Blood Bowl returns and it's glorious!

The death of Games Workshop's Specialist Games proved short and they have released a brand new edition of Blood Bowl! After what GW did to Warhammer Quest, I think many old BB players waited for this release with fear in their hearts. Now it looks very much like GW is giving us the new edition we're all hoping for! The rules are left intact and we get a new box with top notch components. The last time I bought a Games Workshop product new from the store was in 2009 when I bought the third edition of Space Hulk so I wanted to vote with my wallet and made this a day 1 purchase. Whoa, that's seven years already! I thought Space Hulk 3rd edition came out yesterday!

I'm sure you can find everything you want to know about this new edition from the Internet already so I'll just add a few notes.

I'm really happy with all the components. Everything is top notch quality in my mind and the box contains plenty of value for its (in GW scale) moderate price point. I hope this will attract new players from the boardgaming crowd as I think it could compete in that market. Note that even though GW hasn't released all the old teams as official rules in the "day 1 DLC" -type death zone book, there is a Ravening Hordes style pdf in the new which GW released and which you can use to play all the teams that don't have new official rules yet.

The new orc team looks great, especially the Black Orc. He really looks like he's having the time of his life out there :)

Size-wise the new models are a bit bigger than old Blood Bowl models, but not so much that they can't be used on the same pitch as long as they are in different teams.

 As you probably know, the new pitch has larger squares and the new models have larger bases as well. This means that old models fit on the new pitch but not vice versa. Actually, the old "big guy" base now fits on the new pitch just fine.

 I guess in a pinch you can play with new models on an old pitch, but it's going to be a tight fit unless you play a very loose formation:

So there you have it. It's nice to get some love from GW to some of it's non-core games and I hope this makes them enough money so they continue to support it. Next up it's time to have fear in our hearts over what they'll do to Epic. 

Some Blood Bowl and Block War

Quiet on the Hobby front. I haven't been finishing many models lately, although I did do some 20mm scale telegraph poles for WW2 I might post later,b ut I did get a couple of games in. Nothing much to report but here's a couple of pics.

Blood Bowl:

I'm shocked to find out that I haven't played a single game of Blood Bowl on the table during the existence of this blog! I have played the computer version(s) during this time but not a single game on the board for years even though I love the game to bits! This will not stand! I dusted off my goblins last weekend (I also have an orc and an undead team) and played against my friends' Ogres. I lost 1-0 after a lengthy grind, but it was fun. I actually noticed I had forgotten quite a few core rules during these years of downtime even though I have scores of games under my belt. I hope to reignite the game in my local group now to get people playing again.

My custom Blood Bowl board transforms into a carrying case to put my figures, papers and dice in.

The Goblins try to catch the snotlings while the Trolls grapple with the Ogres.

This one doesn't like being filmed.

Excuse me..

Napoléon (Columbia Games):

You know I love block wargaming and Columbia's offers are always a treat. I've played an older edition of Napoléon before and got a chance to play the fresh Kickstarter funded edition now. I don't remember much about the first time I played but my opponent says the changes to the new edition are minor. The game details the Waterloo campaign and I played the French. I tried to focus on the Brits first to defeat the Coalition one army at at time, but it didn't work out so well. Napoleon did beat Wellington and force the British to surrender, but the French didn't have the time or the fight in them to stand against Blucher after that

In other news, I've fixed my old Amiga 500 and replaced the old disk drive with a floppy emulator so that I can now load games onto the Amiga from a USB stick. All it took was a firmware flash to a generic industrial pc floppy emulator! Pretty neat, huh?