¡Bitzkrieg!

Somehow it’s both funny and sad – I wrote about my starter set of Man O’ War beforeI could write on my acquisitons for a similar wonderful game, The Uncharted Seas – even though I got those weeks and months before Man O’ War… well, it might be forgiven; I longed for Man O’ War for years, while The Uncharted Seas are a great game, but also a fairly new game.

The Uncharted Seas is/are, in some way, impossible to imagine without Man O’ War; I cannot help but think that the people at Spartan Games took a good look at the community and wondered what product could bring them customers and fans. And there is a large community of Man O’ War fans out there complaining that there’s no more support for their favourite game (and also, though few would admit, that the miniatures of 1993-95 are charming, but fairly outdated). It’s the same process that brought us Mantic Games with Dwarf King’s Hold (more or less a HeroQuest-style Dungeon Crawl) or their Abyssal Dwarves, which are clearly aimed at hapless Chaos Dwarf gamers out there, who are no longer supported by Games Workshop in any sensible way…

Mind you, this is not a bad thing, quite on the contrary. To my point of view, the only thing that counts are

• Great Miniatures (best with good conversion potential – you know I love that)
• Good Rules (which would start with rules I can memorize – no easy feat)
• Great Miniatures (you really should count that twice)

Companies like Mantic or Spartan Games (to name just those two – if we come to S/F and Fantasy Skirmish games, there are a lot more) fill in an important role. Some fierce competition here is great for us fans: we get new miniatures and Games Workshop might come to the conclusion that they have to give their best to remain the Number 1. There are some signs that this really happens – like a new line of Chaos Dwarves to come from Forge World, or the fact that they will bring out the Tomb Kings next – something which might be connected to the highly successful Mantic Undead line…

But I am wandering from the subject. We were talking about the Uncharted Seas. So here’s what I got via eBay between November last year and February: the Rulebook, a Starter Set for the Iron Dwarves and another one for the Thaniras Elves. Actually I also got a blister with another Thaniras Elves ship, which might be presaged in the lower left corner – just couldn’t place it right when doing those photos.

I will talk on the miniatures separately, it would take too much time now. So here’s a first peek at the rulebook, one sturdy softcover of 106 pages.

I like the general layout of the book. It’s full colour with some pristine diagrams and some nice artwork. The rules – as far as I read them so far, I got little time for that at the moment, sad as it may be – seem to be clear and easy to understand.

It’s also great that quite exactly half of the book is devoted to background. There are four to six pages to each of the races of the Uncharted Seas, including all the stats and rules needed to play them.

Spartan Games, I might add, was kind enough to include most of this data into its download section. Still it’s good to have it in the book as well. I am highly sceptical towards material available on the homepage of the publisher only – remember too well when Games Workshop remodelled their homepage which almost completely made all the old content unavailable ever since.

There are also some great photospreads inside, like this one showing Dragon Lords (more or less equaling Games Workshop’s High Elves) attacking some Imperial Human town.

There are loads of photos of miniatures. Mostly the ships, but there are also several miniatures of people in there. Obviously Spartan Games plans (or planned – they are doing Dystopian Wars mostly these days) to put out some Skirmish game based on Uncharted Seas… I would love to see that coming.

In the way I got it, the rulebook included three extra goodies: A reference sheet (called “the rules at a glance sheet”) one small sheet of counters and one sheet of templates.

Both the counters and the templates are included – in slightly different form – in the rulebook, too. They are all also available for download on the Spartan Games homepage (Quick Reference sheet, Tokens, Templates).

I am not that happy about the Token sheet. It’s small and its printed on glossy, but terribly thin paper. Not good for daily use for sure. There’s not even a perforation there.

As I have no playing experience, I cannot tell if there’s enough tokens on the sheet anyway. I will probably print my own tokens, glue them to sturdy cardboard and then cut them out.

It’s similar with the templates that are constantly needed for playing. Again the sheet is printed on nice, glossy paper, and there’s even perforation this time, but the paper is far too thin.

Besides, there are only the three movement templates on the sheet, but for playing, you need four more that are only provided in the book or online. Again I will print them out on my own, sturdy them with cardboard and cut them up myself. Even though it will be a real pain for me to cut out those circular templates… never been good at those…

Next: Thaniras Elves!