Board Setup in Blood & Plunder

 

Late last year, I took part in a Blood & Plunder Campaign hosted over Tabletop Simulator. I found myself asking my opponent each week who would make the board for us to play on. Sometimes we ended up with an abstract board with very little on it and sometimes we played on a board where terrain and line of sight played a key role in tactical choices.

Blood & Plunder with an abstract TTS board.

Blood & Plunder with a board made by Discord user wlonk

I grew interested in trying to make boards for our games and our campaign organizer wlonk recommended a Bolt Action Terrain Layout Generator that could be adapted for playing Blood & Plunder.

I set to work right away making board after board for my games. I made adjustments along the way such as choosing terrain that would be proper for the 17th or 18th Century Caribbean rather than 20th Century Europe, but some of my boards were coming out one sided.

Blood & Plunder on a board generated with the Terrain Layout Generator

In one campaign game, I had the role of defender and the board I generated ended up being more like a siege where one side of the board had plenty of hard cover and structures while the other side was comparatively empty. As defender, I chose the side of the board with the most cover and consequently left my opponent out to dry. It was after this game that I realized there also needed to be a component of balance in my board making that didn't exist in the Terrain Layout Generator that I was using.

A nice looking, but deeply one-sided board for Blood & Plunder

I have been working on editing the Bolt Action Terrain Layout Generator for use in Blood & Plunder and will share the Blood & Plunder Board Generator in my next post.

In many of our Blog Posts we will identify the key Blunder and associated Peril:

BLUNDER: I learned how to generate nice boards for Blood & Plunder, determining where and how to place terrain elements to make a nice looking board. I however did not take into consideration balancing the board when creating it.

PERIL: My opponents ended fighting the piratical 17th century version of the landing at Gallipoli, a battle that they couldn't win and quickly soured the experience for them.




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