Day: January 25, 2011

A friend sent me this link:  

Swordfish Article

As many of you know, the name of my tavern for pirate brawls is The Ruptured Swordfish.  More than once, a pirate has pulled the stuffed swordfish off the wall and used it as a weapon.

I saw a link on The Miniatures Page not long ago about a print on demand shop, superiordpod.com.  I got the idea that for my pirate tavern fight convention games, it might be nice to have cards with pre-rolled stats.  In those games, using Blood and Swash, I usually have each player control one of each character class: Swashbuckler, Hero, Swordsman, and Man at Arms.  Over the holidays I photographed each of the pirate figures I use in those tavern fight games and then made these cards.  It took a few iterations with the company to get my cards to match the template for printing, but I’m really happy with the final product.

This photograph shows some figures along with their matching cards.  Note that each character class has a different colored label.  This is so I can quickly sort them into four stacks and have the players draw one from each stack to start a game.

In practice, I plan to get the hard cases used for collectable cards.  Each player will put his cards in one of those cases so he can use a grease pencil to mark off ammunition and hits.

I’m so happy with these cards that I’ve been thinking about other uses of custom cards.  A deck of 54 cards costs about $6.00 plus another $5.00 for shipping.  I made some mistakes on the first order.  Then I wanted to finish making cards for the rest of my pirates.  I just sent in another order for 108 cards, and the total order cost was something like $14.00.  The price is very reasonable.  I’m working on custom decks of cards for GMs of Look, Sarge games.

On 22 JAN, the HAWKs hosted their annual gaming day at Archbishop Curley High School in Baltimore, MD.  The turnout was very good.  We had 24 events run during the day, and every game master had enough players to run his or her game.  Genres varied from fantasy to WWII, with just about everything in  between.

Matt Kirkhart ran two ancients games using his scratch built figures.  These were built from various bits from the craft store.  It’s not often you can describe a war game as “cute,” but these really were.  The game was not silly.  It was a real ancients game, and both kids and adults seemed to enjoy it.

This is a wide shot of the gaming room about mid morning.  In this picture you can only see about half the room.  We had 8 games scheduled to begin at 0900.  We weren’t sure we’d have enough gamers at that time to fill that many games.  While a few games waited until 0930 to start, every game was run (and was full).  We even had two ad hoc games get set up, Ambush Alley and Sea Kreig.

Two youngsters playing in Todd Harland-White’s Airboats, Alligators, and Daemon Rum game.  This is a race by bootleggers to get casks of rum past the revenue men.  The game uses a combination of Jamie Davis’ Future Race rules and Blood and Swash.  My daughter won this game.

Scott Perry ran a beautiful 28mm Carlist Wars game.  He claims to have the largest collection of Carlist Wars figures in North America.  He’s probably right.  This is a very niche period.

Civil War author Scott Mingus ran a very attractive American Civil War ironclads game.  There were about eight players in this game.  Everyone seemed to enjoy it.  I think he did a really nice job on the terrain for this game.  Scott also had some of his books for sale.

Chris and I had 12 players for our 16 player Cold Wars game.  We had just played 2/3 of this game the night before at our regular HAWKs meeting.  We will make only minor tweaks for Cold Wars.  All of the players were engaged and fighting until we called the game.  We started about 45 minutes late.  We made sure the games run by non-HAWKs were filled before starting this 12-player game.  As a lot of folks arrived at 0930, we didn’t really get started until 0945.  The game had a hard stop time, because there were two games scheduled to use the tables after us.  If we had been allowed to play the full time scheduled (if we had started on time), the Germans and Russians might have been assaulting the town.

This is a close-up shot of the Germans approach one of the Polish defensive lines.  The fighting was hot and heavy here for about an hour of game time.  The rules were Look, Sarge, No Charts: World War II.  Note how clean the board looks.  This is not prettied up for the photograph!

Contrast the Look, Sarge game above with this view of another game at Barrage.  The aesthetics of the figures are completely destroyed by the charts, special measuring devices, and HUGE labels behind the units.  This game use a popular, expensive, hard-cover set of rules.  Which do you think looks better?

One of the ad hoc games at Barrage was a six-player Aerodrome game.  My kids love this.  In fact for his birthday last year, I bought Tommy a complete set of rules and playing aids.  I can’t afford to send him to college, now, but he can have fun playing this game.  This game ran from about 1400-1800, with players rotating in and out.

Tim Tilson ran an attractive Sudan game using The Sword and the Flame.  This was another player pleaser.  Every time I passed the table the guys looked like they were having a ball.

Peter Hess ran this very attractive pirate game in which mobs of pirates were trying to sack the town, capture the fort, and get away with treasure.  The game lasted four hours and appeared to be exciting to the last.