Blood Bowl Tokens

I was looking forward to Season 3 of Blood Bowl for some time. To be clear, this was one Games Workshop game I had never played back in the day (the late 90s for those curious), but I have been enjoying Mordheim and Necromunda lately, and seeing Blood Bowl was getting a new starter set caught my attention. Here was a chance to get in on the ground floor, as it were, and pick up two teams in the process. Given the luxurious large hardcover rule book, the tokens, templates, and minis, the cheat sheets, and the board, the whole set was actually pretty good value for money I think - not something I thought I'd ever say of GW, but here we are.

Of the two teams in the starter set, the Bretonnians were the ones who caught my eye. I've been dallying over the colour scheme I wanted to use for some time: green and yellow, red and green, red and blue... I couldn't quite decide. In order to delay the choice, I decided to start work on the tokens. These tokens are used to signify various in game effects, and come about a million to a sprue. They are thick, solid, and good quality casts. I had originally considered painting them on the sprues and cutting them out, but every token had 5 or 6 connection points to the sprue frame, and beveled edges, and I felt after cutting them off and filing them down, I'd essentially be repainting them anyway, so I clipped them off, and painted them that way.

Cutting them off the sprues and cleaning them up actually took a bit of time. Each token had 5-6 connection points, and with the angled edge of the token, the cuts always left flashing which had to be cut and filed back.

The Stunned and Prone tokens, if you follow the colour guide in the rules book, are the only ones which have one colour one side, and another colour the other side.

No prizes for guessing where I was holding them...

The most annoying to paint, but not that difficult really. I started with the yellow, then the red, then cleaned up.

I decided to use Tamiya Panel Liner to fill the letters and symbols. I wish I hadn't. The size of the recesses for the letters and symbols really isn't suited to panel liner in my view - it took an enormous amount, and was messy to use. I should have varnished them before using the panel liner, so I could use a rubbing alcohol to clean them up, but again, I didn't. In the end I wish I had simply used a dark wash. Cest la vie. 

With the 'messier than I wanted' results, I decided to fork out on some new dry brushes I had been eying off. These are really nice, but... they are so soft, and with the large round heads it's sometimes tough to feel when they are actually connecting with the model. This meant some of the early ones were a much heavier dry brush than I intended, and I had to take a step back in the process.

This is the tokens roughly finished. I always wanted them a little dirty, but not quite this much. Still, on the whole they look ok, and are certainly serviceable. I fixed a few up after taking this shot, and the photo itself is in poor light, but they are done!

Crap, I still hadn't decided on the colour scheme for the Bretonnians... 

What would I do differently if I had my time again? 

I could have gone through the same process, using a dark wash instead of panel liner. I think the dry-brush afterwards would have felt more naturally layered, and it would have been a lot quicker.

I've also seen good results on TikTok and YouTube with people spraying them black, and then using paint markers or Sharpies to lay the colour on top. From what I've seen this works quite well. I'd want to experiment with something first, but I could see this working if you wanted a more vibrant set of tokens.

Next, the balls and team token things! Which means I have to make a decision...

2026 in Miniature

 Having already written out some RPG related goals for 2026, it's time to turn my eye to miniatures games. 

Moving in something of a full circle in my gaming habits, I had moved away from miniatures games for about 7 years. Partly this was due to spending a disproportionate amount of time freelancing in the RPG industry, then publishing my own RPGs. Partly this was because Covid put a stop to face to face gaming for a good while. And partly this was due to burn out I experienced after working with Spartan Games on Dystopian Legions, Planetfall, Firestorm, Dystopian Wars and Halo. Halo particularly was a huge amount of time and work, and combining this with a real life full time job, and a family, left me running on empty.

Time heals all wounds as the old saying goes, and in 2025 I finally broke out the paint brushes which had been sitting silent and gathering dust. I painted a Necromunda gang, some ships for Oak and Iron, and a Gallic army for DBA, not too shabby.

So, 2026 goals, without further preamble... 

Blood Bowl is my first goal. I never really played much of it when I was playing GW games in the late 90s, but I recently got the third season box, and intend to paint and play this one. I already have the Bretonnian team assembled and undercoated, and I'm trying to decide on what paint scheme I use for the team. In the meantime I'm painting the tokens and markers (more on this in another post). 

For the Bretonnians I am thinking of doing a more setting traditional red and blue mix, but I have been tossing up doing green and yellow, or blue and yellow. I'm not entirely sold on which combination of main colours to use just yet, so I'm working my way through the bits that don't require as much thought.

I enjoyed my forays back into Necromunda in 2025, and I am looking forward to painting and playing Blood Bowl this year. 

I didn't spend all that time painting a Gallic army for DBA without intending to play it, so DBA is on the list. I'm waiting for a friend to assemble and paint his Roman army, but if he doesn't manage to get that done, I'll get and paint another army myself just so I can get this to the table. I quite like painting 15mm figures.

More Necromunda please. I realise this game is particularly enjoyable as a part of a campaign, but I find it difficult to commit the time to actually playing a campaign, especially during competition season (I'm a gymnastics coach by trade). So maybe just some one-off games here and there would scratch the itch.

Speaking of GW games, my friends tried to talk me into 40K recently, admittedly on my instigation and with my help, but on deeper reflection I don't think I want to go down that path. There's a good argument to make, that one should collect and play the games that other people play, and it's true there is a thriving 40K community around where I live, but no. I think Necromunda and Blood Bowl are enough GW for me.

Some of my friends are trying to draw me back into playing Dystopian Wars, and I'll be honest: I'm showing signs of cracking. The game is now under the auspices of Warcradle Studios, and if I do decide to rejoin the ranks of Dystopian Wars players, I'll have to get hold of a new fleet. Not sure which yet, I quite like the Egyptians, Prussians, and English, but I am also one of those people that likes to collect a fleet no-one else in the group is running, so we'll see where that lands me as the year rolls on and the cracks develop further.

Lastly Infinity... this one is a bit of a long shot. I have a heap of Yu Jing miniatures sitting in a box in my shed, all of which are assembled but unpainted. 2026 could be the year I break these out? Corvus Belli make lovely miniatures, and I would like to get some paint on them. Perhaps this could be the game that has me testing out some speed paints (which I have otherwise shied away from). No doubt I'll tell myself that I'll only do a simple and neat job on these, and then like every other time I'll end up picking out more and more detail until the 'speedy' job I was going to do ends up taking just as much time as my usual plodding method.

Fin

That's a wrap, and those are goals, for now at least. I am too often distracted by odd little miniatures games that no-one else plays that I'll probably end up wandering off and wanting to play something else entirely. I mean, I still have an unpainted English army for Sharpe Practice that could get a run, I have multiple lovely little anthropomorphic dinosaurs for Chronicles of Anyaral, and a collection of modified Hot Wheels cars for Gaslands. I have Silent Death space ships that I've been wanting to paint for years, and the itch to break out Full Thrust, a rules set I haven't played in more than 20 years. 

But I have to stop thinking about all of those, because I am far too easily distracted. 

Focus! 

Blood Bowl first, then we'll see what comes next...