Legends of the High Seas - the ship

For a month or so now my friend Rob has been trying to get me keen on playing a pirates miniature game. Of course he never needs to try too hard to convince me to play a new game system as i love toy soldiers. Legends of the High Seas not ony allows you to create a pirate crew and fight it out on land but also on the sea.

This of course means that you need a ship. this means build one or buy one, building a ship from scratch seamed a tad time sapping and buying a ship that would work for 28mm figs looked expensive. wondering which way i should proceed i found some posts on TMP;the miniatures page talking about people using the pyrate range of mega blok ships and converting them. Now a few years back i remembered seeing some of these ships in local toy stores so i decided to take a trip and see if i could find any. As is often the way when you really want something i coulldnt find any. Next i checked e-bay - lots of choices but once you add in shipping well over $150 a ship (which is a little much for a plastic ship im going to have to pull apart and refit to make it work for gaming). Feeling a tad down and thinking i was going to have to part with some serious wargaming spending money i looked at Trademe (New Zealands version of E-bay) and found one ship. It was a cool looking undead ship covered in bone and with broken decking and three huge silly looking cannons - oh yeah and it lighted up when you pressed a button - it wasnt perfect but it was only $40. I went and picked it up this morning.

The first thing i did was strip back all of the unnecessary pieces (bones ect). This left me with this nice hull. Lots of work to do but a nice starting point. I need to buy some cannons, no idea where ill get them from at the moment, im thinking 6 per side in two bays of 3 - obviously ill need to rebuild the areas where these are mounted but im looking forward to this piece. I have a plan of allowing areas of the ship to be removable so that fights on the ship can take place in several locations and not just on the main deck. I plan to have the Captains cabin, the cannon hold and a section of the brig (this may end up being impractical but time will tell). Im also going to have to make new masts and a new crows nest - its impossible to get rid of the skeleton bone pieces from these pieces without destroying them in the process. This probally sounds like a pile of work and it may be but as i wont have a pirate crew till the end of the year i have time to work on it. :)

If anyone out there reading this has tried a similar conversion of a Mega Blok ship id love to hear from you about how you went about it.



the pieces removed: