A game of Dreadfleed, 3vs3 ships

It’s easy to forget the ridiculous chaos of what a Dreadfleet game can be if you haven’t played if for a while. I brought the game down to the club to have a secondary game to play after the Flames of War battle played with David – and ended up introducing Joakim to Dreadfleet. This was a regular 3vs3 ship skirmish meant to introduce the rules, I kept to managing the Fate deck, damage cards and wind  gauge as well as teaching the rules while David and Joakim had a go.

The Grand Alliance used the Heldenhammer, Grimnir’s thunder and the Swordfysh. The Dreadfleet was made up of the Black Kraken, Skabrus and the Bloody Reaver.
Initially it looked as if it would be a very short game, with heavy fog affecting the cannons and limiting them to fire at short range only. This made both sides seek boarding action and melee fighting kicked off the battle. Soon though the fog lifted, ships tore away from each other and cannonades mixed with whacky Fate deck events had ships on both sides brutally beaten up, burning, drifting and slowly capsizing.

The Black Kraken hunted down Grimnir’s thunder in multiple boarding actions and finally wiped out the entire dwarf crew. Skabrus was rammed and sunk by the Swordfysh while the two capitol ships went at each other – Heldenhammer banging the deck of the Bloody Reaver with its steam powered figurehead and both captains dueling as the crew tore the ships apart.

Tiny dirigibles and cogs swirled the big ships and exchanged shots, and amidst it all a Sea Giant was spawned and under the control of the Dreadfleet it helped in sinking the Heldenhammer. Though the Alliance captain had managed to slay the Dreadfleet captain in the duel before going under with his own ship.

This had the Bloody Reaver, a Sea giant, a Dreadfleet cog and the Black Kraken all swarm the Swordfysh and rip it apart. The final boarding action saw the Swordfysh crew wiped out completely. The game reminded me that I still need to paint the damn terrain for this game, I think I will need to find some kind of airbrush solution to it since it will speed up the painting tremendously and allow me to focus on the detail work over base coating and layering the cliffs.

Dreadfleet all ships finished - group pictures

To celebrate that all the ships are at long last finished (and that I only have the terrain left to paint) I took some group pictures to show the collection. Not the best quality pictures but it's hard to take these kind of photos and get the light and sharpness right with my camera - which works better for closeups. But at least you get the idea of how things may look.

Dreadfleet Auxiliary vessels finished

The tiny Auxiliary vessels, (cogs, dirigible and dragon) are all painted up. I tried painting the sails and hulls of the tiny ships to make them resemble their parent ship as much as possible for easy identification on the table. They took a bit more time to paint than anticipated, despite their microscopic size and rough details they required some work to look decent. Probably most happy with the dragon which wasn't that exciting and I feared that my lack of enthusiasm would affect the paintjob.