Blood and Plunder First Sea Battle

Spanish Guarda Costa Sloop Isabella vs Pirate Sloop Albatross

Now that Kati and I have become competent in the land rules for Blood and Plunder we decided to give the ship combat a whirl.
As I had mentioned in a previous post the ship combat adds a game on top of a game.  The ships are treated in the rules as giant moving structures for rules purposes but with the addition of wind, movement, cannons, crewing guns, rigging, repairing etc it is a lot of new mechanics.

First up are my Spanish forces. We played with 150 point forces and made our ships look identical with 2 medium cannons, 4 light cannons, and 2 swivel guns each. While this may not be as exciting it was a good way to test the water with this whole ship thing.
 I immediately felt the limitations of my sloop (Nuestra Senora Isabella) when building my force.   Each deck of a ship can hold a maximum of 2 units, and with the sloop only having 2 decks I was limited to 4 units total. I ended up with an experienced captain, 2 units of 6 trained militia, and 2 units of 4 trained marineros.

We joked about how overcrowded the decks of my ship looked once loaded.  I gave the medium guns to a militia unit and the light guns to a marinero unit.

Kati's pirates on The Albatross on the other hand had only 3 units and an experienced captain.  7 flibustiers, 4 marineros, and 4 enfants perdus.

We then jokes at how empty her ship looked.  She gave her flibustiers 2 light guns and the medium guns. The enfants got 2 light guns as well.

We set up the simplest scenario we could find.  Two ships going with the wind starting parallel to each other.  Just deep blue water made the board a snap to make!

I started the game using my captains broadside ability to fire all my guns at once.  While it looked cool for the pictures I missed completely.

The Albatross responded in kind with a single light cannon.  It hit the Isabella doing 1 damage to my hull killing a man and damaging my rigging with a lucky hit.

She tried to repeat her luck with the rest of her cannon but lucky for me they all fell short.

Another broadside saw minimal damage.

The Albatross was definitely sailing more aggressive and quickly closed in on the Isabella.  At this point I had finally repaired my rigging and was back up to speed.

The Isabella takes another hit.

The Isabella responds with a swivel.  The Albatross ignores it and continues to close.

The Albatross details a devastating broadside knocking out a light gun, killing 3 men and slamming my hull for 6 damage.

While much harder to picture we begin exchanging small arms fire in between reloading the cannons.

The Isabella deals a deadly volley!

The small arms fire continues.  Surprisingly my men got the upper hand and Kati's captain and flibustiers ended up ducking for cover.

While a close shot the effects were were minimal.

The ships continue to close.

The Albatross takes another well aimed shot to the hull.

The games ended on turn six. The turn consisted of more small arms fire leaving the decks a lot emptier than they began.  With this being the end we tried to calculate who won.  Amazingly we had equal amounts of strike dice, equal damage on our ships AND had killed an equal amount of men.  It was a perfect draw.

The game started out a bit slow during the long range cannon duels.  While slow we both agreed that it made sense.  Once we got in close though the game picked up fast and felt like a rush that whole time.  Each time a gun went off we both held our breath which is rare in a miniature game as we have played so many. So kudos to Firelock Games for making a miniature that keeps you on the seat of your pants. the stat cards for the ships were another element that we liked. We came anyway REALLY enjoying the game and we can not wait to try again with a different setup.