Pirates of the Spanish Main

So, back from our vacation to Victoria and Vancouver, British Columbia. We had a good time with the kids at the petting zoo, watching the seals and an otter at the fisherman's wharf, strolling through the Royal B.C. Museum, touring Granville Island, and more.

Luckily, our ferry rides were a little less exciting than this!

Jenni and I also got some gaming in with cousins and friends. We brought three games with us: Concept, Colosseum, and Marrying Mr. Darcy. Concept was a mild success with those we introduced it to. Colosseum got one play, but being a heavier game, I wasn't surprised (I came in second).

Marrying Mr. Darcy was a smash hit with a cousin and some of her friends (including guys), so much so that we decided to leave our copy with her so that all of her friends could have the chance to play.

We got to try Star Wars: Epic Duels. It was a fun game! I was the Boba Fett/Greedo team and MVP for the Dark Side (who won the game), having taken out five of the seven Light Side characters. Now I'm kicking myself for not picking up this title when I saw it at a thrift store a few years ago.

Other games we tried out were Patchwork, Blue Prints, Jungle Speed, Exploding Kittens, and Tokaido.

Our hosts for the Vancouver portion of the trip were my aunt and uncle. My uncle is a miniatures gamer, mostly D&D and similar games. But while we were getting ready to leave, he thought of some miniatures he had that he didn't use any more and didn't foresee using again: a bunch of assembled ships from the WizKids collectible game Pirates of the Spanish Main. Man, am I excited about these! Three reasons to be excited:

1. It's a game with pirates! The romanticized version of pirates is a well-loved theme across all age groups.
2. Easy rules mean a young kid could learn and play. I'm thinking about my oldest two: 6 and 4 years old.
3. Miniatures that really look good for what they are and that could easily work for more advanced rule sets.

Now, I've read the complaints regarding the game rules being broken and can see what is meant. I'm thinking that what is needed is a different objective in the game. By the rules, the objective is to gather more gold than your opponent can from a central island location. The main complaint being that the gold-gathering objective discourages going after your opponent's ships in favour of grabbing as much gold as you can from the island and hoping the values of the gold you grabbed beat the values your opponent got. It would seem that the rules for movement, firing, and special abilities should be fine for games with a different objective or with multiple objectives.

Anyways, on to the booty!

After matching ships to cards, I counted 48 ships, 1 fort, and 1 sea monster (how cool is that?). There are other cards with special crew members and such, but I've not really looked at those. You've already seen the sea monster.

There were some British ships...

...some French ships (and fort)...

...a few more Spanish ships...

...a whole mess of pirates...

...and a lone American vessel.

Now to find/invent some scenarios to try out. Maybe the battle of the Antelope and the "great Yank".

P.S.: Again, to my uncle: thank you.

Of Simplification and Zombies

I'd been planning and thinking, humming and hawing, and scrapping and re-thinking ideas to make a play map for some miniatures skirmish game. There are many options: paper-craft buildings and scenery, popsicle stick and cardboard construction,  scrap cloth creations... I was even considering purchasing a pre-printed felt mat or a printable file to have a printer do a poster-size job.

Along-side all of that, I was considering what genre/theme I wanted to do. Again, so many choices: western, steampunk, '30s and '40s pulp, military... An important question for me as miniatures are expensive, which is why I am interested in making my own. Making my own is time consuming, even more so if I want to have people-figures, which I have never tried to produce and which would be easier to buy. You can see the vicious cycle of thinking one could get trapped in.

Then I came across a post on Facebook (I'm in the Full Thrust group) from a gamer asking about what set of rules they should play for a beginner game.  One respondent, a Jesse Casey, made a comment accompanied by a cute image:

"Start simple and grow into the game, in the long run you'll enjoy it much more than otherwise."

If that isn't some kind of inspiration for the little dilemma I had been creating for myself... To me the comment was saying, "Start with what you have and see what you can do with it. Add as little as possible to make it playable."

So I took stock of what I had and these were the things that could go together the easiest:
- 40 or 50 glow-in-the-dark zombies meant for the Zombies! game
- 40 Imperial Guardsmen for Warhammer 40,000 that I thrifted a while ago
- 24 6" x 6" tiles cut from the press board bottoms of some cheap drawers I found at the dump

With that, I decided that some tile set depicting modern roads and city-type scenery would be most usable with these resources. I found tiles on Wargame Vault that depicted modern roads and buildings. What I like about them is that the buildings are interior floor plans so a game taking place on the street could be continued inside buildings, but the roads are too wide for my taste. I was almost ready to buy the set anyway when I thought I should at least see if there was anything similar for free. 

Well, it's the Internet and you can always find something for free! I found a set here. The roads are a little narrower, more to my liking. The buildings are roof-tops, not interiors, but I'm okay with that. I could still buy the other set for interiors (or learn to make my own, right?). Another great thing about modern roads is that they can accommodate a number of themes in recent history, the present, or the future.

So the Easter weekend saw me cutting and gluing printed tiles to the press board squares. Then a couple of days later, I put together a game of counter-zombie actions by a couple of Imperial Guards with Lawrence (almost 4) who was super excited to take the role of the Guards. 

And now for pictures (the camera flash gave an added thematic feel to the board):

Jeanette just home from school, Lawrence rolling dice to move his Guards.

These zombies were no match. Only two of them got close enough to bite, but the dice said "Not today!"

Waiting just around the corner...

For the game I just made up some simple rules that Lawrence could mostly understand. I'll write them here:

For Imperial Guards:
- Roll 1 d6 for each guard, assign dice rolls so each guard gets one roll result
- Each guard can make one action x assigned roll result
    - Actions: move 1 space, fire weapon (d10, ranged attack with reducing chance of hit over increasing distance), melee attack (d10, if adjacent to zombie, 40% chance of hit).

For zombies:
- Roll d20
- Move any zombies any number of spaces up to the roll result
- Individual zombies may only move up to 4 spaces on one turn
- Zombies adjacent to non-zombies attack automatically (d10, 40% chance to hit)

For both:
- Movement may be to any of the 8 squares adjacent (if unoccupied) to the one occupied by the moving piece (i.e., diagonal moves are allowed).
- for this game, no entering buildings.

The Imperial Guard cleaned up easily. I'd like to see if adding more zombies and raising the chance of activating them would make it harder. Something to mimic the overwhelming numbers depicted in zombie movies. I also thought of some kind of encounter card system to bring in 'surprise' zombies that would appear very close to the heroes or hamper the heroes' progress somehow (gun jams, stumbles, etc.).

But, that's something for another time.