flight`s excellent cardgame Blood Bowl Team manager.  If you like a good cardgame it has a lot going for it and if you are a Blood Bowl fan then you really should play it.  The only real issue with the game is getting your hands on a copy of the game and the expansions.  The expansion add a lot more teams to the base game, which helps to keep things fresh.

The cardgame reawakened in me an urge to reread the Blood Bowl novels by Matt Forbeck. Are they high literature? Of course not, but they are a good fun distraction from the troubles of the world. I am the proud owner of the hardback, slipcase edition,a wonderful gift from my wife a few birthdays back.

Reading the books led me to go through my lead mountain and pull out my old 2nd edition Blood Bowl miniatures. I spent a joyous few hours taking stock of the figures that I have and I realised that I could make 7 different complete teams. The choice of where to start was fairly easily. A lot of my Blood Bowl figures were painted with enamel paints, when they were all the rage, and they would need to be stripped of the paint, but my Skaven figures had sat unpainted since I bought them in Canterbury in the late 80s. So, I decided that I would finally give these Jes Goodwin sculpts a lick of paint.

I started painting the Skaven in the first week of July and gave myself the month to get them all finished. If I can keep up that pace I should have all of my figures painted by next February! I doubt that I will be able to stay focused for that long, especially as I don`t have a copy of Blood Bowl, but we shall see.

The figures themselves were really good fun to paint. They needed very little clean up and they have a lot of details that were easy to pick out.

So, here is the complete team, The Kingsbury Critters. I have given them a, Bob Olley, minotaur as a big guy, in the modern game he will be used as a rat ogre but in 2nd ed the Kingsbury Critters will be supported by Jim `Bully` Bowen the minotaur blitzer.