Enfilade 2018 - Thar be pirates 'ere by Mark Johanson. Blood and Plunder.

Saturday night I played in a pirate game using the newish rules: Blood & Plunder. I've been hunting for a pirate rule set I like so I make an effort to try out new rules when I can.

The setup is that 3 pirate hunters have located the pirates safe cove and are coming in to burn em out. The pirates must resist. The pirates are outmatched on all 3 ships, but have a gun emplacement on a small island and, unknown to the hunters at the beginning, also have a few canoes with extra pirates who can row out and board.


The game was run by a great guy and his son from the Seattle area. Some liberties had been taken with the rules to try and make them play faster (notably all the ships on a side took an activation per card, rather than having everyone wait while each player did his thing).




Mark cleverly had a bunch of wood rulers with the range modifiers painted on in colour bands so it was trivial to figure out modifiers....slick move there.

You can see this in the right.




Early game one of the hunters took a mobility hit (spar and rigging damage) and was shortly thereafter boarded by it's opponent. The canoes, scenting blood, rowed in, using the pirate ship as cover from the hunter at the top of the pic (blue with green racing stripe). Hilariously, everyone started to board that melee. The blue/green hunter boarded the back of the black pirate ship, and the red lined pirate ship moved in to join as well.

Meanwhile my own pirate crew was getting methodically murdered by crack musketeers in the third pirate hunter. It was a combo of being outclassed, not having a great plan, and my opponent having above average rolls. Overall it was clear the hunters were going to get a solid win in this game.

Rules wise, I don't think this is the ruleset for me. It has some interesting features around playing cards to select who activates, and the 'later' the card the more actions you get that activation. There were a variety of special skills, and rules to hit, to save, and a multi step morale status (with decreasing activations, then pinned/shaken, the routing).

I didn't really like that you need relatively large numbers of figs (units are typically 6, and you'd probably have at least 3 units per side. I'm looking for more like a dozen tops). The activation, while interesting, could be streamlined. I'm not sure I care enough about extra actions for the late cards for the extra time/thought to deal with this aspect. Cannon reloading is painfully slow. Ships seem pretty resilient and crew saves seemed to be in the 50% range. Arguably convention games never play fast, but I can't see this rule set playing as fast as I'd like, given the difficulty in carving out game time in my life these days. 

6MMRPC Week 15: Ainsty Wharves and Jetties....shipping out

The horros of packing up the house and dealing with old employer/new employer HR continues to suck at my time and energy. I haven't gone dark quite yet though. Here is another appropos submission, considering my move will require a ferry ride.

One again we have some more Ainsty resin terrain. All my Ainsty stuff came in two large purchases that occurred in successive Decembers. I remember this because 'it was a gift to me'.....how we trick ourselves. It's great to see the lot finally done up. I still have other Ainsty stuff, but they will be their own projects.

After finishing the browns, I wanted to do more, and add some colour. Scum/Kelp/mold/rot/etc was the obvious choice, but I was quite sure how to swing it. Thankfully I remembered the great work done by Barry at League of Augsberg on his pirate ship (here), who shared his recipe when prompted.

Voila:

Definitely the look I desired.

Reaper Bones: Pirate Team including Gruff Grim Cleaver & Hajad

I fell off my posting scheme to get through these guys this week (the dangers of stretching out your progress). The last two figs are definitely a bit weaker, mostly due to painting, but I'm not super impressed with the sculpting of the treasure chest toting fellow. Perhaps it's more realistic proportions vs 'heroic' models that are so prevalent.

Hajad, the treasure bearer, I think had some fairly decent skin tones done. I painted his eyes which were okay, but I don't think the brown spot of colour for the iris was the right decision. Too similar to the skin, it seems to detract from the eyes. Perhaps no iris would have been better. 
The metallics on the chest edging could benefit from a highlight as well.

Grim could have had some colourful food splatter put on his chest. He also has a small apron I left black (behind the pouch on his belt). I was a little out to sea (haha) on what to do with it. The wood stock on the gun is so large, I'm not too happy with the uniform brown I ended up with. And the dew-rag could pop a bit more with some highlighting.

All 4 figs were completed on a pretty tight schedule considering I had family staying here for most the week/weekend. Once again, they are bones, so I'm happy to consider them good enough.

Reaper Bones: Muriel Twinspar

Yet another Bones miniature. I have to say, I appreciate the monday deadline to get these things done. I obviously work better with deadlines.

My wife was a bit disappointed in this mini, as it's a typical under dressed, over busty, unbelievable body shape, female fantasy trope. Can't say I really disagree. Her generous endowment did allow me to practice my skin tones however.

I was hoping for a more rosy/ruddy colour, but I used reapers flesh was and was quite unhappy with the results. I will stick with vallejo sepia, or GW devlan mud in the future (mind you, I really like reapers paints). As a result, I needed to work hard getting back to a reasonable skin tone, which brought the tone too light.

I ended up preping and priming all 4 pirate figures (that I noticed) from Bones 1. So this is why there's a run of these figures. I tried to match up the colours a bit to make them appear to belong together. Unfortunately the bases are quite different, so the effect is lessened. We shall see this next weekend.

Reaper Bones: Barnabus

I've decided to try working back in time to the caffeine forge blog reaper bones painting schedule (hopefully that makes sense). I'm trying to keep up with the weekly fig, but I decided to start catching up with the other folks by going back and doing what I've missed.

My first hop backwards (skipping one fig for now) is Barnabus. Obviously a pirate sea captain of some means. What the heck are the bevy of skeleton keys for? There's also a hint of a leather jacket under his coat to help him survive those pressing melee's on the high seas.

I rather like the sculpt of his sea coat and it turned out quite well. I passed up white and red striped pantaloons, but it was probably the right decision. I was undecided about leaving his hair black with no highlights, but I think it turned out well enough....a young and hungry captain this.

I think my biggest disappointment was his hand gun. The molding was a little wonky, and the colours didn't turn out super great.  Also the basing as stone instead of wood decking, for such an obvious naval man, was a bit weird. Oh well.

Pirates: Ainsty pirate ship battle damage

Another Port from the Old blog. I did a massive Ainsty order (to receive maximum discount and free shipping) around Dec 2011. I received the full package early in 2012. I must say early that Andy Lyon over in the UK (of Ainsty castings) is a princely individual. He was very good about keeping in touch with me. The first set of packages got bounced from Canadian customs for some weird reason, so he had to sent them again (these were 2 very large boxes). When they arrived (the second attempt) this is what I found.....

Shipping damage to a wonderful pirate ship fig. Everything was well packed, but transit across the atlantic can be rough, and it's easy to blame the monkeys who deal with the mail (FedEx in this case).

I'm hoping to get some advice on the best way to proceed with repairs.....afterall this looks like a clean break and it's not comminuted at all (I'm sure anyone familiary with broken ones will appreciate this comment).

I emailed Andy to ask what the best way to repair this was, not really wanting to cost the guy MORE of his margin on shipping, instead I got this message:

Hi David

Jeez thats really frustrating. I will send another Hull over to you next week. Fortunately this doesn’t happen too often but thats no joy to you. At least I guess it got through customs this time.

Will get one packed up early in the week

Apologies

Regards,

Andy Lyon

The final (Third!) package arrived very quickly and was a whole other hull! I basically have 2 whole ships (minus one set metal fittings and mast). Like a said, I was very impressed with Ainsty. I'll try and review of the stuff I got and have finally been getting around to washing up (oh resin....sigh).