Friday, November 13, 2020

AAR: Black Seas: First Contact British vs. Spanish.

 


    Kalissa and I tried out our first Black Seas game the other night, since flooding was interrupting travel to our local game store. We both had three ships and duked it out against each. It was a great learning game. And I am not just saying that, because I won! Kalissa had great fun. She was rather sad that one of her ships passed a fire test instead of an exploding ship. Also, I like that my bad rolling of "ones" is a good thing in this game. I rolled a lot of "ones"! Any, enjoy the photos of our game.



















Thursday, November 12, 2020

Naval Combat Games and the Board I Made For Demos.

 


   It just happened that before the year of 2020, my wife, Kalissa has been getting more into being an unofficial/official Warlord Games Raider. I am not sure what her title was or is, but this means we would be demonstrating other games. In this case, we have looked into the naval games of Warlord. Now, it is not a secret that I am not that much of a fan of most naval games. I think I have more or less been burned by bad rule sets or ones that just seem like work. There was one naval WW2 game I saw at Historicon that I decided to watch a turn play out. Kalissa left before the turn was other to see more interesting stuff. While I am sure the players ate up what they were playing and were having a blast I can see why she left. One round of shooting took 30 minutes to resolve. The one battleship fired a volley to the other side of the table at 20 feet long with ships the size of my finger. At the point of hitting, the receiving player open a 3" three ring binder with pages of information that he rolled on. Each page was sections of the ship form the kitchen to the bathroom to the engine room where he rolled for damage and fires. After all that rolling, the player said I am good. I still have no idea what happened in that round of shooting. 

   Now, grant it, I know there are way less complex naval games. I had played two games of Warlord's Cruel Seas game when it came out. I, thought, it was an interesting game, but I did not buy into with the exception of the German Faction, because I thought of maybe doing an aerial game for Dunkirk. It did not help that Kalissa was not into naval games, so I did not have much invested. Having a game we can play together makes things easier.  

   Because we have a little more commitment to Warlord Games as volunteers, I figure we should demo games on our terms. I needed make an ocean board. That is what this post was about anyway. Blood and Plunder may have given me some ideas, because that is a dangerous topic for myself I will not talk about. So I made this board with my so-far knowledge of terrain making. 

   This project did turn out rather when despite many mistakes. They are not much for anyone to care about other that I was going for a little more North Atlantic than Sub-tropical. It is not like I am not going to make another one! Anyway, enjoy!