In my quest to find Pirate rules I like, I've ordered "Blood & Swash / Thunder & Plunder", which is a single book with two games in it.  The first one is a "Swashbuckling" game, where each player gets a half dozen pirates or so and fights it out, usually in a bar or the deck of a ship.  The second one is geared towards raiding parties with dozens of figures.  I can't help but think of Sid Meyer's "Pirates!" game, which is great fun.

At any rate, "Thunder" appears to be an early version of "Battles by G.A.S.L.I.G.H.T.", which caught my attention a few months ago, and seems like the right way to do small battles.  B&S/T&P only costs about $9us, as opposed to over $40 to get into "Battles by..." (the basic book and supplement), and while I'm sure the newer rules have many refinements, B&S/T&P seems like a good way to get my pirates out and fighting.  (Ok, techinically they're my wife's pirates, but who's keeping score?)

Another nice thing is that these rules have period variants included for everything from Ancients to Civil War, and rumor has it they work just fine for WWII skirmish as well.  Since I'd noticed the same effect with GW's "LoTR" game system, it will be interesting to see how they compare to each other.  I'm quite fond of the LoTR game, so we'll see how things stack up.

Anyone who actually follows this blog might be asking, "Why not use Chain Reaction?  Isn't that your favorite skirmish game?"  Well, that's a good question.  And the answer is that I've never been happy with CR's handling of settings that aren't dominated by firepower.  Maybe that's just because I've never seen "Black Powder Battles" (CR for musket era) played "correctly", but in my solo games, it just feels wonky.  So as much as I adore CR, I'll stick to using it for "Cowboys and Later".  So far, I've been using WAB or DBA for ancients, but I'd love to do some LoTR with my WAB armies.  And if B&S/T&P is as much fun as people say, maybe I'll start using my WAB armies for that instead.

Of course, that would actually mean that I'd have to get off my lazy ass and finish my WAB guys.  It's depressing to see how long I've been working on that project, so I'm not going to think about it. :-)