Blood and Plunder Pirates: Indios y Lanceros

This post originally appeared on the Analogue Hobbies Painting Challenge.

Just a handful of figures this week as I make the first dent into the Blood and Plunder Kickstarter package I received a few weeks ago.

After visiting the fort at St. Augustine and watching the first season of Black Sails, I decided to go with a Spanish crew to face off against my opponent's English sea dogs. I'm excited to get in some games of Blood and Plunder (their example game videos convinced me to back the project), and I was thrilled with the ships, dice, coins, cards and rulebook I got from the Kickstarter. The figures on the other hand aren't quite up to snuff.

From a distance I think they'll look great. I appreciate the variety of poses and ethnicities, but there's just something off about them. I'm chalking it up to the conversion of 3D renders to physical metal minis. I love chunky models like Mark Copplestone's, and I've even had some success with model's that were either created as 3 ups or 3D rendered (the Perry and Fireforge plastic figures for example), but these Blood and Plunder figures are both overly large and have a lack of detail. Features are indistinct, hands are tiny, and clothing ripples and wrinkles react strangely to washes. They're just... odd. Not terrible, but different from what I'm used to.

Lanceros, spear armed Spanish troops

Indios, native islanders put to work
defending Spanish outposts in the New World.

Despite my reservations about the figures, I did have some unexpected success with some Vallejo paints. Using the paints and instructions from the Vallejo Leather and Wood paint set, the deck planking of the bases came out better than I'd hoped.

I also did a quick paint up of an Imperial Assault figure as we're sharing the burden of getting our game master's set finished up.

All told that's 8 pirates and 1 medical droid for 45 points by my calculations.