Blood Bowl: Dark Elves

A new season is about to begin!

We have never been large sports fans, but that has not stopped us from playing some miniature-based sports games. Interestingly, our very first blog post was for Mantic Games’ Dreadball. Of all the sports-themed games we have played, we always come back to Blood Bowl. Back in 2006, I got Bronze in the Open category in Golden Daemon Baltimore for a Norse blitzer. In 2016, when Blood Bowl was released after many years being out of print, we got back into it again, and even started a small league which we never finished. Now that a second season was announced, we are preparing to get back into the game. With that in mind, I decided to start assembling a Dark Elf team that had been sitting unused in my collection!

The only modifications I made to the model were adding some additional armor plating to her helmet. 

The main section of the helmet visor was sculpted using milliput, with finer details being done using a mixture of green stuff and Apoxie Sculpt.

The Dark Elf Blood Bowl team is one of my favorites teams Games Workshop has released. All of the models in the team are very well proportioned and wearing sensible equipment (except for the witch elves) for the sport. Unlike a lot of the models Games Workshop releases, these do not have massively oversized feet! The team members are also adopting believable poses and none of them come off as awkward.

The Blitzer model is probably my favorite of the set, the pose perfectly captures the brutality of Blood Bowl!

Milliput works really well for sculpting smooth plates of armor, like the crescent plates I added to the sides of the blitzer’s helmet.

Since the basic models are so strong, I decided I did not need to do much in the line of conversion work on them. Thus far I have assembled two, and have only modified their helmets. I am planning to make each of the helmets unique, to help differentiate between team members. Currently I have modified the helmets by adding additional plating around the jaw-line. The official helmets leave the lower half of the faces heavily exposed. I sculpted chin straps on the helmets to help keep them in place. As I assemble more of the team members, I think I will make other subtle modifications to their dragonscale cloaks or gauntlets to further differentiate the duplicated sculpts in the team.

The Dark Elf models are surprisingly large, rivaling Primaris Space Marines.

Two Dark Elf players facing off against each other!

There are still a lot of team members to assemble and convert, but I am excited to continue to work on them. With a little luck I will be able to finish them by the time the new version of the game is released! This will also give me the opportunity to consider a paint scheme and team name. Let me know if you have any thoughts or suggestions.

- Adam Wier