For my part the "look" of the game ranks almost as highly as the gaming aspect and I always want my games to have the appearance of a moving diorama. I cannot stomach the idea of paying someone to paint my miniatures and I am blessed with having a reasonable amount of artistic talent that has been improved over time with lots of practice. I therefore spend most of my hobby time painting miniatures or making attractive terrain.
However inspiration is a fickle beast and my enthusiasm for a particular project can ebb and flow like the wind. One moment I am gung-ho attacking a project with gusto only for the energy to disappear overnight. This means my painting table is covered with many "in progress" projects.
This year I have flitted from Frostgrave to Russian WWII to Roman legionarys to Medievals to Mars Attacks to Russian Napoleonics to Super Heroes!!
And so I flit again....
I don't even know how this one happened. One moment I was painting Russians Napoleonics and then I find myself not only painting soccer players but also planning to build a football pitch to play my games.
Several years ago I purchased from Eureka Miniatures a soccer set. This set consisted of two soccer teams (15 figures per side) plus two linesman, a referee, two goal posts, corner flags and a streaker to boot! At the time I didn't have a particular rule set in mind to play a game. I do recall there being two commercially available rulesets (I think one was called Corner kick). However I didn't get around to buying a set and so the figures sat in the lead pile waiting. While I moved on to other projects.
It must have been a post or something on Facebook which lead to some web browsing and "hey the rules are available in PDF and cheap!" A few mouse clicks later and a PDF copy of these rules arrived in my email inbox.
On a first quick read through the rules appear quite good and not overly complicated, which is what you want when playing a fast moving tabletop soccer game. It appears the author lives in Victoria which will make clarification of rules easier.
So now I have some rules so I need two teams and a pitch to get playing.
The Eureka soccer players appear to be around 20mm sized. Since you won't mix these with other games the figure scale doesn't really matter.
The poses are good, the players look realistically animated and there is enough variation in the poses that you will only end up with one or two of the same pose.
I gave them a quick clean up (very minimal flash), mounted them in 20mm round bases and undercoated them in white. My favourite team is Manchester United and I decided on Chelsea as the opponent mainly because the blue is a nice contrast with United's red.
Online you can find historical uniform guides for both teams. The figures uniforms are not strictly modern looking. I think they seem to have the style of the mid eighties so I checked the historical uniforms around this time and came up with an approximation of that look. The uniforms will not be an exact copy but capture the right feel. I have decided against adding players names or any sponsorship because frankly, it's too hard to paint!
Here are a couple of in progress shots of both teams. You can see the myriad of other projects in the background crowding the painting table.
I'll post again when I have finished the teams and started working on the pitch.
Bye for now.
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