![]() ![]() This gave me a nice, deep socket into which the bottom of the mast would sit, keeping it upright and secure. ![]() Using super-glue, I glued these together in a stack (along with a little circular flat metal plate I had lying around in my bits box – you could just as easily use a piece of plastic or a left-over sprue bit) to make a sort of “cup” that I could then affix to the underside of my ship’s hull. In that ship’s particular case, these were 1/4″ dowels. To solve this problem, I went to the nearest hardware store and found washers whose internal diameter was the same diameter as the bottom parts of the masts. This was definitely the case for the two-masted Brigantine, which was the first Blood & Plunder vessel that I worked with. But for some of the larger vessels, you’ll need to do something to give the masts a secure base such that they don’t go shooting out the bottom of the vessel every time you pick it up. For smaller vessels like the Bark (or “Barque” if you’re French!), the mast holes will have a bottom to them and you won’t need to do anything special. While it is a really impressive model, just take a good look at this spindly fucker! You know that some part of him is going to break off during the trip from your house to your game (credit: Games Workshop)īut fear not! With a few easy steps, you can set up your Blood & Plunder ships such that the masts and rigging are modular and removable, which makes storage and transport a (warm Caribbean) breeze! Step 1: Prepping the Hullĭepending on the size of your vessel, the holes in the deck into which the mast dowels are inserted may or may not be drilled all the way through the hull. While the hulls are incredibly solid, the masts, sails, and rigging are the very definition of spindly, which makes getting your ship model from your house to your gaming venue intact a GW-Nagash-level exercise in “what will break this time?” While this might be fine for display and game-play purposes, for storage and transport it’s an utter nightmare. The drawback to the standard method of assembly, however, is that it sort of assumes that you are putting your ship together in a more or less permanent fashion. Fully painted and assembled, the ships make for gorgeous gaming pieces and look utterly fantastic on the tabletop. Finally, the kit will include a good amount of black elastic cordage that you can use for the ship’s rigging, along with instructions about how everything goes together. With each ship kit, you also get a set of dowels of various sizes to represent the masts and spars, as well as a set of laser-cut wood pieces to hook them together. The hulls of these vessels are enormous hunks of resin – my Brigantine measures 11″ long at the waterline and 13″ long at the gunwale – though the new Raise the Black expansion includes two smaller “Bermuda Sloops” with plastic hulls. This includes everything from canoes and long boats (for natives and/or landing parties) to the massive galleons and 6th Rate frigates and almost everything in between. In addition to the regular line of 28mm miniature figures (originally in metal and now increasingly with multi-part plastic kits), the game has a range of sea-going vessels of varying sizes. Vicious broadside cannonades, desperate boarding actions, puckle guns, chain shot, buccaneers firing down from fighting tops in the rigging – all these are represented in Blood & Plunder in a way that is almost unique in tabletop gaming. Because while Blood & Plunder lets you do raids and ambushes and prison breaks and daring escapes on land just like any other tabletop skirmish game, it also lets you play games set entirely on the high seas. There are lots of 28mm skirmish games out there, but what really distinguishes Blood & Plunder from the competition (and what really caught my eye when I first saw a demo of the game at GenCon in 2017) are the ships. And with the newest release ( Raise the Black), the action focuses on the golden era of the Age of Piracy. Later supplements ( No Peace Beyond the Line in 2017 and Fire on the Frontier in 2020) extended the game into the mid-1700s and expanded its scope to include colonial North America. With the recent release of Firelock Games’ “Raise The Black” expansion for their flagship Blood & Plunder game, we thought it was high time to put out some pirate-based content to get everyone in the mood to raid the high seas!īlood and Plunder (first released by Firelock Games in December of 2016) is a 28mm skirmish-level game originally set in the Caribbean in the mid 1600s.
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