This blog is an attempt to keep me on track as I steadily work on my plan to build a local community for Freebooter’s Fate, the fantasy pirate skirmish game by Freebooter Miniatures. While convincing people to play a game is always difficult, this game has some additional barriers to entry:

• Availability: This is a game made in Germany, consisting mostly of hand-sculpted miniatures that are cast in metal. With the current instability around ordering to the United States from abroad and the apparent lack of a US distributor, getting releases is a bit complicated. With individual miniature prices at around €14,50 (currently $16.86 as of posting), this makes it a hard sell to a lot of people, even though you only need between 4-6 miniatures for a full-sized game. There’s also enough items that you need to play that are specific to the game and aren’t easily replicable – the Game cards (including hit location, fate cards, Loas, and equipment), Boat deck, Equipment & Loas deck, and Shadows deck are all needed to have all of the game’s mechanics available.
• Theme: Pirates are cool, and fantasy pirates are cooler. Unfortunately, it is an incredibly narrow niche for a game, so trying to convince others to play requires them to buy-in to the conceit. There’s also some themes in the background of the game that I’ll end up writing about because I am incapable of not critically analyzing anything I enjoy.
• Resources: English-language resources for Freebooter’s Fate are few and far between. The Compañero 2.0 is an excellent crew building resource, but the English version is still being updated and corrected. The books are available on Wargame Vault as PDFs, but print versions of the latest Tales of Longfall books don’t exist in English quite yet and – as someone who likes having books for table reference – is a bit of a bother. There’s even an untranslated book for Campaigns, which I haven’t quite managed to take a look at yet.
  • For anyone who doesn’t speak German: select Einstellungen (the sixth link on the landing page) and change Deine Sprache to English. I’m also helping to correct the English rules information, so updates to that will inevitably be posted here as part of the project.
• Terrain: A good amount of terrain with verticality that fits the theme can be hard to come by. Amazons in particular require jungle terrain to really feel like they’re competitive or fun to play.
• Out of Production Items: While this is something that happens to every game, there’s a few items that are out of production that I would like more of. The standout introductory scenario, Attack of the Zombie Octopuses, does not actually have any miniatures currently available. There’s also some tokens that I would love to have more of, including ammo counters and Numskull tokens.
• Metric: As I am in the US, many of my gaming peers are somewhat skeptical of using centimeters. This is a small issue, but it’s a barrier that needs to be acknowledged when trying to get others to play.

There are a ton of barriers in my way, so I plan to tackle them bit-by-bit. I’ve already primed and started painting my initial demo crews, I have access to a bunch of high-quality terrain at my local gaming shop (who will get a shoutout as soon as I feel okay to let people know I have a blog), and I am dedicated to getting through my backlog enough to attract interest to this game.

Hobby Progress

I started a blog. I also told people why this game is a hard sell, which is probably not a great way to get people interested, but I’m a natural pessimist so I may as well be honest.