Blood Bowl Team Nurgle Rotters

The latest team kit for Blood Bowl, the Nurgle Rotters, was introduced at Warhammer Fest Europe and up for pre-order shortly after. Today I want to cover this Nurgle devoted team in this review.

The boxed set is 25 EUR and covers two identical plastic sprues, 12 round bases (with a diameter of 32mm, slot and hole), an assembly instruction and large decal sheet with numbers, Nurgle iconography and positions in black and white. The instructions cover a pre-assorted roster for a 1.000.000 coins Blood Bowl team in English, French and German.

The sprues in this kit are identical, each covers 6 miniatures including a few optional bits which a makes slight variation looks possible. Each sprue contains two Bloaters, three Rotters and a Pestigor. There is a turn marker, a double sided marker and two different balls in each sprue. Giving you a total of 4 Bloaters, 6 Rotters, 2 Pestigors, 2 turn markers, 2 double sided markers and 4 balls. Casting is good, with a very low amount of mould lines and properly filled sprue. The only bit that is a bit tricky to remove is the two fingers bit from the Pestigor, as these are rather small and delicate.

The Nurgle Rotters are not a new addition to Blood Bowl, they were available as a Mail Order product in 2002. They received two new Nurgle Beastmen / Pestigors and three decaying Zombie likes Rotters that were filled with the regular Beastmen, from the classic 1994 Chaos All Stars from the third edition of Blood Bowl. Picture courtesy of SoLegends.

AT Warhammer Fest 2016 the first artwork of the redesigned Nurgle Rotters was presented. Pictures by recalcitrantdaze. The sketches by Mark Bedford were used for the final design of the now available plastic kit.

Let's start with one of the sprues. You get two different bodies for the Bloaters, one is running, the other one tumbling forward. Each body comes with two different heads. As the sockets for the heads are different from those of the remaining positionals, you'll have to put a bit of work into switching those. Unfortunately the design of the total of 4 heads isn't that different, as they are two designs but with a spike on top for variant 3 and 4.

As you can see, unlike the Blood Bowl Orks or Humans, these come without the slab on their feet, so you have to fill the slot on the base otherwise.

The three different Rotters come with four different heads, which all can be mixed with each other. The position of the added parts, like arms and such, are fixed and leave little room for variation without the use of a cutter.

The most twisted model of the kit is the Pestigor. It has a hunched pose and comes with two different heads. One of the horns is growing from the spine of the Beastman. As this creature is wildly corrupted by the powers of Chaos it is a bit difficult to get the features on its head and takes a bit of time to recognize where everything is.

And this is what you get from the first sprue.

Now for the second sprue. As I'm not a big fan of clones, I took a cutter and used parts from my bit box (primarily from the Putrid Blightkings). As for the rotters, I moved the arms a bit, by gluing them at an angle, or filed down the large horn from the shoulder pad. I used the fourth different head from the sprue and used two heads from the Putrid Blightkings to give the rotters more variation. You could use heads from the Deadwalker Zombies or Poxwalkers as well.

As for the Pestigor, I used the alternate head that is included in the sprue and swapped the horns from the spine and left side of the head with each other. Just cut them close to the bell and use that as the new connecting piece. For the Bloaters, I used a head and an arm from the Putrid Blightkings and a heavily mutated arm with tentacles from the Chaos Spawn plastic kit. The idea to convert it with the tentacles came from the 2016's artwork (seen above). It is quite easy to enhance the miniatures, plastic is simple to work with and if you don't have a bit box with spare parts of your own, simply ask one of your fellow players might have some spares. With the popularity of Nurgle, someone will have something for you.

As mentioned further above the team comes with two turn markers, two double-sided score coins and two sets of two Blood Bowl balls. The balls without the Nurgling have a pin to them, so you can put them onto the hole in the bases, showing which player currently carries the ball.

The new Blood Bowl Range is huge. The miniatures are at a solid 32mm heroic scale, with some of the miniatures like the Bloaters as tall as 4 cm and above. For comparison a regular Human Blitzer (the bright yellow colour comes from the miniature being from the Blitz Bowl boxed set).

The Rotters are even taller than their Nurgle counterparts from the Warhammer ranges, as you can see next to a Plaguebearer and a Pox Walker. The Pestigor is quite massive, next to a regular Beastman and an old 90's Blood Bowl Beastman. As for the Bloaters, I assumed they would be the size of the Putrid Blightkings, but they are even taller, almost as large as an Ogre.

And the built Blood Bowl team of the Nurgle Rotters, with the regular, right from the sprue in the first row and slightly modified, with head swaps and such, in the second row.

Conclusion
I like the new team boxes for Blood Bowl by Games Workshop. At 25 EUR and covering 12 miniatures they are reasonably priced, you get a bit of extra pieces like the tokens and balls with it as well. At just over 2 EUR per miniature, these are some of the cheapest Citadel miniatures you can get. So for a starting point it's a real bargain. More Blood Bowl teams are a long awaited thing, especially a team like the Rotters, which was rather costly to kit-bash (some people convert miniatures from the regular Age of Sigmar/Warhammer range into Blood Bowl teams, like Duncan Rhodes did on Warhammer Community). You needed the Putrid Blightkings (44 EUR), either Zombies (30 EUR) or Plaguebearer (23 EUR) and a box of Gors (20 EUR). So this is an improvement, not only on the price point but on the fact, that these look like real fantasy football players too. You could bulk up your team with matching coaches and apothecary miniatures, using Festus the Leechlord or the Nurgle Sorcerer for those positions.

Upgrading a team for competitive play or to go further into the game is a bit more expensive. They do not include the rules for the Nurgle team with these boxes, as they do unit profiles for example with Age of Sigmar or Warhammer 40.000. So you'll need to buy the current Spike Magazine (#3), Deadzone 1 or the Almanach to get your hands on that. Filling up your team with the remaining positionals can be partially done by buying a second team box (for the remaining two Pestigors and as many Rotters as you like, you're already maxed on Bloaters), or waiting for the Forge World add ons to be released (the Rotspawn is on its way). Same goes for Star players. These can cost as much as the team itself.

You can use this team right out of the box with the Blood Bowl boxed set for matches using the basic rules. The casting is done on a very high level and the fit of the parts is proper. As mentioned above the price is more than reasonable. Until the official Star Players and such are released, you can easily build or convert them using the large Slave to Darkness / Rotbringers plastic range.

Blood Bowl is a brand by Games Workshop.

The reviewed product item was provided by the manufacturer.