Getting the vegetation covered for my table, I want to have a way to get my crew back on shore from their boats. That means docks and boats.
Category: Blood & Plunder
With my first land terrain piece done for Blood & Plunder, I moved on to scatter terrain and smaller items. I knew I wanted the standard Caribbean palm trees but there is then the question of storage. I decided I needed to print my own tree bases and would use cheap plastic trees to plug-n-play.
As we explore more of Blood & Plunder, it was inevitable that we would expand to bigger boats. My Austin opponent went there first by printing out a frigate model from Printable Scenery. Unfortunately, the print warped severely and was not very usable without a ton of work. He moved on to easier options but offered up the pieces to see what I could do with them.
One of the big challenges I realized when putting together the Blood & Plunder: Raise the Black set was storage. You have minis and tokens and rulebooks and cards and dice which are normal. But then you have these ships with fragile masts and delicate sails. They aren’t all that fragile but they can’t be just thrown back into a box so I needed to improvise.
In playing the one intro game of Dracula’s America, there was one little thing bothering me. To activate, both players play a playing card from a draw of cards that reset at the top of each round. A lot of games use cards, and specifically standard playing cards, to determine an activation order but I’ve seen a few new iterations that I’ve been enjoying. Unfortunately, Dracula’s America uses a very simple mechanic. While this isn’t bad, I think there is a big missed opportunity here.
A while back, friend Colton embarked on a new frontier: Blood & Plunder by Firelock Games. This mostly historical miniatures skirmish game was talked about a lot but being the only owner in the group, there was not a lot of initiative to get it together and push it on his fellow gamers. Flash forward to now and his minis are painted, his terrain is set, and friend Colton is spoiling for a fight.
This past weekend kicked off the start of my usual convention season prep with the annual Gen Con event registration. This will be my eleventh Gen Con and one would think I’d be used to the stress and frustration of their event registration process but no such luck.
I can’t complain though. This is the 50th anniversary of Gen Con so there is a lot of demand for hot events and so getting into those requires some blind luck. I was happy to make it into one of the sold out event slots for CMON’s upcoming Song of Ice and Fire miniatures game and I’m excited to go see They Might Be Giants. I’ve wanted to see that band live for years now so having an exclusive event sounds like a great way to hear them.
If you missed my part 1 post, you can see it here.
Gen Con 2016’s Thursday was coming to a close, or at least the dealer hall was as it was getting into the late afternoon. Fortunately for me, my day was finally getting into full gear. It was Blood Rage Tournament time! This was a series of two Blood Rage games and the top 4 total scores would play a final game for the tournament prize: a full Kickstarter Exclusives set. Pretty choice swag if I could get it.
