LotHS preview- putting the Demo together.

 Spent alot of today figuring out how the heck to put this 12 foot by 4 foot , 10 player Legends of the High Seas game together and transport all this stuff back and forth from Adepticon,  Not only does the set up need to playable, but it needs to be portable. Last time around (2011) I  basically hauled half my basement out there including two heavy 4 x 4 framed tabletop and and enough set ups to run
all the games.  This was not a pleasant experience (the moving and setup that is,  the tournament itself was awesome) and it definitely wasnt "portable" by anyone with any common sense measure.

 Telling myself, "I'll never do that again" had alot to do with the fact of why this game hasn't happened in the last two years outside of some family and work related issues. Because games like these requires alot terrain and scenery to set the mood (and I sold my Pickup earlier in the winter in exchange  for a more family freindly SUV.) My options to pull this off were somewhat limited. Deciding to run the event "Big Game" style as many smaller events are rather than a conventional tournament was step one, Step two was designing a board with great terrain that was easily moveable was the other.

I was sweating using the blue felt, worried about how it would look, but once I got it set up and saw the nice color contrast, I was quite happy.

Since one of the biggest requests in the long interim between these events was Pirate Ships- in a Pirate game, of course. I wanted the Ship to be part of the scenario and not just static scenery. While incorporating a "boarding action" type scenario wasn't in the cards for this type of game, One ship and some Water was.

 Using 3, 3 x 3 foam boards for the land mass and huge piece of Royal blue felt as a table cover gives me the nice color of some Caribbean water and huge land playing area with 1 foot boarder in which to Sail the ship for table end to end...which is 16 feet from dock to dock. 2 of my players crews will be fortunate enough to take The Griffon round end of the board , letting off a broadsides at their opponents along the way...of course Artillery goes both ways and there are 10 live guns on the board as well..Sinking the Ship and /or destroying some of the fortifications are part of the scenario. The cannon balls will be flying I am sure.

While I only got the Fort section or 1/3 of the table set up today it was only because I had some painting to do on the bases of both the other sections and they are drying. We are play testing the scenario Tuesday evening...I'll have the whole thing set up tomorrow.  I built quite a bit of stuff for this event, and borrowed the rest from some of my Pirates in arms, Rich and Tim, the latter of which is helping me run the event.

I am going to finish the full fortress to match the gatehouse section at some point, as you can imagine its quite the endeavor, having Rich's original pirate castle still kicking around is always a good thing.

In the end while there is alot of foam and plaster and a whole lot of scenery for the miniature to navigate, unlike last time is all portable in plastics tubs in the SUV with foam boards being very move friendly. While I will probably pour a nice resin water section on a permanent table here, the blue felt works well for the convention type setting.  While we do have a mish mash of various peoples terrain here, when I did the initial set up I was impressed with how much it reminded me of Havana from Assassins Creed Black Flag and that was pretty neat. looking forward to showing off the full setup over the course of the week. I am excited for this event, the players are in for one heck of a ride. Best of all I am not sweating moving the stuff around at all..which means if I can keep moving along on that track we might see these games alot more often!.