Building A Blood Bowl Pitch

[Wirelizard]

After years of watching most of the rest of the local gaming club I'm involved in play Blood Bowl, I've decided to get into it myself. Being a completist, of course it's not enough to just build my own team and rely on other people to supply the pitch (field) and other accessories needed to play, I've got to get a full set of stuff myself! Oh, and do it without sending a cent into GW's coffers, because I'm strange like that.  

I've got my figure painting efforts over on the Other Adventures forum for now, but figured the pitch needed a Workshop thread. If nothing else, the techniques are universal enough that even people who'd never touch Blood Bowl should find some of it interesting.

For this BB pitch, I had a couple of goals. I wanted a jungle ruins theme overall, to fit with the Lizardman & Amazon teams I'm starting with, and the whole thing had to be transportable, probably in a boot-sized shoebox. I do almost all of my gaming away from home, so portability is key. That meant the actual pitch was going to be fabric, not hard panels of some sort, and the various accessories and decorative elements had to be modular and not really oversized. Light weight would also be nice.



The photo shows where I'm at after a couple of hours over a couple of evenings. The main construction material is half-inch pink insulation board for all the stonework. Turns out this is 14mm thick, so if you slice 14mm wide strips off then cut those roughly 1 inch long, you get a nicely sized "stone" block. It's like Hirst Arts plaster blocks, without the weight, fragility or the mess of dozens of casting sessions! The square tiles are 20mm by 20mm cubes cut from the same styrofoam, then sliced into thirds, so each tile is somewhere between 3mm-5mm thick. A hot glue gun was used to glue everything together; the bases are just mattboard, the good quality card used in picture framing.

The two foreground pieces are a pair of Re-Roll & Turn Track markers, one for each team, made to look like some sort of temple plaza/stone-paved roadway setup. You can etch/carve insulation foam with a pencil, so the wide stones on the left have the name of each track ("R-R" for Reroll, "First" and "2nd" for first half/second half turn tracking) and then the numbers 1-8. I used Roman numerals for the 2nd half numbers, just because, although looking at it again, using those for Rerolls to make it different might have been cleverer. Not too late to slice off those two name labels and put new ones on, I guess.

Top left and top right is a dugout for each team, with the 3 areas in each needed for Reserve/KO/Injured.

Top centre is the base for the scoreboard. I haven't quite finalized the design for the actual scoreboard, but magnets to hold some sort of placard with the score number on it will be used. The 3x3 square of paving at the front of the scoreboard will be pencil-etched with the BB scatter template for reference, and I might actually extend the front of the paving by another row to put the 3x1 throw-in template there.

Everything will be painted in stone, then various vegetation, vines and such added to make it look jungle-like without hampering the functionality of the various Blood Bowl game elements being built into the scenery.

[beefcake]

Looking cool? Can't wait to see it in all its glory. Keep it up

[Coronasan]

This is one of those projects I have always wanted to do, my very own BB pitch!

Will follow this!

[smokezombie]

This should be interesting. Looks good so far. 


I am however, totally in love with your cute mini steel ruler  it's going on my Christmas list.

[Wirelizard]

I am however, totally in love with your cute mini steel ruler  it's going on my Christmas list.

$2 at the local Staples.  The only issue with it is that the measurements don't start right at the end of the ruler, but in a few mm, and the corners are rounded.

I've got a lovely 14" monster steel ruler as well and use it regularly, but the mini definitely has it's uses after the major cutting is done. Much handier to use on my small, crowded workbench.

An excellent stocking stuffer for wargamers, if someone is asking what to get you for Xmas!

I haven't had much time to make progress on the BB pitch recently, and I'll be away for most of next week visiting family ('tis the season...) but over the Xmas/New Years holiday I should be able to finish everything. I might spend Boxing Day working on the fabric of the actual pitch, now I think about it...

[Wirelizard]

So the pitch had it's first outing on New Year's Eve at a friends, where we blew off the time before heading to another friend's NYE party with a first-ever game of Blood Bowl. My crocs wound up squashing his humans, 3-1.

Last weekend, we had our second friendly match, same two teams, and it was even more of a crocodile victory, 4-0 and one dead human!

Here's the current state of the fabric pitch. It's a long way from finished, as I want to use spraypaint and dye to get it looking more grassy, muddy and jungle-like, but the basic grid of a 40mm BB field is in place and it's usable.



There's a bit more over on the Warbard, too.