The Pacific Northwest has one substantial wargaming convention per year and some of us on the Blood & Pigment team had a chance to attend Enfilade! in Tacoma, WA, over Memorial Day weekend. Here is a quick report on the convention and the Blood & Plunder events we were able to host and participate in
About The Enfilade! Wargaming Convention
Enfilade! is put on by the Northwest Historical Miniature Gaming Society. While it is nowhere as large as the mega conventions like Gencon, Adepticon, or even Historicon, it claims to be the largest historically-focused gaming convention west of the Mississippi River. Gamers gather from Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, British Columbia and beyond every Memorial Day weekend to enjoy the wargaming hobby together.
The convention is held at the La Quinta Inn & Suites in Tacoma, Washington. The location looks very affordable, but it isn’t the nicest part of town. We had a homeless person lacking a couple essential garments doing a dance near one of our cars and it was less than pleasant.
The schedule at the convention is pretty uniform with three 4-hour time slots every day. Most all events are held at 8×6 tables in one main large room, with 2 additional smaller rooms available in another part of the hotel.
The legendary “bring and buy” room is always a highlight. Attendees bring their unneeded gaming goods and sell them at good prices. New stuff is added several times a day, so whenever you have a free few minutes, its fun to walk through and snap up some great deals. Local vendors set up shop in the hallway around the large main gaming area. There’s always some great terrain sellers, along with a wider variety of interesting products from local vendors.
The convention only costs $40 to attend, and that also gets you an annual membership with the NHGS. Games are listed via tabletop.events and players can register for games several weeks in advance. But in an interesting attempt to be extra friendly to walk up attendees, only 60% of the player slots can be preregistered and the rest of the spots are saved for people showing up the day of the event. Paper signups are displayed in the halls. This system, combined with the no-cost events (which doesn’t incentive actually showing up) makes it very difficult to know exactly how many people may show up for you event! But it is a very friendly, relaxed and low-key atmosphere.
The hotel ended up costing about $170 for a night for a room with two beds. And it was still easy to get a room a few weeks before the con. The food situation was ok, but not great. The hotel lunch/dinner costed about $20 for something pretty basic. There was usually one food truck in the parking lot but it was busy! We’re just going to bring a cooler full of sandwiches next year.
Blood & Plunder Events at Enfilade! 2025
The Oregon crew (including Joseph, Riley, Bryan and Don) partnered up with the Seattle crew (Adam & Brad Horton, Paul and Co) to run 4 major Blood & Plunder events at Enfilade! this year.
- Veterans’ Fleet Battle
- Learn to Play sessions
- Maroon Raid on Jamaican Plantation
- Treasure Island
Veterans’ Fleet Battle
Time to get those big ships on the table! Players got to bring their largest ships they had and fight it out on a large 6×8 sea board. With seven players, teams were divided into fleets of about 1000 points each. Galleons were kitted out at 400pts each and all other ships were capped at 250pts.
On one team we had a 400pt English galleon commanded by Henry Morgan, a 400pt Spanish galleon commanded by Guzman, and a 250 Dutch Fluyt.
Across the table was a Portuguese 6th Rate, a French Light Frigate, a Dutch Brigantine (Piet Heyn) and an English Brigantine (Maynard) at 250pt each.
With a small island with a lighthouse in the center of the table, we had a obstacle to work around. The Galleons hit the oncoming privateers hard with their cannons, but by the fourth turn, one of the Galleons was being aggressively boarded by two enemy ships!
The island kind of split forces which created mini battles between smaller groups. By the end of our play session, both flagships (a Galleon and a 6th Rate) had effectively been taken! While not entirely decided at the end of the 4 hours, it appeared the galleon fleet was having the hardest time. We got some great boarding actions in!
During each time slot (period) during the convention, a table is awarded a “Best of Period” prize and our table was selected! Nice way to start the convention!
Learn to Play Sessions
Saturday morning we split our big table in to quarters and ran 4 simultaneous demos during the day’s first game session.
We had 3 land tables being taught by Adam, Riley and Bryan and a sea table with Joseph coaching.
The games pulled lots of eyes and we taught about 12 people how to play, or helped review rules for people who had played once or twice.
We used 100pt forces for sea and around 90pt forces of 3 units each for land. We had one sea demo that ended with nearly every model eliminated!
Blood & Plunder Jamaican Plantation Raid Scenario
Adam and Brad brainstormed and created a massive 8 player scenario where 4 Maroon and Caribbean Native players attack a plantation on Jamaica. Adam painted a massive amount of minis for this scenario, including an entire army of cavalry!
Each player had their force’s personal objective. Capture the landowner, seize the supplies, or free the slaves for the Maroon players. The English players had opposing objectives including protecting key points on the board, killing the overall Maroon commander, or taking down 4 unit of Maroons over the course of the game.
There were a lot of newer players in this scenario, and those rules for Maroons aren’t particularly kind to new players! The English ended up holding their ground pretty well and many a brave maroon fell in the assault!
At this point in the con, we had two large games running and one ended up on a different floor. The Washington crew ran this scenario and the Oregon crew ran Treasure Island. We were hoping to be next to each other so we could enjoy both games at once, but it wasn’t meant to be. I wasn’t able to get many pictures of the Plantation Raid but Adam let me share some of his shots from the game below.
Blood & Plunder Treasure Island Scenario
What’s more piratey than an island loaded with treasure? The Oregon club worked together to design, build and playtest an 8-player Treasure Island scenario where 4 teams of 2 players start at sea, land on an island, and grab variable objective tokens and haul them back to their ships. Gaming legend Don Ollerton came up with the idea, worked up the main scenario design, and then created the entire island for the scenario.
We heavily seeded the island with barrels and crates as objective markers. A unit in base contact with an objective could take an action to “dig it up,” roll on the objective chart and claim their plunder (or pain)!
The Objective Table used a 2d6 system so the top and bottom results would be statistically less likely to be rolled.
It was very entertaining every time someone rolled on this chart. In our playtest we just kept picking up Damsels in Distress! But the most popular hit during the convention game was the Cask of Rum. Half the units on the board dwere drunk by the end of the game!
To make sure the island didn’t get too crowded with 8 players, we incentivized getting plunder back to the ship. Each plunder in your ship was worth two points vs one point if controlled on land.
The other result that got rolled a lot was the gator! And at the most inopportune times! Near the very end of the game, two teams were pushing to grab one more treasure, hoping they could overcome the Spanish who had lucked into a full chest of treasure giving them 3 plunders which they had already got back to their ship, along with a few others.
But both those greedy players hit alligators near the very end of the game! “Please pass the alligator” became a thing…
I should have brought a whole “congregation” of alligators!
Each team consisted of a 100pt Bark full of a militia force that would do well on land, and a 100 point sea force that had some light cannons and swivel guns. This sea force could either choose to land and try to help the militia force grab as much treasure as possible, or they could stay at sea, grab some treasure from some small outlying reefs, and threaten to seize any unattended ship along the island’s edge. This worked really well! The island didn’t get too crowded, there was action on land and sea, and teams were able to choose to approach things in their own ways.
Teams started at corners of the board and we had the wind start from a random board edge. This made it more difficult for some teams, but we continued to roll on the Wind Table every turn through the game to make sure it wasn’t a permanent disadvantage.
We had teams of Dutch, Spanish, English and French. Each team had a veteran player and a newer player. We used a team card activation system with each team using one card to activate 1 unit in each of their forces. We were worried about slow play with 4 teams all activating in sequence, but it actually went very smoothly and we completed the 6 turn game in 2.5 hours!
I had a lot of fun with this event and thought it struck a great balance for a convention game.
- Teams of two which helped support new players
- Objectives meant fighting was not the only priority, which meant less players would be be eliminated or crippled.
- Competitive and easy to declare a winning team, but not a zero sum game that newbies have no chance of winning.
- Entertaining results on the plunder table.
- Not too long or complicated.
- Good eye candy with the island and ships.
- Easy to involve several nationalities.
I played on the French team and we had a lot of fun. Our Boucaniers grabbed a treasure early in the game and immediately got drunk which didn’t help their marksmenship!
We really had fun with this one hope to run it again sometime.
A big thanks to Don for helping create the scenario and making the terrain and to the rest of the Oregon Crew (Riley, Bryan, Brian, Lliam and Ian) for helping test, develop and run the event.
Other Games at Enfilade!
While we were focused on Blood & Plunder, there were a lot of other games going on at Enfilade! The majority were historicals, but there was a good bit of sci-fi happening as well. There was a good variety of scales, eras, genres and rulesets. But you were much more likely to bump into a home brew ruleset than anything else.
Final Thoughts on Enfilade! 2025
We had a great time! We met some new people, gamed with some old and new friends, found some plunder, bought some games and terrain, and got bit in the ass by an alligator. What more could you want in a weekend?
Playing Blood & Plunder with more of the “old school” wargaming crowd reminds me how Blood & Plunder is a little different than a lot of wargaming rulesets. It’s a “little too fiddly” for some wargamers who like to play a lot of different game systems a little bit. But Blood & Plunder really becomes more and more fun the more you play since the ruleset is so complete and well put together. At least, that’s this guy’s opinion. 🙂
If you’re in the Pacific Northwest and enjoy Blood & Plunder, or wargaming in general, you should head to Tacoma for a day or two next year and play some Blood & Plunder with us at Enfilade!
A big thanks to both the Oregon and Washington Blood & Plunder clubs for all the work they put into running games this year at this year’s Eenfilade!