By Joseph Forster

Blood & Pigment is two years old! This last year has been exciting and we’ve grown a lot here at Blood & Pigment. Over the past year the blog got 71,756 visits with the Getting Started with Blood & Plunder and the 2020 Photo Contest posts being the most popular. We hosted a photo contest, published some custom content, previewed upcoming official content, helped develop fortification rules, reviewed nationalities and factions, shared painting guides, participated in the HMGS online convention, shared terrain guides and battle reports and hosted a few giveaways. It’s been a busy year!

There are so many exciting things going on for Blood and Plunder everywhere right now! It’s time for a State of the Blog Address.

Let me indulge in a little retrospection while introducing the crew at Blood & Pigment.

Inspired by meeting Mike and Rufus at Gencon, I started this blog in November of 2018 with the vague idea of creating content for a game I love. Starting with some battle reports and model painting guides, I later started expanding into more substantial faction overviews and some ship reviews over the next year.

In September for 2019, Guy Rheuark, a member of my local Blood & Plunder club agreed to write an article for the blog and he’s been contributing regularly since as self-described Amateur Freelance Writer. He has been covering many of the French related articles as well as contributing some fine battle reports,  some nitty-gritty thoughts on tactics, some terrain building and a recent Sloop painting guide.  I get to game with him often and he’s a formidable opponent!

Around the same time, Dan Carlson, an avid player and active member of the Facebook group volunteered to write the Pirate faction article. His colorful writing puts this author’s prose to shame and we’re lucky to have him doing more articles lately. His specialties are Pirates, Dutch factions and anything to do with Blackbeard and his crew!

After we hosted a photo contest in the first half of 2020, Bryan Longoria, one of the winners of the contest joined the crew and he has brought some much-needed graphics, photography and video skills to the team. He is more recent to the game but has already amassed an impressive fleet, several beautiful armies and a gaming table to die for! In addition to his graphics work he has already written a couple articles and has more in the works (I want to know how to build a table like his!).

In addition to all that, he has helped us move into video creation! That’s half the point of this whole post! We’re on YouTube now!

We have just launched the channel with some ship review videos. Our Sloop, Brigantine, and Light Frigate videos are already released for your enjoyment. Guy and I have been doing the easy part of talking about these ships with some in-depth commentary and analysis and Bryan has done the hard work of making us sound good and adding video and photos. Dan has jumped in on some of the recordings we haven’t released yet as well!

We have all sorts of topics we would like to cover and we hope we can be helpful to the Blood & Plunder community, both to newer inexperienced players and to grizzled veterans alike. Watch for buying guides, faction and nationality overviews, hobby guides and more on our channel! We would like to produce content that is helpful and enjoyable to the community so please drop us a note (comment here or send us a message via the contact page or Facebook) with anything you would like to see covered in either video or written blog form.

We’ve got several ship review videos up now along with a couple simple hobby videos (and a shanty video!).

Watch for more content coming soon! Go subscribe to our channel now so you don’t miss any new material!