Fjord Serpents - Karvi

   As a general rule I'm avoiding buying games on Kickstarter* as for the price a lot of them go for makes buying them blind and without knowing it is definitely being posted to you just seems too big a risk. However, when I saw the Fjord Serpents game on Kickstarter a few years back, I was in before I'd even thought about it. This became one of those Kickstarters that I was fairly sure wasn't going to deliver once the manufacturer they had lined up couldn't meant the quality they wanted for the price and they had to start looking elsewhere. I'm fairly sure the ships and figures were supposed to be plastic with resin hulls but I might be wrong, while what we got were resin hulls with 3d printed parts and crew.

*which means I've missed some amazing games that then haven't gone to retail

   For me the Dark Ages, or Early Medieval period as it should now be called, is just the most fascinating part of history and something I am always drawn back to, and a Viking longship game just had to be bought.

   Then when the backer kit came out and the rules were made a bit more open, it became fairly obvious that a "standard" game would be about 3 to 4 ships, I looked to add another pair so I can have two fleets of 3, before realising that those two ships cost more than just buying a second starter set - with the only loss by doing this of not having a the varied prows that come in the single ship sets.

   It's the crew that have completely blown my mind. As the warfare is basically land warfare but on water, with the crew doing the fighting in shieldwalls and not the ships (like in Napoleonic naval warfare for example), I knew I'd be painting some, but each box comes with 322 figures (on stands of 3-4), this might take some time. I've decided to give the crew more of a gist of a paint job rather than spending loads of time, I've based in brown, highlighted in brown then done quick layers in a limited palette with the idea being they look about right as long as you don't look too closely. This is going to be a long project.

   This test ship is a Karvi, the smallest war ship in the game, which has 32 crew. I've gone for the plain red sail you see in a lot of art online, but I plan to vary sails in the future.

Thanks for reading