Back in May, I started painting a Chaos Chosen Blood Bowl team. As with the Skaven, it wasn’t long before I had enough models painted to field a playable team, but after that I slowed down a lot. In particular, I switched to focussing on the Skaven team again, although I also just slowed down a lot generally. However, once I’d finished the Skaven team, I was free to turn my attention back to the Chosen. So naturally, I put together a Nurgle team instead! However, once those were finished I did start painting the Chosen again and at last they are finally finished. So here are Blue Shift, my Chaos Chosen team:

For the most part, these are the current GW plastic models, but there are a few extras and some conversions here and there.

The Chaos Chosen team first appeared in the third edition of Blood Bowl. There had been teams of Chaos-worshippers in previous editions but they were quite different, being corrupted, chaotic versions of human or mixed-race teams. The new Chaos team had only two player types, Beastmen and Chaos Warriors. When ‘big guy’ players were added to the game, the team gained a Minotaur. In the 2016 edition, the team was re-named ‘Chaos Chosen’ to distinguish it from the other Chaos-worshipping teams that had been added to the game (including the Chaos Pact/Renegades team, which more closely resembled the old second-edition Chaos teams). There were also tweaks to the names of the player types, although their stats remained unchanged. What had previously just been called ‘Beastmen’ became ‘Beastman runners’. Confusingly, in Blood Bowl 2020, this changed again, as the designers decided to make ‘Lineman’ a ‘keyword’. For any team that didn’t have a player that was explicitly called a lineman, the word ‘lineman’ was added to the name of the appropriate player type. In some cases this was fine: renaming ‘Goblins’ to ‘Goblin linemen’ made perfect sense, for example. But when the player was already identified as holding another position, it led to such clunky entries as ‘Dwarf Blocker Linemen’ or, as in this case, ‘Beastman Runner Linemen’. Whatever they’re called, though, Beastmen are the most numerous players on the team.

The other main player type for the Chaos team are the Chaos Warriors. These were re-named as ‘Chaos Chosen Blockers’ in BB2016, in an attempt to move away from just being troop types from Warhammer transposed into Blood Bowl. I swapped the heads of mine with Kairic Acolytes from Warhammer: Age of Sigmar, in order to give them a more Tzeentchian look.

In BB2020, Chaos teams can take one big guy, who can be either an Ogre, Troll or Minotaur. Of those, the Ogre seems to be generally reckoned to be the best option. However, in all editions of the game prior to 2020, the Minotaur is the only big guy available to the team, so I have one of those. This is the current Forge World model, and he’s pretty big.

As ever, I have some sideline staff to go with the team. The head coach and apothecary are both converted from Kairic Acolytes. The cheerleaders are from Forge World. I like the models but I have to admit that I’m not sure what they’re supposed to be. Are they mutants? Some particularly human-like beast(wo)men? They most closely resemble Tieflings from Dungeons & Dragons, but those don’t feature in the Warhammer/Blood Bowl setting. Finally I have a referee. This is the only third-party model on the team: it’s from Goblin Guild miniatures, sculpted by Pedro Ramos.

For this team, I have the full complement of players from the CRP edition of the game. Going left-to-right, they are Grotty, Brick Far’th, Lord Borak the Despoiler, Morg ‘N’ Thorg, Max Spleenripper, Grashnak Blackhoof, Lewdgrip Whiparm. Morg and Grashnak are the old 3rd-edition models by Gary Morley. Morg is the same model that I painted last year along with my Dwarfs; as he’s particularly associated with Chaos teams I thought I’d include him here as well for the sake of completeness. Grashnak Blackhoof I got from eBay and I strongly suspect that the model is a re-cast. There were lots of small flaws in the casting, some of which could be explained by an old, worn-out mould, but some of which don’t make much sense unless the model was re-cast. I’ve tried to clean up the model as best I could and disguise the flaws with the paint job. I don’t think I’ve done too badly. Max Spleenripper and Lewdgrip Whiparm are the old second-edition models. I’ve tried to reflect their allegiances to Khorne and Slaanesh in their colour schemes, while also featuring some amount of blue to tie them in with the rest of the team. Lord Borak is the current Forge World model. Again, I’ve mostly kept his iconic black-and-red armour, but given him blue shorts to tie him in to the team. I don’t think I’m the first person to use the thrower and goblin from the old metal Ogre team to represent the duo of Brick Far’th and Grotty. I don’t normally like models that feature other characters besides the one they represent, but since the whole point of this pair is that one of them throws the other down the pitch, I decided to make an exception. I initially though that the goblin being thrown was exactly the same as the one on foot. This particularly made sense given that these were the only two goblins sculpted for this team; there aren’t any others available in the same style. However, closer inspection revealed that there were numerous details that didn’t match up and I don’t think they were supposed to represent the same goblin. With a scalpel, file and some green stuff I was able to modify both goblins so that they’re now almost identical, but there is still one detail that doesn’t match between the two. The pair are painted in the colours that I intend to use for my Ogre team once I finally get around to painting them. It’s not a coincidence that blue features heavily, so that they also fit in with this team. Since all of these players are also available to my Nurgle team, having blue as a unifying colour across both allows me to tie them all in together.

Finally, I have some mutants. One of the key features of the Chaos team is the ready access to mutations, and while I don’t think it’s practical to try and represent every possible mutation option on the models, I did convert a few models to represent a few possibilities, using parts from Punga miniatures. I have two Chaos Warriors with claws, plus Beastmen with prehensile tail, tentacles and extra arm.

And that’s it! At 32 models (not counting Morg, Brick or Grotty), this is now my second-largest team (behind the Skaven). I don’t know how much I will actually use the team in games. I tried a couple of games with a Chaos team way back in the day and didn’t get on with them at all, but it’s possible that I’d enjoy them more these days.

Next up I’m planning to revisit my old Orc team. Some of the models were painted quite some time ago and could do with a bit of a touch-up. I also haven’t done any star players for the team, so I’ll add those in. Then, since a majority of the Orc stars are shared with the Goblin team, I might as well go on and paint up my goblins as well!