Blood Bowl: Bleachers 2: The Bleachening

Earlier, I built some Blood Bowl bleachers, which I've been populating with various miniatures since. Now it's time to take the next step and mount them on a plywood base, and add even more spectators.

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Back when we played a lot of Necromunda around the turn of the millenium, I built a 4' × 4' game board and with some help from my friends, a set of 1' × 1' modular terrain boards for it; you can see them on my Instagram. We're currently using it to play Warhammer 40,000, and since the board itself is fairly solid, I'm going to build my Blood Bowl stadium on it. I even have some of the 1' × 1' plywood boards left, so I'm going to mount my bleachers on one of them.

The way I made the original terrain pieces was with two sheets of 4mm plywood: one 300×300mm and a 280×280mm sheet glued to its underside. The original idea was to have the pieces lock into position on the board, but that turned out to be way too fiddly. It turns out there are several advantages to doing it this way, though: the 4mm gap at the edges of the boards makes it easier to mount hinges on the baseboard, and since 4mm plywood can bend quite a bit, gluing two pieces together helps the whole thing stay level. So I've started by creating a plywood board like the previous ones:

The top side is then spraypainted white:

And then we stick on the stands!

They're a bit wonky, but then again my fluff reasoning is that all this has been built by the lowest-bidding goblin contractor!

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While all this is going on, I've also got some new miniatures to add to my spectators. First up, from Perry Miniatures, their excellent Female and young rioters.

They'll be joined by three of Perry Miniatures' Female civilians. I've painted so many grimdark 40k miniatures and drab military vehicles that I wanted to do something totally different with my spectators, so it's bright primary colors all the way.

I also painted up some Muslim and Ottoman civilians, plus a leftover crewman from a Gatling gun. Here I felt like the models called for some more earthy tones.

And here's HP Lovecraft from Impact Miniatures.

Can you imagine how much Lovecraft would have hated a football game? I take an inordinate delight in placing an effigy of him in such multicultural surroundings.

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Earlier this fall, I signed up to be harassed by a bird, so as to learn some rudiments of a new language. Soon enough, I went looking for an appropriate 28mm miniature to paint up as the Duolingo owl, and found it in Dark Sword Miniatures' Owl Mage.

I'd previously noted that Dark Sword's King Robert Baratheon looks remarkably like he's watching a football game, and I've been thinking about building a royal box for my stadium since. However, what I only noticed this time around was that so does Viserys. The Beggar King is obviously going to be slumming it in the stands, and he looks so much like he's losing a sizable bet placed on the game that I got Illyrio Mopatis to be there as the guy he's losing to.

Finally, I got Aeron Damphair, who I think also looks dissatisfied with the score, or maybe the refereeing. With the assistance of one of the casualty figures from Perry Miniatures' superb Zulu Wars infantry box, he is re-enacting a scene from my theology studies, of which the less said, the better.

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I rather liked this idea of theological characters in my stands, so the natural thing to do was visit the Foundry Miniatures website for some Jolly Monks, Medieval Characters and Anarchists. These are also superb models! I'm delighted with them. Some of them joined Aeron at the back, along with one more Perry Muslim Civilian:

The rest of the monks and some of the anarchists got better spots up front.

Here are two vehicle passengers I got from the Bad Squiddo kickstarter:

Finally, the stands are now getting crowded enough that I think it's time to deploy The Crowd from Sally 4th. There's not that many seated 28mm miniatures about, and even fewer that are perfect for Blood Bowl, so I'd been saving these folks until I had a better idea of what these stands were going to start looking like.

The fellow in grey below has a long hair head from Anvil.

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So here the stands are in their current glory!

I have to say that this is by miles the best modeling project I've ever done. I'm really happy with it, and very much looking forward to my stands finally making their Blood Bowl debut; hopefully later this year.