Dreadfleet

Yarrrgh!

It's Pirate time! My mum got me 'Dreadfleet' last xmas and whilst I had put the ship together, last night at the Kirriemuir Wargames club was the first night I had the rules out of the box.

The quality of the stuff in this game is incredible. I'm not going to be painting them to a display standard, however. It's a standalone game, for playing games with. So I'm going to paint it to a decent tabletop standard. I had managed to get the pieces that we needed undercoated before the club so we had a good start!

After some deliberation about set up and some drooling over the nice gaming mat + glossy book, we had a run through the first couple of tutorial scenarios in the rulebook.

The game flowed really well and despite GW's trademark loads of dice, the mechanics worked quite well.

So far I think Dreadfleet is a shaping up to be a good game with a simple rule set but tactical play. It's a shame that more people haven't taken to it. From this minimal amount of experience I think that the random element might be its undoing. Sometimes it feels like a ship takes tons of damage but won't sink and other times two shots are enough. Now I'm not saying this isn't totally unrealistic but random damage coupled with the Fate deck means that sometimes even though you've got the upper hand things can quickly go wrong. Perhaps this adds more balance to the game but when you're making the right choices only to lose out to bad luck it can be frustrating. Having said that it's the same in most wargames, sometimes your luck just fails you.

It has spurred my painting on, the heldenhammer is started and its basecoat is drying as i type.

back to the brushes..