Setting Sail for Blood & Plunder

We are a little late to the game, as Blood & Plunder from Firelock Games was on kickstarter.com almost 3 years ago, but, we finally started. Better late than never! We did consider getting involved in the Kickstarter, there had many enticing stretch goals, however, the timing was bad (we had a nice backlog of Bolt Action miniatures that needed painting), coupled with the price and the idea of metal miniatures, we didn’t buy-in back then.

This fall though, we took the plunge, when we noticed they had introduced a cheaper two player bundle. After some deliberations, naturally we decided to go for the more expensive and expansive national starter bundles – pirates and Spanish.

What made us do this? Well we were interested from the beginning, but a few things changed. First, Firelock Games introduced the first expansion to the game via a second Kickstarter, proving the game was not just a one-off Kickstarter, but had enough players to continue development.

While we are still excited about the game, there were a few annoyances in receiving our plunder:

Missing foam insert and backing: Metal miniatures need to be handled more carefully than plastic miniatures on a sprue. Usually when receiving metal miniatures, they are protected by a foam insert making them less likely to bend.

Ship cards not all the same size: Judging by the different color as well as size this is probably (hopefully) an issue between the newer and older versions. But, it is annoying not to standardize cards, making it difficult to buy one set of appropriately sized plastic sleeves.

Nonresponsive customer service: We inquired about the availability of a unit & character card set and received no response via direct mail or the website form, so we ended up buying them from a 3rd party site. I am happy to write this off as a one off (we all know that happens with customer service), as people have generally praised Firelock Games customer service.

Honestly, none of the above takes anything away from the game, and we are excited to paint and play. However, they are signs that we are dealing with a smaller company than we are used to, and that comes at a (small) cost--in this case, the flair and packaging of the products.

This spring we are hoping to show off our progress towards our two factions in more detail and highlight some suitable terrain to go with it.

Until next time, adventure on!