Corner Kick

My son ordered four bags of soccer (I know, football - apologies to my friends across the pond!) teams from Bob Wiltrout at Quantum Castings and they arrived earlier in the week. There are 15 figures per bag; one goalkeeper and 14 field players, allowing you to have 4 substitutes.

I  unfortunately didn't get a chance to play Corner Kick first hand at Historicon, but my son did and absolutely fell in love with the game; bought the rules right there at the table and ordered four squads the day after we got back from our trip. Pretty impressive when you think about it, especially for a 16 year old! 

These figures have immediately jumped to the front of the "to be painted" line. I guess that's good and bad; obviously good because this will get Jakob and I gaming together straight away, and then obviously bad because I sure as heck don't need another project!  Clearly I can't even finish the projects sitting to my right and left as it is. 

I started off with our beloved Liverpool. I cleaned up the figures a bit, glued them into thier bases, and filled the gaps in the slotted bases with some Green Stuff. I also added a washer to the bottom of the base to give the figures some more weight.  What you notice right away is that these figures are absolutely screaming for a separate head system.  One can only hope, but Quantum Castings is just Bob creating the figures in his garage, so your not going to get a Warlord or Artizan quality cast; the heads in particular are a little rough. Plus they are metal, plastics definitely give you more defined features, especially when talking about the heads in my opinion. I think that the head sculpts are a bit rough because you can see that  changes were attempted to get as many varied looks as possible; long hair, bald heads, dreadlocks. And a few of the heads just look too big. What is going to be Mamadou Sakho, second from the left, his head just looks awkward. Still though, hats off to Bob for making these figures available; and reading through some posts on their Yahoo group for Corner Kick, he knows the potential for the quality and variety for separate heads, so fingers crossed for what may come.

I've got a lot of ideas for the kits and all the  items that I'm going to need to make that happen are on order so hopefully everything will be here by the end of next week.  Here is my WIP of Philippe Coutinho. I flocked the base with Woodland Scenics grass just to see how it looked, and I used my P-Touch to make a name plate for the base. I don't like it though, and think that it should be black lettering on a clear, not white, backing. But again, that is part of what's coming next week. Still lots to do with the shirt and shorts, the skin and boots. Stay tuned!

Here are a few WIP photos of some soccer balls I'm working on. They are 1/4" ball bearings glued to a #6 washer. I've got 12 that I'm working on and we'll see how the detailing will go here shortly. I really like the look of them so far though! 

Here is another WIP photo of the measuring sticks used in the game. I think I want to paint each stick a different color to help identify each type; sprint red, half movement blue, etc.

Meanwhile, until I can get the four squads painted up (we're going to do Arsenal, Chelsea and haven't decided on which Manchester team yet; it's quickly becoming clear we need to buy more squads! Especially seeing as I love the movie "Victory", or "Escape To Victory" for my overseas friends, it really fits with all my WWII models and it would be really neat to get the Allied and German squads on the table!) we've played a few games of Corner Kick using my old Subbuteo teams. I ran Liverpool and Jakob ran Chelsea for both games; game one was a 1-0 win for Chelsea with Hazard scoring for the bad guys and the second match was a 2-2 tie, with Captain Fantastic scoring on a free kick and the ever injured Daniel Sturridge scoring the second goal.



The German squad from "Victory" I painted years ago



Overall a great game that I'm really looking forward to showing and playing with all our footy friends here in the area; and hopefully getting them to buy some squads themselves!

As always, thanks for looking!