Island of Blood Box: Unboxing

With the 8th edition rulebook read, and the Skaven army book read, I struck up conversation with one of the salesmen at the Bunker today about wanting to maybe do WFB in the near future. I propositioned him into showing me the basic mechanics of how the game is played using the Island of Blood starter set that the Bunker has assembled. We played all the way through a turn relatively quickly because I had read the 8th ed. Rulebook already. Since the Salesman devoted some time to me I decided to buy the starter kit then and there, as opposed to the following day.

Here it is:

I knew that there was alot of stuff in that box (check the full listing here), but after opening this bad boy up, you really get a sense of how great a value this box is. From what you can see in the above picture, the box includes: five sprues with all the units, a sprue with templates, some books, some dice, two rulers, and the bases.

It's finally nice to have the artillery dice i need in 40K.

The unit sprues have mixed skaven and High elves, which is kinda annoying. Additionally, they come in VERY easy assembly methods, i.e. two or three pieces for most individual models. The cavalry for instance is split down the middle, all you need to do is glue the other half and add an elf head. The clanrats just need another arm. I would like a little more complexity in the unit assembly (at least on par with the normal boxes of the respective units) but i understand why GW did this.

More Sprues. The latter is primarily Skaven.

I got an up close piucture of one of the rat ogres. One of my favorite models from the box! The only other Skaven model i like better in the box is the Warlord, it's such a sweet model!

This is the Griffon for the High Elf Prince that comes in the box. It's an AWESOME looking model, easily the best in the box.

The templates. I already have all three, but I guess it's not a bad thing to have more, right?

These are the fantasy rulers. If i hadn't played WFB them for meassuring back in the day. Though i'm pretty sure the 40K starter box has these rulers too, but who buys the 40K starter? If i remember correctly, these rulers always seemed to knock down models even more than your standard tape meassurer. I'm pretty sure i'll continue to use the tape meassurer.

The books that come with the Island of Blood set. The book on the right is the mini-rulebook which almost every 40K player I know has learned to love. This one is a little bit more hefty than the 40K mini-book but is still very nice. One really nice thing about the WFB mini-book is that it is in full-color. The diagrams and pictures look amazing. The thing in the middle is a little Rule clarification insert for the victory point rule. It looks like someone accidentilly a whole paragraph [they deleted it]. The book on the left is a "so you decided you wanna play WFB and sell your soul to GW" book. It's very nice for beginners and has some really cool pictures. There is also a description of all the units that you can make using hte Island of Blood box. Additioanlly, there is some short little descriptors of all the other armies in the WFB universe.

Next time I'll post pictures of modeling the Skaven force :)