Overpowered by Elite X-Wing Pilots

I finally made it out to a nearby game store last night to play a couple X-Wing battles with a few others that are trying to build local interest in this cool table-top game. I have not had an opportunity to play in over a month so I was rusty on a lot of the upgrade cards. I elected to play a list of imperial scrubs so that I could reduce the number of variables I needed to keep track of by eliminating special pilot abilities. This was the last list that I had played too, so it was already at hand and ready to go. I fielded 4 academy TIEs, a scimitar squadron TIE bomber with a seismic charge and a Firespray bounty hunter. Opposite of my squad were the three amigos, Luke, Biggs and Wedge in X-wings with several R2 droids on board.

The asteroids ended up in fairly uniform six-pack arrangement. I set up mostly towards one corner. With the higher pilot skills, my opponent set up second and chose the opposite corner to try and force me to spend more turns flying my ships in formation. I was really out of practice on trying to judge the distance and angles for my selected ship maneuvers and early on this caused me to split my academy squadron as I failed to successfully navigate around my bomber. As our ships engaged, I quickly lost a TIE to Wedge and had to focus fire on Biggs since he was drawing fire off of the other X-wings. I was unable drop Bigg's shield much and then I pushed my TIEs up into the X-wings...

...in hopes that my bounty hunter could swoop in for some flanking shots.

Moments later, I lost a couple more TIEs but a successful hit from my seismic charge and the effect of cumulative shots on Biggs looked like he might drop too. Since Biggs is about the same cost as 3 TIEs I hoped I might have a chance to even things up if I could get him off the board. But, my bounty hunter could not finish him. The X-wings then took out the firespray and with only a bomber and single TIE remaining, I decided to concede the match. Despite the thorough whooping, it was lots of fun.

Beantown Barking Spiders: Crazy as a Looney

Besides being able to field two trolls, the other entertaining thing that makes the goblin team in Blood Bowl unique is their use of secret weapons. If you saw my Barking Spiders conversions post then you might recall the conversion that I did for my chainsaw-wielding looney with a big, nasty saw blade reveling over the corpse of an unfortunate human, maybe a Norseman or Chaos Marauder. Because the chainsaw is the secret weapon positional of the most deranged and mentally unbalanced member of a goblin team I had to paint him first. Goblins might not be able to stand toe-to-toe with other teams in strength or skill, but no team can match their reckless abandon and disregard for the rules. To put it another way, they don't know karate, but they do know ka-razy.

Beantown Barking Spiders: Trolls

My league's Blood Bowl season for the Dungeonbowl championship officially starts tomorrow and I have been trying to convert and paint my goblin team for the opening event. Alas, I am only about half way through painting the team and it is going to pain me not to be playing with a completely painted team. Although they will not be fully painted at the season opener, I did get a few of the important figures on the team done, namely the two trolls. The models for these trolls are the Reaper Miniatures cave troll in the Bonesium plastic which set me back a measly 4 or 5 dollars for the pair of them. To help set them apart, and without having to get into any heavy conversion work, I painted them different purple tones, one more towards the blue spectrum and the other towards red. I also added a goblin to the raised hand of troll #1 so that it looks like he's getting ready to toss the little fella! On the goblin, you can see the team colors, purple and yellow, that I picked out for the Barking Spiders.

Beantown Barking Spiders: Conversions

Over the Thanksgiving holiday I managed to get a little conversion work done for the Beantown Barking Spiders, a new goblin team that I'll be trying out in my Blood Bowl league. As I mentioned in my previous post, I am using a selection of Reaper Miniatures goblins and trolls for this team. The Blood Bowl rules specifically prohibit players from bringing weapons on the field, and while goblins show disregard for this ruling by sneaking a few secret weapons into the game I disarmed most of them by snipping off the swords, spears and bows that they had used to arm themselves. However, there was one spear-bearer figure that was in a pose with the spear shaft across his body that could not be easily converted with a few simple cuts. I have two copies of this figure. With one of the cross-body spear-bearers, I chopped the spear tip off and replaced it by sculpting a boxing glove.

For the other cross-body spear-bearer, I decided to convert him into my team looney, a chainsaw wielding lunatic that can be an equal danger to the opposing team as he is to himself. In my box of bits, I found a saw blade that I believe came from an old 40K orc dreadnaught. I thought it would make a great chainsaw for my looney. It is a metal bit and I quickly realized that it was too heavy to be glued to the Bones plastic without something underneath it to support its weight. To remedy this, I chose to make a support for the chainsaw by modeling a sawed up opponent at the looney's feet. I built a basic frame for the sawed up corpse from some skeleton and marauder bits.

And then I green-stuffed some skin over the skeleton rib cage which provided the needed support to get the saw blade into place. The saw had a pretty terrible paint job on it. I think the previous owner might have used Testor's enamel paints. Normally I would have tried to strip it before using it, but since I intend for the final look on the chainsaw to be rusted and blood-spattered I think I'm just going to try to paint over it and hope that it adds to the final dilapidated look.

Now to the pogoer. Digging back into my bits box, I found a spear that had a skull staked on it and thought it would make a great pole for a pogo stick. First, I snipped off the top of the spear above the skull.

Then I used a pin vise to drill a small hole into the top of the skull.

I had selected a wolf-rider goblin to use for the pogoer. I removed the left hand that he was using to hold the reigns and carefully bent his right arm so that he was straddling the spear. Then I shaped the end of the spear into a narrow pin...

... that would fit perfectly into the hole that I had previously drilled into the skull to create the primary structure for the pogo stick.

Then it was time to break out the green stuff. I rebuilt his left hand so that it was grasping the pogo stick and I made a little support on the top of the pogo stick so that I could affix the top of the spear bit. I also used a small bit of green stuff to help hold is left foot to the side of the skull so that the pogo stick had another anchor point which I hope will give it some additional rigidity.

Finally, with a paper clip bent into a spring, and a crossbar added to the pogo stick, my pogoer is done being converted.

The last conversion that I wanted to tackle was that for my bombardier. This one was pretty simple. I started with the goblin warchanter.

I simply cut off the whip and short sword that she was holding and modeled a bomb into her right hand. Simple and effective.