Wandering Adventures

How to Paint Your First Blood Bowl Team So you've picked your Blood Bowl team, maybe using our team building guide, and now you've got a box of miniatures staring at you from the desk. Good news: a Blood Bowl team is one of the best painting projects in the entire hobby, and I say that as someone who has been painting miniatures for twenty years. You're looking at somewhere between twelve and sixteen models, they're all on the same side, and unlike a Warhammer army there's no codex telling you what colour they should be. It's a sports team. You get to invent the franchise. Here's how I'd approach it. Pick Your Colours Like a Sports Team, Not an Army This is the mindset shift that makes Blood Bowl painting fun. Don't think "what's the official scheme," think "what does my team's home jersey look like." Two main colours and one accent is the classic formula, the same way real sports teams do it. Bold combinations that would look garish on a 40K army look fantastic on a Blood Bowl pitch: purple and gold, teal and orange, black and red. If you're stuck, look at actual football and hockey teams for inspiration. Pick colours you'll enjoy seeing for sixteen models, because consistency is the whole point of a team. Batch Paint, But in Small Groups Painting sixteen models one at a time will take forever, and painting all sixteen at once will burn you out somewhere around the third pair of boots. My sweet spot is groups of four or five: all the Linemen in one batch, then the Blitzers, then the fancy stuff. You keep the assembly line efficiency without feeling like you're working a shift at a factory. Do every model's skin, then every model's jersey, then every model's leather, and the batch is done before you know it. Contrast Paints Are Your Best Friend Here If ever there was a project made for Citadel Contrast paints, it's a Blood Bowl team. Prime the models white or a light grey, then let Contrast do the heavy lifting on jerseys, skin, and leather in a single coat. I use Contrast and Citadel Shades constantly in my own painting, and on a Blood Bowl team they'll get you to a genuinely good-looking tabletop standard in a weekend. From there, a quick highlight on the raised areas lifts everything. If you prefer traditional acrylics, Vallejo and AK Interactive both give you smooth coverage for jersey colours, and AK's ranges are what I personally reach for most these days. Whatever you use, thin coats and patience beat one thick coat every time. Make Your Positionals Easy to Spot Here's a practical one that new coaches learn the hard way: mid-game, you need to instantly tell your Blitzers from your Linemen across the pitch. Real teams solve this with numbers, and you can too, but there are easier tricks. Paint the helmets or shoulder pads a different colour for each position. Give your Catchers white boots. Paint a stripe on the base rim: one colour for Linemen, another for Blitzers, and so on. Base rim markings are my favourite because they're readable from any angle and take about thirty seconds per model. Your opponents will thank you, and so will future you. Don't Sleep on the Bases Blood Bowl bases are half the character of the team. The classic look is pitch turf, and a simple green flock or grass tuft finish works great. But an astrogranite-style stone pitch, a sandy Nehekhara desert, or a snowy Norse field can tie your whole team to its lore. Keep the recipe simple and repeatable, because whatever you choose, you're doing it sixteen times. Varnish Everything Blood Bowl models get handled more than any other miniatures you'll ever own. They're picked up, knocked over, pushed into cages, and occasionally thrown by a Troll. A coat of matte varnish protects hours of your work, and if you want that classic sports-gear look, hit the leather and armour with a touch of satin afterwards. Get Painting A finished Blood Bowl team is one of the most satisfying things you can put on a table, and the whole project is achievable in a couple of weekends. Wandering Adventures in Woodbridge (Vaughan), Ontario carries everything you need to paint your team, including Citadel Contrast paints and Shades, AK Interactive, Vallejo, Army Painter, brushes, and basing materials, plus Blood Bowl team boxes and the new Third Season Edition boxed set. Visit us in-store or shop online at wanderingadventures.ca with free shipping across Canada on orders over $150.  

The Coolest Ork Characters in Warhammer 40,000 With the new 11th Edition of Warhammer 40K launching with the Armageddon box and the Fourth War for Armageddon kicking off, the Orks are having a moment. The green tide is descending on the ash wastes once again, and there's never been a better time to start an Ork army or dive into the lore of the galaxy's most enthusiastic warmongers. Orks don't fight for ideology or survival. They fight because fighting is the best thing there is, and their greatest characters embody that philosophy in gloriously different ways. Here are the coolest Ork characters in Warhammer 40,000. Ghazghkull Mag Uruk Thraka The big one. The Prophet of Gork and Mork, the Beast of Armageddon, and the closest thing the Orks have ever had to a unifying leader. Ghazghkull started life as a fairly ordinary Goff boy until a bullet to the head and some creative surgery from Mad Dok Grotsnik left him with an adamantium skull and a direct line to the Ork gods. Since then he has launched two full-scale invasions of Armageddon, fought a decades-long grudge match against Commissar Yarrick, been beheaded by Ragnar Blackmane, and been rebuilt by Grotsnik into an even bigger body because being dead is apparently just another obstacle to krump. Now his WAAAGH! has returned to Armageddon to finish what he started, and the entire setting is shaking because of it. No character in 40K has more momentum right now. Wazdakka Gutsmek The Speedboss himself. Wazdakka is the greatest bike-riding Ork who ever lived, a Mekboy-turned-warlord whose life's ambition is to build a warbike big enough to ride across the galaxy, jumping from planet to planet in one endless roaring convoy. That is an absolutely deranged goal and he pursues it with total sincerity, which is what makes him great. In the new edition's lore, Wazdakka leads the vanguard of the invasion of Armageddon, tearing across the ash wastes ahead of Ghazghkull's main force. If you love Speed Freeks, buggies, and the Evil Sunz philosophy that red ones go faster, Wazdakka is your guy. Makari A grot. Just a grot. And yet Makari might be the most beloved character on this list. He is Ghazghkull's personal banner bearer, and he has survived battles that have annihilated entire armies, always emerging without a scratch while clutching the boss's banner. Orks believe he's blessed by Gork and Mork, and honestly, the evidence supports it. There's something perfect about the mightiest warlord in the galaxy being followed around by a tiny, smug, improbably lucky gretchin, and the current model of Makari holding the banner aloft is one of the most characterful sculpts Games Workshop has ever made. Mad Dok Grotsnik Every Ork Painboy is a nightmare, but Grotsnik is the nightmare other Painboys tell stories about. After a Dark Eldar attack scrambled his brain, Grotsnik rebuilt his own head with a reinforced skull plate and lost whatever passed for restraint he had before. He performs surgery nobody asked for, installs bionics into patients who came in for a checkup, and famously wired his own body with explosives so nobody could profit from killing him. He's also the reason Ghazghkull exists in his current form, twice. Grotsnik is equal parts hilarious and horrifying, which is the Ork faction in a nutshell. Kaptin Badrukk The most notorious Freebooter in the galaxy and the richest Ork alive. Badrukk leads da Blacktoof Flash Gits, a mob of mercenary pirates armed with absurdly overbuilt guns, and his own weapon, Da Rippa, is so powerful it's slowly killing him with radiation. He wears it as a badge of honour. Badrukk fights for teef and glory, sells his services to any warlord who can pay, and struts around in a greatcoat and bicorne hat like an Ork Napoleon. He's pure style, and his model remains one of the best in the entire Ork range. Boss Snikrot The scariest Ork on this list, and the one with the deepest Armageddon roots. Snikrot is a Blood Axe Kommando who spent the Third War for Armageddon haunting the equatorial jungles, ambushing Imperial patrols and leaving no survivors except the ones he deliberately let escape to spread the fear. Imperial soldiers on Armageddon genuinely believed he was a myth, right up until he wasn't. While most Orks announce themselves from a mile away, Snikrot and his Red Skull Kommandos appear out of nowhere, do horrible things quietly, and vanish. With the war returning to Armageddon, you have to imagine he's out there in the green somewhere, waiting. Start Your Own WAAAGH! Whether you're drawn to Ghazghkull's unstoppable momentum or Snikrot's silent menace, there's an Ork playstyle for every kind of hobbyist, and the new Armageddon launch box is a fantastic way to start an Ork army in 11th Edition Warhammer 40K. Wandering Adventures in Woodbridge (Vaughan), Ontario carries Warhammer 40,000 miniatures, the Armageddon boxed set, and everything you need to paint your greenskins, including Citadel, AK Interactive, Vallejo, and Army Painter paints. Visit us in-store or shop online at wanderingadventures.ca with free shipping across Canada on orders over $150.  

The Coolest Tyranid Characters in Warhammer 40,000 When people talk about Tyranids, they usually talk about the swarm. Endless waves of Hormagaunts, walls of Termagants, tide after tide of ravenous organisms consuming everything in their path. And that's fair, the Great Devourer is defined by its numbers. But within that swarm, there are individual organisms so terrifying, so uniquely engineered or freakishly mutated, that the Imperium has given them names.  Here are some of the coolest Tyranid characters in the lore. The Swarmlord The Swarmlord is the apex of Tyranid evolution. It is the Hive Mind's greatest weapon, a being of supreme strategic intelligence that the Hive Mind births and rebirth endlessly, carrying the accumulated tactical knowledge of every battle it has ever fought across every hive fleet. It cannot be killed permanently. Destroy it, and the Hive Mind simply grows a new body and pours its consciousness back in. Every death makes it smarter. What makes the Swarmlord terrifying is that it doesn't just lead Tyranids, it outthinks its enemies. When the Swarmlord appeared at the Battle of Macragge, the entire nature of the invasion changed overnight. Defences that had been holding suddenly crumbled as the swarm shifted from mindless aggression to coordinated, multi-vector assault. It identified the Baneblade Pride of Hera as the key target of the Imperial western flank, drew the Ultramarines away with a diversion through tunnelling Raveners, and then sent a wave of Carnifexes to tear the super-heavy tank apart. The western flank collapsed. On the tabletop, the Swarmlord anchors a Tyranid army's synapse network and makes everything around it hit harder and move faster. If you're building a Tyranids army, this is the centrepiece.   Deathleaper Most Tyranid organisms kill. Deathleaper does something more insidious: it breaks minds. Created by Hive Fleet Leviathan as the ultimate terror weapon, Deathleaper is an evolved Lictor-strain designed not for slaughter, but for psychological warfare. When it was deployed against the Imperial world of St. Caspelan, it didn't kill the planet's spiritual leader, Cardinal Salem. It knew that would make him a martyr. Instead, it got close, over and over and over again. Sentries would vanish. Bodies would be found with their skulls hollowed out. For ten days, Deathleaper breached ever-increasing layers of security and came within a claw's reach of the Cardinal then vanished, leaving him alive. The Cardinal shattered. His paranoia consumed him, his panic paralysed the planetary defence forces, and when Leviathan's swarm finally arrived it tore through a leaderless, demoralised enemy with almost no resistance. Deathleaper is a reminder that the Hive Mind isn't just hungry, it's patient, and it understands its prey. Old One Eye Old One Eye is a Carnifex that refuses to die. It spearheaded Hive Fleet Behemoth's assault on the Ultramarine world of Calth, swatting aside Leman Russ Battle Tanks like they were nothing. An unnamed Imperial hero eventually brought it down with a plasma pistol shot through the eye socket, the one wound Old One Eye has never been able to regenerate. The plasma burn scar still runs across its skull to this day. After Behemoth was driven off, its body was left frozen in Calth's ice packs for decades. A band of smugglers eventually dug it out, hoping to sell the corpse. The moment they thawed it, Old One Eye's wounds began to heal. It woke up, killed every one of them, and resumed its rampage across Calth drawing leftover Termagants and Genestealers from the old invasion to its presence as a dominant organism, heralding a new wave of destruction. Scout Sergeant Telion of the Ultramarines eventually tracked it down and made an impossible shot into its ruined eye socket. Whether that killed it for good remains unclear. Old One Eye has reportedly been sighted on multiple worlds since, and nobody is certain if these are the same creature or further proof that the Hive Mind has simply learned to reproduce it. The Doom of Malan'tai Most Tyranid organisms feed on flesh and biomass. The Doom of Malan'tai fed on souls. A uniquely adapted Zoanthrope strain, the Doom didn't just consume bodies, it drained the psychic life-force of its victims, leaving nothing behind. It played a central role in the destruction of the Aeldari Craftworld Malan'tai, an entire population of one of the galaxy's most ancient species, consumed not by claws and teeth but by something worse. To the Aeldari, the destruction of Malan'tai and the creature that caused it are inseparable the lament doesn't distinguish between them. The Doom was never conclusively destroyed. Grey Knights arrived at Malan'tai after the fact and found nothing. Some Imperial xenographers believe the creature was eventually reabsorbed into the Hive Mind and that its genetic template lives on in the Neurothrope strain. Which, if true, means its legacy is now standard equipment across every hive fleet. The Parasite of Mortrex The Parasite of Mortrex wins the award for the most horrifying method of reproduction in Warhammer 40,000, which is saying something. A bat-winged Warrior-strain organism, the Parasite carries a barbed tail tipped with a hollow tube like a snake's fang. When it stings a living victim, it implants Ripper parasite embryos directly into the body. These embryos mature in hours and devour the host from the inside out, bursting out as fully grown Rippers hungry for more. It first appeared on the Imperial Fortress World of Mortrex. The defences held for ten days before the Parasite arrived. Each victim it claimed added to a growing tide of Rippers until armoured vehicles were the only things that dared leave the fortress walls. Two weeks later the planet was gone, overrun by a Ripper swarm that the Parasite had grown from the bodies of the defenders themselves. A single astropathic transmission got out before the end, warning of what it had seen. The Parasite of Mortrex has not been sighted since Mortrex fell. But Astra Militarum troops who know the lore keep their eyes on the sky.   The Red Terror The Red Terror is the mystery entry. It has only ever been confirmed in one place, at one time, the Imperial mining world of Devlan. A massive Ravener-strain covered in blood-red chitin, with scythe blades and a maw wide enough to swallow a man whole, the Red Terror emerged from the mining tunnels beneath Devlan's starport and began hunting the garrison. Not en masse but methodically. It would attack, kill, retreat into the tunnels, and return again. When a search and destroy team went in after it, they didn't come back. What happened after is darker still. One ore ship fleeing Devlan arrived at the world of Adri's Hope dark and silent, making an automated landing with no communication. When investigators boarded, they found a slaughterhouse. Thousands of refugees, dead. No creature was found aboard, but three weeks later, Adri's Hope itself went silent. Nobody knows exactly what the Red Terror is. Some Imperial scholars believe it was the Hive Mind's first prototype for the Ravener strain, or an early experiment toward the Mawloc and Trygon bioforms. Whether it was one creature or several, whether it's still out there nobody knows. That's what makes it so effective. Build Your Tyranid Army at Wandering Adventures Whether you're just getting into Warhammer 40,000 Tyranids or looking to expand an existing collection, Wandering Adventures carries a full range of Tyranid miniatures, paints, and hobby supplies in-store and online at wanderingadventures.ca. From the iconic Swarmlord and Old One Eye to Carnifex broods, Hive Tyrants, Genestealers, and everything in between, we stock the kits you need to bring the Great Devourer to the tabletop. We also carry Citadel, Vallejo, and AK Interactive paints to help you nail whatever colour scheme you're going for — classic Hive Fleet Leviathan purple and blue, the bone-white of Behemoth, or something entirely your own. Located in Woodbridge (Vaughan), Ontario, with Canada-wide shipping available. Stop in or shop online — and if you have questions about building or painting your Tyranid army, our staff are hobbyists who actually play the game.