Are You Ready For Some Football?

Man, I am.

September in Seattle is generally a pretty good time of year if you’re into the NFL. My parents started taking me to Seahawk games when I was 8 or 9 years old (they got their first set of season tickets around 1978 or ’79), and my wife and I are lined up to go to 5 of 8 home games this year. Plus with the new HD TV (our first new television in 10 years), everything looks set and ready to go.

Of course, this is all assuming Jim Mora meets the fans’ expectations as a new head coach…otherwise, Seattle could be in for a loooong year.

The last three or four years I’ve been involved in a fantasy football league, with my buddy Jon. Somewhere on the blog-o-verse I read the comment “fantasy football is D&D for adults that used to beat-up D&D players as kids.” There may be some truth to that, but Jon (who is no gamer and never was) readily admits that playing the “role” of a fantasy team owner isn’t much different from playing D&D, and thus doesn’t fault me my vices. Of course, he also plays fantasy basketball AND fantasy baseball, so he is a certifiable nut job with little to criticize anyway.

(do Canadians play fantasy football with the CFL? I honestly don’t know, and there are several of our Northern Neighbors that read this blog…I’d be interested in finding out)

Of course, for me as a long-time gamer, football season always brings out my passion for the REAL fantasy football game: Blood Bowl. Games Workshop’s Blood Bowl long ago proved to be my “gateway drug” into the silly (and expensive) hobby of painting miniatures. While I played RPGs for years without a single miniature, I can trace my minis collection back to the purchase of my first Blood Bowl boxed set circa 1995.

Actually, my first Blood Bowl set (the 2nd edition version) may have been purchased PRIOR to 1995, but it was 1995 when I had graduated from college and was living off Broadway that I first became obsessive-compulsive with miniatures. Suddenly, I was working full-time and had a bunch of extra cash on my hands…and I lived just down the street from a little shop called Games & Gizmos where I could engage in Warhammer 40K (then in ITS 2nd edition) tournaments.

Ahh…the good old/bad old days.

Nowadays, I am NOT obsessive-compulsive with regard to collecting miniatures. Games Workshop has fortunately cured me of ever wanting to support them again with their quick succession of releases and re-vamps of the 3rd-4th-5th editions of 40K (are they up to 6th yet? Maybe) and their official abandonment of Mordheim and Blood Bowl (yes, I realize these games are still supported on-line…that’s a whole ‘nother issue).

However, I still have minis that are un-painted, and every Autumn, when football season rolls around, I get the urge to do some painting.

My total collection of minis is fairly enormous for a dude that doesn’t actually wargame all that much. Part of this has to do with my completionist nature; part is simply a product of purchases made over a dozen year span. The end result, though, is pretty amazing…in addition to hundreds of 40K minis I have enough Blood Bowl miniatures to field at least 24 teams.

That’s pretty crazy if I do say so myself…practically enough to form my own NFL, Blood Bowl-style. Of these, fully half are completely painted and another 7 teams are in various states of being “finished up” (the Dark Elf team is probably my most miserable bit of un-finished business, as I’ve never been able to decide on a final color for their team uniform, and they have been painted and re-pained more than once).

In all truthfulness, this really is my big pot-o-crazy…whenever I stumble across a boxed Blood Bowl team in an obscure corner of a game store I tend to buy it. I have old Ral Partha minis that I have converted to Blood Bowlers (notably there was a period of time when there were no Treeman miniatures, and I simply painted up old Mountain Giant minis to look like Birdseye, the Jolly Green Giant…hey, my hobbit team needed their Big Guys!).

Anyway, this will be my first football season in the new house, and for a change I have several possible venues for painting. The kitchen has the best light (as well as the HD TV), but I have my own “game room” where my wife won’t have to look at my paints and brushes and newpapers. Heck, I even have a spare bedroom masquerading as a “TV room” upstairs that I could use to both paint AND stay out of the wife’s path (I should point out that my wife IS a football fan AND she enjoys Blood Bowl, too…she even has her own team…but she HATES the clutter that comes with the painting projects).

Ah, well…this is the kind of “tough decision” that’s not really very painful at all. Maybe this year I’ll finally finish the Dark Elf and Skaven teams. If I get around to it, I could even post some photos.

Go Seahawks!!! (*skraaw!*)
: )