Bargain Hunting On eBay - Man O War & Risk Legacy

"What's this world coming to, Cratchit? You work all your life to get money... then people want you to give it away."

We Scots have a bit of a reputation when it comes to money.  Sometimes it's phrased more politely and we are described as frugal or prudent.... but more often we're tight, spendthrifts and misers.  There's a reason Scrooge McDuck gets that Mc in his name, after all!

While I'm prone to spend money on nerdy things fairly often, I do like a bargain and I spend quite a long time on eBay hunting for things.  Especially when you are interested in older RPGs & wargames you can find some things go for a lot of money: Chaos Dwarfs and Squats are particularly prone to this due to how long they've been out of print, which is why I've been experimenting with home casting rather than paying eBay's prices for 80s/90s figures. 

I received two large packages this week, each of which was the result of an eBay purchase where I feel I got a good deal - and each of them is something I'd like to get a chance to play sometime soon.

Dungeonbowl Match Report

European Standard certified?  Thank goodness for that!

I mentioned back in April that I'd got a hold of late 80s game Dungeonbowl, a supplement for Blood Bowl.  This is one of those out of print GW games which can cost a bomb to get a hold of on eBay, so after months if not years of searching I lucked out into a reasonably priced auction.  It takes a while to get some items on eBay for reasonable prices - you get a lot of silly figure Buy It Nows for out-of-production material - but persistence paid off!

The figures were in some cases painted but the board pieces, rulebook etc were in good condition.  It even had all the tokens for teleporters, traps, chests etc unpunched.

I felt kinda bad bursting these open. 

So, what is Dungeonbowl?  Well, it's like Blood Bowl in that it's a fantasy version of American Football.  As the name gives away it's played in a dungeon.  What the name may not give away is that the ball does not  begin in any one players hands or kicked off - instead it's located in one of numerous chests in the dungeon.  The ball must be retrieved and than ran into the opposition starting area - whoever does that wins.

Oh, did I mention the chests without balls are trapped?  They explode when you open them.

Oh, and there's spiked pit traps and teleporters scattered about the dungeon to create obstacles and possible short-cuts.

It's, um, it's pretty mental.

Blood Bowl, The Fantasy Football Game

The third edition cover, which is always the first picture to come to mind for me.

There are few Games Workshop games I am as fond of as Blood Bowl.  I picked up the third edition new back in the day and while there were many other GW games I owned - Man O' War, Necromunda, Horus Heresy, Epic 40,000, Advanced Heroquest plus of course Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 - Blood Bowl was the only one I played any amount of as a young man, both as a child and then as a student at Glasgow University.

It has a lot going for it - for one thing it's an easy premise to understand, being essentially American Football or Rugby as played by fantasy races like Dwarfs, Goblins and Ogres.  It's got a low overhead cost because unlike the scores of figures you need to assemble a Space Marine battleforce or an Imperial Roman army, you only need a dozen figures or so to make a full team.  A fairly tight set of rules seal the deal - winner of an Origins Award for best miniatures rules when originally released.

Rules I'd quite like to play again, if anyone is up for a game!

Unleash Hell

 

A tough act to follow.

 So my last post proved very popular indeed: not just the most viewed post on my blog since i started it but more views than the second and third most viewed posts put together.  A mass of likes on Facebook and even a share to a distant gaming societies wall.  For someone who considers himself a crap painter it's high praise indeed.

Somehow I must struggle on, even though I know deep down nothing I can post afterwards can go down as well.  It's like second album syndrome for nerds.  This must be how the Happy Mondays felt.

Anyway, as much as I'd like a functioning Chaos Dwarf army we're going to stick with terrain for now and with something I'm working on for my next apocalypse game in the middle of September.

Some Very Glasgow Warhammer Terrain

Every once in a while Glasgow can be rather pretty.  The Gallery of Modern Art at Christmas Time.

As you will know I am a native of Glasgow: most populous city of Scotland, second city of the British Empire and (depending on how you count suburbs and stuff) third largest city in the United Kingdom.  We're home to more gangs per capita than New York and, and are the epnoymous city behind the Glasgow Effect. Gallery of Modern Art.  We are famed the world over for stabbing each other over football teams.  We are No Mean City.

Despite these grim facts, though, we have a sense of humour.  Check out the above picture and you'll see our beautiful Gallery of Modern Art and, sitting outside it, a statue of British hero the Duke of Wellington;. he who won the battle of Waterloo. Look a little closely and you'll see a decidedly Glasgow addition, though: a strange red splodge. 

What could that be, non-natives may well ask?  What would be red on a bronze statue?

It's meant affectionately, honest!

Er, it's a traffic cone.  For decades we've put a traffic cone on his head.  When the council comes to take it down, we put it back up again. When they take it down again, we put it up again and give his horse one as well.   It's a strange drunken student rite of passage to clamber up the statue and crown him.

This odd ritual is even more odd for having become famous.  It's a common picture on the front of tourist guides of Glasgow; it's on T-Shirts available in the modern art gallery; we even featured it as part of our Commonwealth Games opening ceremony last month.  it says something about Glasgow's sense of humour that what at first might seem like the desecration of a hero of Empire is in fact an odd sort of welcoming him into our family. 

The highlight of the opening ceremony.  (It wouldn't take much)

For a long time I've had half a mind to do a little Warhammer nod to this Glasgow icon.  When Wellington and his cone popped up in the Commonwealth Games, I decided it was time to stop with the excuses and start with the painting.

Who Ya Gonna Call? My Favourite Role-Playing Game

God help us, I actually have more things on this shelf than when this blog started.

Remember this picture of my RPG shelf?  That huge pile of games spanning decades and many genres?  I mention it again so you understand that what I am saying cannot be taken lightly.  This is not some bloke  with five games telling you what his favourite game is.  This is a bloke with over a hundred RPGs telling you what his favourite is.  

My favourite game is at the top of the picture, a black box wedged between others.  My favourite game is one I only actually play every six months or so because rationing it makes it better.  My favourite game is one which lets me and my friends do something we always wanted to do as seven year olds.  My favourite game doesn't take itself too seriously and always has us laughing.  My favourite game only cost me £5 in a second-hand bin in my local game shop but is probably the best purchase I ever made for fun-to-pounds-spent.

My favourite game is Ghostbusters International.

We're ready to believe you!

Dice Dice Baby

Keep rollin' rollin' rollin' rollin'

These nerdy games I post about all the time - board games, wargames, role playing games and the others - tend to have something in common.  Many of them use dice as a randomiser.  Some of them use regular garden six-sided dice as lives in your monopoly boxed set; some use different shaped dice with 4, 8, 10, 12, 20 or even weirder numbers of sides.  Some of them don't use numbers but have letter, symbols or colours as part of the game mechanics.

When one plays these games you acquire a lot of these odd dice.  You go scavenging every old board game in the house; you come across a weird new set of dice in a new boxed game; you pick up an extra pack of dice here and there at nerd shops.  You even start trawling websites that sell nothing but dice and dice alone.  The worst might even get custom dice made.

Few people get this bad though.  And fewer still would intentionally pose in a stupid way with their dice collection.

Right?

Doing my best Bryan Ansell 80s photo impersonation with my three tables of dice.

So this is more or less my entire dice collection as it resides in my many dice bags.  Not every board game I own has been raided for dice: Talisman and Trivial Pursuit 20th Anniversary Edition have pretty six sided dice that still live in their game boxes, for example and Formula D has a bunch of weird dice for the different car gears which stay with the game.  If I store the dice seperately, though, they are there!

Below the fold I'll post some "highlights", such as they are.  And why not share your own dice collection with me?  I even have a sort of prize to offer.  :-)

The Iron Daemon Rolls Out

 

Finally, the Iron Daemon is ready to trundle across the battlefield! Shading and some highlighting is done as well as my crappy skills will allow.