The game comes with a pair of longboats, a pair of small sloops, two towers, and a ton of cannon and pirate figures. In this post I'll concentrate on the work I've done on the longboats.
First up is an image of the longboat as it comes, and beside one on which I've already started work. The first thin I do is decide if I want to keep the sail, or remove it completely. Then I take a Dremel tool and carefully grind away the excess plastic bits from the deck of the boat. In the case of the one pictured, I am removing the sail completey, so the stand for the mast has got to go.
Next begins the process of planking over the plastic with a wooden deck. I fully admit that I am a bit of an obsessive on this, as I use wooden coffee stirrers (available free at many fine coffee shops across the planet), and individually cut them to size and shape. I then superglue them onto the plastic deck below. The photo below shows a before and after on longboat where I've decided to keep the sail.
Here's a series of photos showing the planking process on a boat where the mast stand was removed:
After that all the boats need is a pretty quick and easy paint job. Most consist simply of a brown basecoat, a darker brown wash and a lighter drybrush. On some I get a little more creative.
Here's a pair of shots of a completed longboat with sail beside one in its original condition:
And here are a pair of completed longboats, one with sail and one without:
Lastly, a longboat with some crew, to show the scale. The figures are from Heroscape: the 10th Regiment of Foot from Wave 8
. All I did to them was rebase them on 25mm round bases as the original Heroscape bases are oversized.
In the next post, I'll go into how I convert the sloops. They make perfect "small" ships for Legends of the High Seas.
'Til next time.