To paint the content of the Dreadfleet box, you’ll need a good pirates/sailors songs playlist. I mostly listened to that one, you can try it while reading.
Dreadfleet was released by Games Workshop in the last months of 2011 if I am not mistaken, when the World that was…still was! It is a game about good hearted pirates seeking revenge on acursed uncharted magical seas.
I got it from my parents for Christmas 2011, it was the first time since I reached adulthood I asked my parents for a game at Christmas, but they were easy to convince, as they always have been (I may ask for Necromunda this year, but that is another story…). I was thrilled because I had fallen back into 40K with friends of mine but we never had time to play and I thought Dreadfleet (which is a « stand alone ») would allow me to play more (no need for my friends to collect or paint armies,…).
As I am an ambitious hobbyist (and a bit of a stillmaniac), I made a pledge (before the Old Gods and the New): I swore not to play the game before all that was in the box was assembled and painted.
Dreadfleet was good value to money (hooby wise): the ships, monsters, landscapes and game accessories are all beautifully detailled and there are a LOT of toys in that box. Once finished they look damn good on the table…but they take forever to paint (especialy for someone like me who is both slow and often gets side tracked).
I started to paint a couple of ships right away, and promised myself (and my friends) we would have our first game by the end of June 2012.
Of course, the Gods, with their weird sense of humour, punished me for such boasting. The game is cursed with the « this paintjob is awfull, I should never paint again » spell, as I soon came to realise.
I painted about 30% of what you find in that treasure chest then…got side tracked by numerous projects (you can see some of them here and there) and left the ships in the wharf. They stayed there…longer than expected.
I got back on track in 2015, thanks to my wife who helped me find my motivation back. She understood that I had stopped because I was disappointed with my work on one of the ship (the elven ship), so she helped me get back on the seahorse and I did. I was quite productive and painted almost everything except the two flagships.
One more year…then I got the courage to reopen the workshop and got to it.
It was 2016, I had the game for 5 years and never really played it. It was time to complete these ships!
But when assembling the Vampire Count’s ship the gods cursed me one more time. Something went horribly wrong, I broke something, ruined (in my opinion) part of my paintjob while triing to repair it and…that was it. Disgusted with the whole thing I stopped working on the project altogether.
I got the courage to get back to work earlier this year, remembering one of the fundamental truth of our trade: all can be repaired. So I did repair what had been broken.
That was it, the game was fully painted. I thought it deserved a post here. So here are the results of 6 years of efforts. Hope you like what you see!
Have I played the game? Is it any good? Well the curse is not fully broken and eventhough I did some test-games, I consider I didn’t really have proper games yet. But I’ll keep you posted on my struggle against the Gods!
Banner & post pictures by me.
Le Terrier du Verménarque 
[…] To that end I pledged to complete the explorers from the Blackstone Fortress box I got for christmas in the #TaleOfMoreWarlords challenge. This should keep me busy for the beginning of the year and help me avoid the « christmas gift » curse (Necromunda is not yet finished and it took me 7 years to paint all the minis in the Dreadfleet box…). […]
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[…] box right away, we wouldn’t want another “Dreadfleet incident” would we (do you want to know more?)? As you may know I started to work on the Goliath first, even though I find the Escher more […]
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