Pirates of the Out of Print Game

I'm a little disappointed in myself for the lack of updates but I suppose this crazy world has contribute to that more than I am willing to admit to myself. I found myself going back to work a lot sooner than I anticipated. Even though it is a short walk home for me, the summer heat is such that I find myself completely exhausted once I do get home. There has been other personal events that has also contribute, but at least those events have the benefit to potentially being interesting story for a blog, maybe. Another blocker to my ability to update was my desire to only make post that showed some progress oppose to just being about my thoughts, ideas or plans. After reexamining that desire this week, I've come to the conclusion that I'm better off at least writing about something oppose to not writing at all. I have a lot of stories I want to tell so anything that helps me practice writing in general is a benefit to me at this point. My desire to only write post when I had made some kind of progress came from the frustration I felt at having post after post that just deals with concepts. I lost sight of the value of putting my thoughts and ideas on paper... um on virtual paper. I had forgotten that writing on concepts not only help keep the ideas fresh in my mind but the process itself of writing blog posts has inspired new ideas before. With that in mind I want to write about a new game I've invested in.

Pirates Constructible Strategy Game is a game that was publish from 2004 to 2008. It is a strategy game that straddles the line between being a collectible card game (CCG) like Magic: the Gathering and miniature wargames like what I usually cover here. It came in random packs that you punch out cardboard pieces to make the ships(I say cardboard but I suppose its more like plastic as it feels similar to credit cards). I never played or collect it back in the day but I did have friends that were big fans of it. I don't think I got into it because I was getting tired of CCGs in general as well as I don't like the random aspect in a miniature wargame. The random aspect was also why I didn't get into the first version of Monsterpocalypse. I also wasn't as excited about cardboard models as I was with metal/plastic ones. Which is a little strange as at the time I dislike painting and would have preferred to have prepainted models. That preference has completely swap since then.

So why am I bringing up a out of print collectible game? Two Fridays ago a friend was showing me his Pirates collection and that got me thinking about and looking into the game. I couldn't stop thinking about it over that weekend so I ordered some packs on the Sunday. I figure the price was just too good for something I had so many uses for. I've already had ships on the mind off and on for a while now. In the last year or two I started assembling the ships in the Dreadfleet boardgame. I stop when I screwed up gluing together one of the 2 main ships in the game. It had 3 pieces that needed to be glued together and it was really awkward trying to hold all 3 pieces together. So I glued two pieces together first but that meant that the third piece no longer fit. All 3 had to be glued together at same time. Even called Games Workshop for help but was told since the game was out of print, there was nothing they could do to help. Since that was one of the main ships, that killed my interest in finishing Dreadfleet. I still planned to go back to it. I had put 4 ships together and there were another 5 waiting to be assembled. On top of that I've been looking at Warlord Games miniature ship line. I think their line is in a similar scale as Dreadfleet so I could buy a box and either put the ships together as is or convert a few to be in the same high magic fantasy style as the Dreadfleet ships. I've also gotten a tip on how to fix my glue mistake that I haven't gotten around to trying (it work on a Chaos Giant model that I also misglued). In other words, I've been on the verge of having a miniature fleet collection for a while now.

A Pirates pack on Amazon averages about $10 each, guaranteeing 2 ships each. Some expansions were price much higher than that while other were cheaper. Not a bad price for miniatures I have a lot uses for. Since I've never played Pirates before, it would normally be a little risky investing into an out of print game that I might not like when I actually played it. But I can use the Pirates ships to expand the play ability of Dreadfleet. Of course I've never played Dreadfleet either. In the event that I don't like Dreadfleet either or the ships are too small for it, I can still use the ships the next time I run a miniature fantasy campaign game where I can put a major seafaring aspect to it. Also with me exploring running more pen and paper role-playing games with Pathfinder and others, I could use the ships in a pirate heavy theme campaign. Lastly failing all that, I plan on doing comic book style stories using miniatures here and that requires a large collection of as many different models as possible. I hope I end up enjoying the game but if I don't it will still be worth it to invest in it.

To make it more interesting for us, my friend and I decided to invest in different expansions. He stayed with the sets he already had packs for which was Spanish Main, Crimson Coast and Revolution. I went with South China Seas and Barbary Coast, which was probably a mistake given that South China Seas is one of the rare and most expensive sets for the game. For my first purchase I got 1 pack of South China Seas and 15 packs of Barbary Coast. The one China Seas pack was half of the cost of the 15 Barbary Coast! Here is a picture of some of the packs and one pic of my English ships.

After actually having a few ships assembled in person, I really love the looks of the ships. I will be playing my first game of Pirates and really of any war game in person today for the first since the pandemic started. Of course with masks and social distancing. I will be discussing more about Pirates in future posts. Whether it be as a collector or as a fan of the game will depend on my first few games. Until next time, stay safe.

The World We Live In

I finish moving at the beginning of the month. Since then I've been relaxing and getting used to the world we now find ourselves in. Needless to say the plans I had for after I had move are now completely out the window. It is kind of hard to get the motivation to work on hobby stuff when I don't know when I will get to play. In any case my art room/office still needs work to be used as intended. I need to rearrange the layout and buy new furniture so it can be a place I can always just sit down and work. So it will be a little while before I can get back to the miniature hobby. That and having to sort all my projects that got mix together in the moved. If I had to guess before I moved how many models I had, I would have been very very wrong. There is nothing like being tired of your moving and wondering if you can just toss that box in the corner that you haven't open in years in the trash. Only to open it up and realize no you can't because it has over $200 worth of miniatures in it, some of which is nicely painted.

I normally have a beginning of the year update that explains what my plans for the year are. I really struggled with it this year because I found myself listing out the games I plan to work on without being able to show any kind of progress on them. And that got to me. So I've decide to do each game with it own article after I've done some kind of modelling progress with it. This might prevent me from talking about some projects but I will feel better if I have something to show off while talking about a game. I also had 3 other projects I wanted to talk about in that failed beginning of the year update. One was that I still wanted to do my 80s project and to put a deadline on me by announcing I will having something for it done by September. That's not happening now. I have a collection of miniatures I either got for it or I pick up for other reasons that fell apart and repurposed them for the 80s project. And while I can paint these miniature up, they are just a small amount to the number I models I need and we are in a time where my abilities to get models (and paint) are limited for the foreseen future. Until we get to some kind of normality I can't have a timetable on when I can release my 80's project. I also realize I shouldn't show off my progress on the models in the 80's project for storytelling purposes. If a new villain suddenly appears in the story, the shock of it is lost on the audience if you see me painting the guy up for a year before his appearance! So in the end I do still plan on doing the 80's project but I can't talk about it until I'm ready to start releasing it. The other two projects I wanted to talk about in January are also not happening! The projects were two very different podcasts. One was a podcast on Battletech and Gundam in a similar style to my War Journal podcast with a different friend. Being able to discuss and compare these two giant mech settings with a fellow fan would have been fun and eye-opening. The other podcast was me interviewing local artists. It would have force me to study art in a way I have never experience before and learn to come up with engaging questions to people I don't know. I miss doing podcasts and I now have easy access to equipment to make them again. However the pandemic shut those podcast projects down. I don't see recording podcasts as an option for at least a year and doing it online is not an option I want to take. I think the sound quality would be terrible and trying to setup an interview online with people I don't know is a headache I do not want.

I've talked a lot about what is NOT going to happen here, I should probably get into what I will be doing. Due to social distancing, these last few weeks I've turn to looking at pen and paper games. Most of my physical games have move online to the Roll20 web site. While working on transferring my paper character sheets into digital ones for Roll20, I was filled with ideas for games that I could run. I've been thinking about running a game for a while and converting characters to Roll20 feed into that. Eventually I got an idea for a massive game universe with Pathfinder that I love so much I had to do it. Unfortunately I'm limited on what I can say about it because there will be a twist that I want to be a surprise for the players. I envision 4 ways for the game to interact with this blog; 2 ways immediately and 2 way later down the road. The setting resembles Arthurian Myth with Olympian gods. In universe there are many stories about the gods the populace tells themselves and these stories changes depending on the region. Instead of just summarizing these stories, I will write them out into full stories and post them here. The first few stories will be ones that the player characters would have heard growing up. As the party adventures through the world, they will come across both new stories and vastly different versions of stories they already knew. At higher levels and with the party interacting more with the gods themselves, the players will start to learn about the actual source of those stories, what the real version of those stories were. Some of these stories will be important to the campaign. Others are just there to enrich the world. I will post all those stories here so the players will have a place to read them as well anyone else who is interested in reading about a mythology I just made up.

The second way Pathfinder will make an appearance here will be a narrative version of each game session. I won't post anything from the game sessions itself because I don't think it is fair for the people involve and there are some thing that should just stay private. What I will do is take a summary of what happen during the session (in-character stuff only) and make a narrative version of it. If I do it right, they should sound like classic Dungeon & Dragons novels like Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms. Once I have a few posted I will make a page dedicated to Pathfinder so all the myth stories and game session stories will be all in one place. Once the real world goes back to normal and I can meet with friends in person, I will have a need to buy and paint a new range of miniatures. I've been interested in painting miniatures for role playing games for a while and running Pathfinder in a physical place will give me a reason to do just that. If the game last that long, I will post pictures of any models I make for the game. Some of those pictures might have to wait until the party face them in the game first. Lastly, one of my players is also a war gamer. If everything goes will with my campaign, the two of us could come up with a way to use Warhammer or another war game to play in my setting. Might even get to a point where his character leads an army and the result of the battle affects the Pathfinder campaign. But those are ideas for a much later date.

So, I'm back and Chaos Magic future will have a lot of tabletop role playing games in it. Beside the Pathfinder game I'm going to run, I still plan on writing those Flashback Storytime entries. My miniature hobby will make a return at some point. It is just that the menu is going to be role playing heavy for a while. Until next time, stay safe.

Fifty Shades of ... Red?

I haven't updated in a while and I hope I will get around to discussing why. Part of it was due to putting my hobby on hold due to medical issues and preparing to move to a new apartment. I won't be doing anything hobby related until after I fully move which is looking to be around the end of March or beginning of April. To keep from having the drought here last until then, I wanted to write an article about a new project idea I came up with before I had to give my hobby a break.

The idea is pretty simple. I want to try to paint a single large miniature in one color and have it still look good. Obviously to make it still be visually appealing I will need to use many different shades of that one color. That color being red. I haven't decide what model to use yet other than something larger than the standard 28mm, which is the scale for most of the games I play for normal sized troops. I immediately thought it would be some kind of demon as that made the most sense in my head for what this is going to look like. There are also a lot of choices when it comes to picking big demonic models in the industry. After putting a little thought into it, I wouldn't mind some kind of angelic model either, though that is far less common. The last time I was in a gaming store, I notice another very enticing option. There is a line of Dungeons and Dragons miniatures that come pre-primed and really for paint. I'm considering one of their dragons. It fits perfectly with what I'm trying to do with this project, both in size and price. Ironically, the model is suppose to be a White Dragon.

I do have some unpainted models that might work, though I had something a little larger in mind. I have Games Workshop's Demon Prince and Cockatrice models that I could use for this project, though I will need to convert the Cockatrice as it is missing a hand (it came that way). I've assembled them but I never got around to painting or priming them. They are a good option if I want to try this on the cheap side since I already own them. It is just that the more I think about it, the more I want to use something bigger. Here are what those models look like:

In any case, I will not be picking the model until right before I start this project in April. I plan on it being a long term project. And while I am historically been a slow painter, that is not the reason why I think this will take me a long time to finish. It is the paints themselves that is the roadblock. I'm surprised at how many different paints I actually have as I had gathered everything I own together to box them up for the move. If everything I had were red, then I would have the paints I need for this project. Unfortunately, this is all I own to work on this project with...

Just 5 bottles which include a bottle of white ink and white paint to make lighter reds. Also I have two bottles of the exact same shade of red(I brought the second bottle thinking it was a different shade as it look different). I'm going to need a lot more paint that I have to buy. Buying a bottle or two isn't too bad for me. Buying 15 to 20 is a different story. If I was a much better painter I could make do by mixing my reds with my other colors. But I'm not. I don't trust myself to be able to mix red with something else and have the result still be red, outside of white and black. I also don't trust myself to be able to remake the exact same color. By that I mean if I mix a color and run out before I finish what I was painting, I don't know if I could reproduce that color to finish. So I will be buying a new bottle of red paint every month for a while. I doubt I will actually use 50 different shades of red, but at the very least I will be going for at least 20. That's a brief look at my new project. I will have more to discuss about it and many other projects in April. Until then, take care.