Play Your Cards Right

Something that’s really very useful for Imperial Skies gamers today – blank ship cards, either for copying out ships from the book or coming up with your own designs. The 85 x 55mm cards feature the Imperial Skies logo on one side and all of the ship’s statistics on the other.

Because they are standard business card sized you can use A4 plastic wallets to store them in or, if you have a laminator, they can be protected with business card laminating pouches.

We wanted all of the ship’s data to be on one side of the card so we’ve had to redesign them slightly to make it all fit. The various parts of the cards are laid out as follows (you can click on the image for a larger version).

Once you’ve entered your ship’s name in the top box, you can fill the rest of the card in. Cross off any crew boxes that don’t apply (so if you have a Yashima class battleship which has eight crew, block out the last two boxes). Fill in the gun values for each of the three gun types in the colour-coded turrets, plus any bombs in the green bomb icon. For Torpedoes and rockets, enter the weapon type – (T) for Torpedo, (L) for Long-Lance or (R) for Rocket – with the number of that weapon underneath (so a British Stingray would enter ‘T’ with a ‘4’ underneath for its torpedoes while a Japanese S-12 would enter ‘L’ with ‘4’ underneath indicating Long Lance. An Austro-Hungarian Lussin rocket boat’s entry would be ‘R’ | ‘4’).

Put the ship’s speed in inches in the Engine box, while the turning circle (‘A’ – ‘E’) goes in the white box next to the turning icon. Block out any damage boxes that don’t apply – going back to the Yashima, you’d cross out all of the last two rows completely, plus the last two boxes of row 5 (so the box containing the ‘-5’ and the one to its left).

Finally, cross out any repair boxes that don’t apply (the Yashima keeps all three) and enter the points value in the final white box. So a completed Yashima would look like this:

ISK-014 – Blank Ship Cards (x50) – £5.00