The new Third Season Edition of Blood Bowl will be available to pre-order on Saturday, freshening up the rules of this classic game. It comes with a double-sided Blood Bowl board, but a game as magnificent as Warhammer football requires extra spectacle, perhaps a full stadium created by a talented hobbyist? It just so happens WarCom have contracted Ben from the Bonehead podcast to build a spooky Halloween stadium for us…
Building The Halloween Stadium
Hey everyone, Ben here from the Bonehead podcast. Building a Blood Bowl stadium has been on our to-do list since we built our studio, so when I was approached by Warhammer Community with the question “do you know anyone that’s building a stadium for Halloween?”, I knew it was time.
Design Goals
Building a stadium is no simple task, and I had to plan out a few things I needed it to do:
It needed to be modular so we could build it in chunks, and use different parts for filming different shots.
It needed to house a full-sized Blood Bowl pitch.
It needed to have stands for the crowd to cheer on the game that were wide enough to fit 32mm based players on – I figured they’re on the sidelines awaiting their chance to get on the pitch.
The Plan
When undertaking any big hobby project, the best place to start is with a trip to the DIY store. Having made loads of Blood Bowl pitches in the past, I knew that the pitch covers 2 foot by 3 foot, so I grabbed a slightly larger piece of MDF and got the helpful chaps at the store to cut it nicely for me into four pieces. This left me with two pieces that would form the front and back of the stadium, and two pieces for the sides.
While I was there I also picked up a hot glue gun, and some some textured spray paints, so I just needed two essentials – foamcore and balsa wood, which arrived later.
The Old World Method
I’ve been making Warhammer terrain since I was six years old (a long time now!), so as soon as the pieces were laid out in front of me I knew exactly what I needed to do… bust out what I call the Old World method! The goal for the stadium was to end up with a haunted/ruined Old World building, so I went back to basics, with foamcore shapes, and balsa wood strips.
I started with four towers for the corners of the stadium. They were simple to do – I cut each of the foamcore sheets in half and used two sheets together to make the four sides. After cutting a few inches off the top to make the eaves of the roof, I stuck them together and popped them on the MDF.
The plan was to have the towers buttress up to the edges of the long MDF strips. That would mean that the short edges covering the end zones could just be open sheds as long as the board itself. This left the back and the front. The back was going to be the highlight – I wanted two crowd sections for the players to hang out in, and one centre section for the stars (and my “Most Touchdowns” winning Skaven team from a Sevens tournament at Warhammer World!) to mooch around in.
As I was planning an Old World Bretonnian theme, and I have a thing for brightly coloured lights, I thought some cool windows were in order. I didn’t have to look far for the pieces for those, as my other “to do list” project is building my daughter a dollhouse, and the window frames for that came in mighty handy for the stadium. I built each of the sections, with the centre section higher and boxed out, then glued on the windows. By using the precision science of “poking a pen through the window holes”, I was able to remove the foamcore behind them so light could come through.
There was an additional fun wrinkle as I wanted the centre section to have a raised floor with planks of wood over it, so I could make a gap underneath that light could shine through, in order to create a cool haunted basement vibe. Some spare polystyrene and balsa wood later and it was done.
For the entrance of the stadium I went with a similar build to the back, but left a big gap for the front door. After adding the last of my daughter’s dollhouse windows, I took my pen and drew plank lines over about 4,000 sheets of balsa wood. Some of those sheets would stay together and be used for the roofing sections, but a fair few I cut into separate planks and glued them around the outsides of the walls to achieve that classic Old World look. All of the benches for the crowd were simply planks of balsa on some foamcore steps.
Painting
With the stadium built in four sections, it was time to paint it. This was really easy, and took me back to the olden times of scratch building terrain for Necromunda and Mordheim.*
The first step was to use a can of textured primer to add depth to everything. This is especially useful for metal plates. From there I primed the whole thing in Chaos Black, then used Mechanicus Standard Grey on the inside sections. I grabbed an assortment of brown paints and messily brushed all the external facing walls – think a drybrush, but with more paint.
For the external sections I grabbed my Wraithbone and lightly sprayed towards the centre of each panel. This ended up getting spray all over my black timber linings, so I drybrushed the centre of each panel with Wraithbone by hand, and used some Corvus Black Air to fix all the wood edging.
On to the details! All of the roofing and benches were painted with my favourite paint – Agrax Earthshade. The shade worked brilliantly on the wood texture and finished looking, well, exactly like wood. Next up were the cool bits. I painted the window frames silver, followed by some Agrax Earthshade, and then focused on the picture frames. These were more dollhouse bits that were oversized for Blood Bowl, which made them perfect for ostentatious gallery portraits. I filled them with pictures I’d snipped out of a spare copy of the previous Blood Bowl rulebook.
Halloween Goodness
Once everything was put together, the pictures hung up, the players on the benches, and a Blood Bowl game underway, I switched on the lights and got some nice glamour shots of the stadium! It looked great, but I thought it wasn’t “Halloweeny” and haunted enough.
Those of you who follow the channel will know how much I hate spiders. So naturally I went out and bought loads of Halloween spider and cobweb decorations, along with a few other bits (like tiny jack-o-lanterns).
Throwing the plastic spiders into the bin with my eyes closed, I took the new accessories and went to work!
Backed up by some rats and bats from a copy of Cursed City – who else is hyped for the new Warhammer Quest, by the way? – the scene was set.
All in all, the stadium build was an absolute blast! I’d forgotten just how much fun scratch building for Warhammer was, and now we’ve got a pretty awesome place for the new Bretonnians and Tomb Kings to duke it out in the new edition of Blood Bowl!
If you need me, I’ll be finding somewhere to store it now. Happy Blocking!
Cheers, Ben!
You can join in the fun with the new edition of Blood Bowl, which will be available to pre-order alongside Bretonnian and Tomb Kings pitches. If you build your own stadium or pitch, why not share it with us on the Warhammer Facebook page?
* Mordheim was a skirmish game set in the Old World that was produced in the late 1990s – it’s fondly remembered by many gamers of a certain vintage.
