Back in the day I never had the chance to play Blood Bowl. At the new club there’s quite a few people who had kept playing, and when they started a league for it a few other newbies and myself decided to join. I got the 11 player Orc team from Meiko Miniatures to play and now we’re gonna have a quick look at it.
My original plan was to convert the Orks from the 40k Stormclaw box set. But it had fewer Orks than I thought. Even if I didn’t have much time I was looking forward to doing some conversions. But if besides doing conversions I had to buy more miniatures, I figured it would be easier (and faster) to pick a third-party Fantasy Football team.
Meiko offers boxed teams in 3 configurations; 11, 12 and 16 miniatures. My choice was the 11 miniature team for 2 reasons. First, it comes with a Troll and I really like that model. And second, it was the one readily available at the FLGS. Not much of a choice when it’s the only available option, right?
While I bought them to save me some time, they had quite noticeable mold lines and it took me a while to clean them. Maybe I’m spoiled working with really good metal minis from Corvus Belli and the like, or maybe it’s because 11 miniatures are quite a few of them, but it felt like I would never finish cleaning all of them.
Overall it’s a nice set, there’s quite a few of the miniatures that are single piece and the ones that aren’t don’t come in too many pieces either. So once you clean the mold lines, building them is fairly fast. I had to use some green stuff to fill the gaps around the troll’s head and one of the black orc’s arm (which would be mostly concealed by a shoulder pad anyway), other than that no problems building the models.
Technically all of the models in the set are different sculpts. But excluding the troll, you can easily pair the rest and see that there’s only 5 sculpts with small modifications for the second mini in each.
There’s a couple of Blitzers that barely have any volume, looking almost like 2D sculpts. Those are by far the weakest sculpts of the set.
While overall I was happy with the look of the team, a couple of the Meiko heads were some kind of full head leather masks that didn’t look orcy at all to me. So I decided to use some of the extra bits from the Stormclaw orks and do a little kitbashing.
The first thing I needed to “fix” where those heads. I used instead some GW orc heads and extra shoulder protections. The bulkier protections give them a more menacing look. And with orcs, the more menacing they look, the better.
The most involved kitbash, even if still fairly simple, was the troll. The exposed belly seemed like a glaring weak spot, where all the regular sized rivals would hit him. I took one of the biggest shoulder pads with a couple of spikes to cover the belly. I also made some shin pads with plasticard. To tie all this extra pieces to the its body I was thinking about using green stuff at first. But then remembered I had some flexible resin chains and rivet strips from Zinge Industries lying around for a while. Faster, cleaner and a better final result than whatever I greenstuffed.
One last note. The miniatures come with 25mm bases and the troll comes with a bigger one (40mm I believe). I switched them to 30mm bases as they look way better that way and they still fit inside the Blood Bowl pitch tiles. The troll was too big to look good on 30mm, but a GW 32mm bases does the trick. The feet still hang a little, but it looks good and it doesn’t take as much space as a big base.
