At long last I’ve finished the massive galleon! I’ve had it since I got my NPBtL Kickstarter package 15 months ago and I’ve been working on it here and there for a long time. It was a big project that kind of intimidated me and took up my entire painting desk so I ended up working on it intermittently.

My current local campaign has a Spanish treasure ship involved and this finally gave me the inspiration to complete the project. Now that I’ve finally finished this big project I have the 6th Rate Frigate to work on!

One of the only extra things I did to this ship was adding a fighting top on the bowsprit. I found a picture of a Galleon like this and thought it would be cool. I probably won’t use it as a functional element, but I like it. 

It’s a beautiful ship and very impressive on the table (and my painting desk). It was so big it was actually fairly difficult to handle it while working on it. I had to use as plastic glove on my left hand to handle it while I painted so I was constantly rubbing off paint on the edges. I found cradling the hull in my lap while I worked on it worked fairly well.

I’m not exactly sure how many men this ship will hold. I put 81 models on the decks and it had plenty of room left. I’m guessing it could hold around 100-110 on the decks in addition to the 80 models you can put in the 4 Gun Decks.

I can usually rig up a normal ship like the Brigantine in about an hour but this thing took at least 3 hours! And I didn’t do anything fancy.

I decided to go full Catholic and used all the Spanish looking bits for the stern. I ran into an issue with the coat of arms. The back wasn’t flat and even after sanding it a good bit and trying to re-shape it with hot water, I couldn’t get it to sit flat against the stern so I just have stuck there temporarily with sticky tack.

The main mast fighting top is very large. It would be easy to fit 5-6 models up there if  the rules allowed it.

The main deck is so big you could probably fit 40 models on it.

The height of this ship means you will frequently get the opportunity to apply the +1 Save penalty to your targets. The stern is especially high.

Here’s the new 6th Rate Frigate hull compared to the Galleon. It’s almost as long but much lower to the water and much less surface area to paint which means it shouldn’t be as much work to finish!

I haven’t had a chance to use it in battle yet, but I put it on a sea mat and got some pics.

The ship stands 23″ tall.

The Gallery on the stern is limited to 6 models in game play but it actually 9 or 10 models. With the Fighting Tops limited to 4 models, you will only be able to put a portion of a unit up there since you will pretty much always be using 300+ points if you’re using the galleon. I like using fighting tops in games of 299 or less since you can still field a unit of 4 models. At 300 points, your minimum unit size is 5 models.

I’m not sure if you can use this front area for a couple models, but two fit without a problem!

Here’s a Brigantine next to the Galleon.

The Galleon makes the Sloop of War (Brigantine) look pretty tiny.

Old Man Zarate could be a nice affordable option for a 3 command point commander for a budget Galleon list.

But Mateo Perez de Garay would be my ideal choice.

I did make a small mistake building the masts. I used a longer dowel meant for the mainmast on the forward mast so now both masts are basically the same height. Don’t mess up your masts!

The stern deck stands 4.5 inches off the water and the front deck is 3.5 inches high. That will put you 2″ higher then troops in most ships.

Another mistake I made while building gluing the lateen sail on the stern too far down the mast. This makes the sail much too low. I tried to break the glue joint and move it up but it felt like the wood would break first so I let it be.

Right now the coat of arms is only held in place with sticky tack but I plan to install magnets on the ship and the coat of arms and make a couple more options of decorations to put back there so I can vary the ship a little. I also want to paint up two lanterns for the back of the ship.

This has been a big project and I’m glad to have it finished! It took a good number of hours but once I really buckled down and worked on it, it wasn’t too difficult.

I’ll be doing another post detailing some of the methods and paints I used on this project for anyone interested.

Thanks for reading!