Every year, on the day after Christmas, the family gets together for a "game day". Sometimes it's just board games, but normally we like to have some sort of miniatures style game, or something like it.
The Rage Track game was an after Christmas Game Day game, for example.
This year we decided on (stupidly last minute) a Pirates game, after it turned out I didn't have enough flight stands for a Starfighter game. So it was a rush to get something completed in time. It's always a rush, no matter what I do in advance, it always turns out like that.
Anyway, I settled on using the Fistful of Lead: Starfighters! rules for the game. They're an awesome set of rules, and contain a section on larger ship combat. I reasoned that could be used for sailing ships as well, and I was right. But leaving out some of the more detailed things (know your audience and all that...), changing names (lasers to cannons, etc) and adding in a few of my own rules, I suddenly had a game!
I created ship sheets for the game. Eight light, medium, and heavy ship cards. Each unique. I left off crews and captains for complexity reasons. And a Quick Reference Sheet, a QRS, or a Q Arrrr S in this case!
The name of this game would be The Great Booty Grab! (because GBG is Gano Brothers Games)
Then I created 32 Event cards. Event cards aren't part of the FfoL rules system, but I find them invaluable for solo or co-op gaming. In this case, it was every man for themselves, but I wanted the events to add some unpredictability to what would be an otherwise straight fight game.
The Event cards also gave us a way to advance the turn track.
The pirates have 12 turns to grab the booty before the British Navy arrives! It advances after every turn, or when an even card tells it to.
My brother built that exceptional tiki god / sun and island tracker. It's really impressive on the table, and it works great.
He also made pirate hats for everyone! The names are randomly generated from a list on a "pirate party napkin". The glitter was a terrible, but endlessly amusing, mistake. Should have at least sealed them, but there wasn't time. But, the game wasn't at my house, so I'm ok with it!
The table set up for the game! After the rules, sheets, and cards, I made the islands. They aren't hard, just time consuming. I rather like them, and think they came out nicely.
Card ships from Pirates of the Spanish Main were used for the ships.
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| The two large islands in the center were the Treasure Islands |
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| That island has a pool and a waterfall! |
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| Kraken! |
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| Dad was being perpetually harassed by the sea monster. |
In the end everyone had a fun time. Dad won with 11 Gold pieces he recovered from the island, Eric was second with 8, all of which he stole by boarding other ships.
It played really well. I was pretty impressed with it, and amazed by it considering we pulled the whole thing together from scratch in 2 days.
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