Thursday, August 14, 2014

Cards for Sharp Practice

The game in the previous post was the first outing for my spiffing hand made deck of cards for Sharp Practice on the Frontier. For those of you not familiar with Too Fat Lardies games, most of them are card 
Grasp the Nettle
driven. A deck is made up with cards for the various units and Big Men plus various other things, which creates the battle field friction instead of a ploddingly predictable I go, you go turn sequence. 

Water
Bonus Cards can be added (or in Sharp Practice are in a separate Bonus Deck) to add flavour and recreate scenario or theater specific things like running out of ammunition, or bonus shooting or whatever. There is of course the always present turn end, called the  Tea Break card in I Ain't Been Shot, Mum or Tiffin in Sharp Practice.

I have used just sheets of cards (perforated cards from the name badges purchased for Hotlead) with hand written legends on them, but that's not very pretty.
Ammunition



Imperial Blinds Move
So during the winter and spring I had spent a lot of time on Google Images seeking out graphics and making

my cards up in Microsoft Word, a 3x3 table on a standard sheet of paper. I then photographed all of my Big Men, thinking instead of unsightly ID numbers etc. the picture on the card would tell you  which figure was 
Tiffin
Bugle Call
active. Unfortunately a lot of the Pathan Big Men look surprisingly familiar!

I did make up two new Bonus cards for the Pathan side since they were lacking in flavour.





Ghazi -playing this card allows one group to charge into Fisticuffs with Aggression.
Ghazi card


Jezzailichi- play this card to have a sniper take a shot at a Sahib. Roll to hit the closest British Big Man.
Jezzailichi card
I also gave the Pathans their own Sharp Practice card, allowing an extra volley of musket/rifle fire.

8 comments:

  1. Nice idea with the pictures.

    "Unfortunately a lot of the Pathan Big Men look surprisingly familiar!"

    How did you solve this problem?

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    Replies
    1. Number the cards and then have a sketch map showing where the BMs were.

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  2. Nice work! Good idea to use images from the period. I did something similar with my SP deck.

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    Replies
    1. It helps with the period atmosphere. All but one card are images from India and the NWF as well. I printed all mine grey scale though. Sepia tone would use up too much colour ink.

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  3. Pretty cool. Looking forward to seeing more of your work.

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  4. Absolutely splendid and very atmospheric!

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  5. HI! You've great looking troops. Is there any way of dropping you a line to ask you about your adaption of Sharp Practice?

    ReplyDelete
  6. Thanks.
    I've pretty much explained all my adaptations here on the blog.

    ReplyDelete