I have been working on re-doing all of the ship cards in Blood Sweat & Iron over the last couple of months and I have finally finished them.
It has always annoyed me that I only had the one image on the cards no matter what the ship was, they were all the same using the image of a basic ironclad.
So I have been searching images in books and on the internet trying to design some simple images to use for all the different ships that were used in the American Civil War river battles.
I could not do every single image different to match every ship perfectly, for me it wasn’t possible, but what I did do was generalise the ships in the rules.
So an Ironclad will be an Ironclad with only a few variation’s, and a Paddlesteamer will be a Paddlesteamer again with only a few variation’s.
One or two images were taken from actual ship models but most are just done freehand by me, then many hours on Photoshop getting them looking how I wanted… hey these are not 100% accurate, not at all, but they do make the cards look a lot better than what they were, you will at least be able to see a ship is an ironclad or a paddlesteamer or even a ship with sails etc.
Now that these are done I will be uploading the new version of the rules, it contains all of the new ship data cards ready for you print our and use in your games of Blood Sweat & Iron.
So if you already own a copy Blood Sweat & Iron you can just download it again and then print out the new cards.
There are now 96 ship datacards in the rules, each one was redone with a new ship image added.
Below are a few sample pictures of the new cards.
Some Union ships.
Some Confederate ships.
What’s next for Blood Sweat & Iron?
Well I am looking at doing a small free add-on to allow you to personalise the ships that you use in your games, so that as they fight and survive and hopefully battles they will gain experience and the ships captain’s and crew will be able to use there experience that they get to buy skills to help them in their battles.
Come on over to my Discord server to chat about your games of Blood Sweat & Iron and show us some pictures of the battles, or show us some pictures of your ships, or just come and chat about the rules.
You will find the link to the server on the community tab at the top of the site.
