Christy is a big pirate fan.  She likes pirates the way I like Sumerians.  The whole pirate setting just appeals to her.

So for her birthday, I've decided to get her some pirate miniatures.  I've ordered a game called (strangely enough) "Pirates!" that is supposed to be good fun, and I have some Old Glory and Foundry pirate figures on the way.  I had originally planned to get the Foundry "Cutthroats&Ne'er do wells" pack from my FLGS, but they didn't have the right pack.  I was able to get more figures and spend less money by picking up just the Foundry pack I knew Christy liked, and some Old Glory "deck hands" to round out the crew.

The "Pirates!" game comes with two gunboat sized vessels, but I'm already planning how to build a larger sloop or maybe even frigate sized ship.  After all, what's a pirate without a ship, right?

The only lame part about this surprise is that I had to tell Christy in advance, since I'll be painting the figures, and she's bound to notice.  I also know she's particular about miniatures, so I wanted to make sure that I didn't order something she wouldn't like.  It would have been 100x cooler if I could have pulled this off in secret, but it was not to be.

A for combat rules, if "Pirates!" is fun, I'll certainly use it, at least for ship to ship.  For man to man, I'm very tempted to use the LoTR Strategy Battle Game, since it's just about perfect in feel - good, exciting melee and effective but not overpowering shooting.

I tried some Chain Reaction in a solo game to see if I could make it work for pirates, but that game is a firepower game, not a melee game, and it really felt wrong.  In Chain Reaction, gunfire is deadly enough that figures will be quite careful to avoid even being shot at, and that ruins the swashbuckling feel.  Which is a shame, since I love CR and want to use it for everything, but no sense in using a dremel to hammer in a nail, right?

I hope to at least get a bare bones crew and ships painted up before Christy's birthday, which is about a month away.  Pirate crews shouldn't be that hard to paint, since they're mostly wearing puffy white shirts, brown paints and a colored head rag.  The captain will need more attention of course, but that's fine, there aren't many figures like him. :-)