Joelfaux Preview

Howdy yall, bin good week for all us down in t’ Bayou. If yer wonderin’ whats wit t’ querly acc’nt I be puttin’ on, I star’ed talkin’ like t’is durin’ recen’ stroll though Bayou, an findin’ it rather tricksy to be stoppin’. 

Just a taste of what was going on in my last game v Hutch, Som’er vs Collette. This was the first time I had played any models from Wave 2, and it caught me really off guard, not that I would have been on guard had I known exactly what I was facing. I just couldn’t deal with the scheme markers! I even took lots of gremlins and pigs to get rid of them but it didn’t work! Anyway, the game was Reckoning, against Collettes Maniquins, I didn’t stand much chance there! The schemes I took were Distract and Bodyguard on Lenny, with Hutch taking Distract and Bodyguard on Casandra. Distract was easy points for both of us, as neither of us could be bothered to remove them. Bodyguard was looking achievable on Lenny until he was targeted by the will power pin. Lenny has a brilliant will power, and when it is combined with a high total of Black Joker was a mighty 1 to try and protect itself, which kind of did him in. The final result was something like 7-3 to Hutch, but we spent the entire game talking in stupid accents and it has to have been one of the most enjoyable games of Malifaux I have ever played.

With Joelfaux coming up this weekend, I’m looking forward to my first Malifaux tournament. Not that I’ve not been to other events, but none of them have been a tournament. So, this should be interesting and fun! First of all, the venue. Newbridge is my old high school, so I think I can safely say, the stock of malifaux there is poor. Do not expect to be getting the new crews there! Secondly, yes this does mean I am unfortunate enough to come from Coalville, but I’ll grow out of it. Normally, I’m quite nervous about meeting new people, but I’ve only heard good things about the wider Malifaux community, so am not at all nervous about meeting you all! 

Now, my aims for the event. The main thing I want to get out of this event is a good time with good people, but that goes without saying. So, what do I want to achieve gaming wise? Well, lets start with the obvious, the only way I will win any prizes from this is the wooden spoon. But no one really goes to an event with the aim to lose all of their games! A successful event in terms of winning games would be winning 2 and losing 1, if I pick my crew well and don’t make mistakes that I haven’t been avoiding in warm up games. Realistically, I can think I can get 1 win, I think I can get the crew right once every 3! I would quite like to use all 3 of the Gremlin masters that have models out at some point. If it looks like I need to use say Zoriada or Som’er twice, I will do! Notice lack of Orphila in there as the one to use twice, I’ve just not been using her as much as the others, plus I think she’s rather 1 dimensional. 

Well, this one has been a rather short post, but its been mainly a preview rather than a review. I’ll do a long one next week! See some of you on Sunday!

A Post to Pass the Time

Right, 3^rd blog post, here we go! At time of writing, I haven’t played a game this week so all quiet on the Bayou front. So to keep up make up the time, this week I’m going to go through the factions, give my opinions on them, explain why I will/wont play them. So without more mucking about, lets get stuck in!

The Guild: I actually played my first game of Malifaux with the Guild, Lady J. I obviously enjoyed it otherwise I wouldn’t have brought into it and hence wouldn’t be writing this now. However, it felt like the humans in most wargames do. I’m entering a world of Zombies, Nephalim, Swamp creatures, black magic ect. Why in this world would I choose to be human? It’s like going to Alton Towers and spending all the time in the gardens. It’s nice, but it’s not really why I went there, I’ve gone there to go on Nemisis, Thirteen, the Smiler, but I’ll stop talking about that, I could go on for hours. They’re good and solid, but feel a touch middle of the road, dull. I’m sure some of you are avid Guild players and won’t be appreciative of my analysis of them, but it’s how I see it. If I was to play them, I’d have to go with Perdita, just cause she is an Ophillia rip off and I like the feel of her from the fluff. 

The Ressurectionists: Ressers were the first crew to grab my eye when I started looking at Malifaux. To be more specific, Seamus. I just thought that he was infinitely cool, Jack the Ripper meets necromancy. Ok, so I’m not too keen on his belles, dead prostitutes just seemed a bit cheap, and I never really rated them in the game. But the rest of the faction easily makes up for it. Necropunks were my favourite model in the game in 1.5, cheap, get in the way, cause a nuisance and they were 3 of my favourite models to paint. Ressers were also such a cool idea, the slimy underbelly, lurking in the dark and cold ready to strike when the foe least expects it. That’s why they are cool, and up there with the green ones for my favourite faction.

The Arcanists: I’ve never really felt the draw of the arcanists. No particular reason why, they just never appealed to me. However, this all changed when I read the fluff in the M2E rulebook. That story is actually rather cool. I won’t spoil it for those of you who haven’t read it, but well worth the read. I will speak about the masters individually, seeing as there seems to be minimal connection between the 3 of them. Ramos is the token old genius, the like the teacher in a classroom, holding the rest of the MS&U workers together. However, I don’t like his crew, I mean spiders? He isn’t fighting Ron Weasley. Marcus, on the other hand, is brilliant! Every aspect of him is awesome! He still has the professor aspect, cause he is one! And unlike Ramos, Marcus has a cool crew! Giant beasts, little beasts, beasts, beast, beasts! He may well be the next master I get. I don’t rate Rasputina, although Ice creatures are a cool idea, I feel they need back up that I don’t think Raspy has, despite that I have been thumped by her multiple times.

The Neverborn: Neverborn are rather good aren’t they? Well, not the good guys, there are none, but they are the faction I least like to face. I don’t think I have ever beaten a Neverborn crew, but that may be because the local Neverborn expert is Joel, and he doesn’t lose, at least at the club! So, other than thinking they are over powered, what else do I think of them? They’re actually cool. Zoriada is an awesome idea, a Swamp Mistress with unknowable mental strength, and a soft spot for those top green guys! Pandora and Lilith are also pretty sweet, kick ass ladies who want those humans out of Malifaux, and heck do they know how to do it! Pretty cool strong and tough minions, great enforcers and amazing henchmen. I will get into this faction, I wish I could say otherwise, but they are purty!!!

The Outcasts: Supposedly the group of renegades who have no faction, yet seem to be more unified than the Arcanists. I really like them, their no nonsense, get stuck in and make stuff suffer approach. No fuss, little magic, just good with a blaster, and a sword! Viks are cool and embody this image perfectly, neither have much magic, one has a gun, one has good swords! Plus their crew isn’t half bad, Ronin have to be some of the best minions in the game, and the Viks have tonnes of cool enforcers. The Freikorps also embody this, just less staby staby, more pointy shooty. Would love to say I know about Tara, but no I have no clue! 

The Gremlins: So’eett! Ma Bro’s r da bestests guyses, wiv da biggest hats, kick’n sum butt! That was a fun sentence to write! I mean how can you not love Gremlins? The pure fun of them is obvious, who doesn’t like killing the toughest characters in the game by dropping bacon on their head? Or getting your favourite mozzy to go fart in their face? I mean that is just cool. Its easy to hate on Gremlins, saying they aren’t a real faction, but they have had a master since 1.1, unlike the Ten Thunders, which don’t seem to get any flack at all! Anyway, they’re cool, live with it. And like Neverborn, you will all be drawn into them!

Ten Thunders: *Everybody was Kung Fu fightingggg, HA!* Ninjas? Ok, part of me says that’s cool, very cool! Oriental is nice, but they have never drawn me in. They feel sort of cobbled together at the end of version 1 to give Wyrd something to release, albeit it stopped the game going stale, so actually was needed. I’ve had them on my list of things to buy, but other stuff has always forced its way in front of it. They just seem a bit meh to me. 

Anyway, that’s my post for this week, hope you enjoyed it, give me feedback via the usual channel, twitter, @Moderate_Matt .

It takes a while to adjust to new things...

Hello again! Second blog post, and its 100% more posts than any other blog I’ve done before! So I’m going to try and get a post out a week, talking about what I’ve done and learned in that week. Some weeks I shall do very little, and some I’ll do lots, but that’s life ain’t it! 

So, this week I’ve been learning how to play Zoraida (in Gremlins because I’m not scum!). My first game was against Joel Henry, so let’s get the obvious stated, I lost. However, I thought I played well. I knew right from the start that I was going to lose, scarily Joel did a trick Zoaida herself would be proud of and predicted a 2 point difference at the end of the game. So my aim was just to score as many points as possible, not to try and stop Joel from scoring, I knew I’d just trip over myself. The strategy was Reckoning, and we both took identical schemes, Entourage and Breakthough. The schemes suited my new crew, with 3 Silurids to complete breakthough and animal form on Zoraida to obtain Entourage. Against Lilith, the Silurids had very little problems in getting across the board as they had to get caught in combat to get killed. This may seem a strange point to be making now, but it comes up again later! As it was my first game with Zoraida, I didn’t understand quite how tough she is to take out, so I was hiding her like I would Som’er or Ophilia. This meant I wasn’t using her to her full potential basically all she did in that game was score me 3 points for Entourage. I lost this game on the strategy. I could not kill any of the neverborn. This may be because I didn’t try as hard as I should have to kill the Terror Tots, however I know how tough they are to take down having seen Lady J take 3 swings at one and leave it standing. But I also don’t think the Silurids and Bad Juju have the punch to take any tough minions such as those in the Lilith crew. 

My next two games were both against Brooks. We got two in because I was shockingly bad in both of them, both in the way I played my own crew and in the way I reacted to his Rasputina. In the first game, the strategy was Reconnoiter and my schemes were Line in the Sand and Cursed Object. My thought process behind those schemes was that it was very achievable by a group of 3 leaping Silurids. I then promptly dropped 5 scheme markers on the centre line by the end of turn 2. This was a mistake for 2 main reasons. Reason one was that in dropping these markers I left all of my Silurids out in the open, in front of Decembers Acolytes, Raspy and Gamins. They were shot. Wacked. Smashed. Blown to smithereens. What I’m trying to say was they were killed. This then opened up the second reason. The Silurids were near enough ½ my crew. This left me with only Bad Juju, Zoraida, Voodoo Doll and a Piglet, which were powerless to prevent Decembers crew removing all of my markers and taking the game. This took all of an hour, ish. So onto game 2 we went.

Game 2 was smaller, 30 stones, which was basically the boxsets. The scheme was Squatters Rights and the schemes that I had taken were Power Ritual and Take Prisoner on the Ice Golem. The theory behind this should be obvious, the Silurids would creep up the side of the board avoiding raspy, and Bad Juju would march into the centre marker and be locked in a stalemate with the Ice Golem. Zoriada could then jump into the centre when needed to score the points for that and be a general nuisance. This plan nearly worked! Except again I overestimated the toughness of Silurids, and as I was creeping up the sides, they got wacked by bloody Ice Gamin! Then in the centre, my plan was working near perfectly until the final turn. Bad Juju was fighting off the Ice Golem, and Zoriada was sat next to the centre marker, hiding around a corner. Then the Ice Golem used its smash attack. Buggar. It hit and did the minimum wounds, but this was still enough to take the poor Mire Golem down. This left me no choice but to jump Zoriada into combat with the Golem, which seemed like an OK choice to get me VP for Take Prisoner as Zoriada was unlikely to get hit. I did not take into account Rasputina hitting the Golem and splash damaging Zoriada to death. My points total improved, losing 6-4, so was a vast improvement in very little time, or at least the way I chose to look at it! 

That’s all from me for this week, hope you enjoyed it!

An Introduction

Right, hello everyone. Inspired by the latest episode of Malifools, I have decided to throw my metaphorical hat into the ring and share my opinion on the world of Malifaux. So I’m going to do this in a structured manner, at least to begin with. The first thing I think I should do would be to state what I am going to do with this blog. No, wait, I should first state that I have started a few blogs before, made one post, got bored and wondered off, so this could be the first of many, or the first of one. Now, what I’m going to do with this blog. Well I will basically put anything I’m currently working on, things that I have learned from games and other shiny things that have caught my eye from the world of Malifaux. If you enjoy it, great, if you don’t, oh well, thanks for reading one! 

For those of you who don’t know me, and I assume that’s most of you, my name is Matt (@Moderate_Matt on Twitter). I’m a young wargamer, at time of writing I’m 2 and a bit weeks off turning 18, however I have been playing wargames for nearly 5 years. It all started when one of my mates convinced me to go to a games club at my old school, which was run by Joel Henry. Now to start with, I did not intend to get into wargames at all. I thought they were a waste of time and money, but something changed my mind, free stuff! I managed to get my hands on 12 dryads and I was gone. I soon found myself with a Wood Elf army and really enjoyed it. Jump forwards 3 years and I first encountered Malifaux. Basically at the same time Joel was getting drawn in, I had brought an Ironblaster to complete my £300 Ogre army. Having just spent this money on a warhammer army, I was unwilling to drop it straight away for the new system. However, the rest of the warhammer group at SQUIGS, the local gaming club, were being drawn into it and I thought ‘what the hey, I’ll join in’. So I got my hands on a Seamus crew and started playing Ressurectionists.

For that year I played Seamus as my only master. I was buying other models and building the crew up, but essentially I played with a combination of Seamus, 3 Belles, 3 Necropunks, 3 Drowned and Dead Rider. I got to know these models quite well and thought I was doing alright with them. I was winning about 40% of my games and getting to know the combinations that these models had with each other. I also had Sybelle, but I didn’t like the model and did a shoddy paint job, even by my standards, so just didn’t use her, even when I probably should have. But as I got into the game, I was drawn to the other green, and after playing Seamus for the year, I changed faction and brought the Som’er box set. 

The rabble that is the Gremlins were fun! I really enjoyed painting them to what I still think is some of my best painting. Also, what could possibly be cooler than loading a catapult with exploding bacon and smashing face. I actually achieved this in my first game with them, dropping bacon onto Molly. This may have given me false hope of how good the Gremlins actually are, and I quickly found out that they are as liable to shoot themselves in the foot as blow the enemies head off. Maybe more likely to shoot themselves… 

When M2E came along, I was thrilled to see gremlins were becoming a faction! Maybe they will actually be good! Actually, I was nearly right, they are good, I just haven’t worked out how yet! Ophillia seems to be the better choice at the minute, purely because of the lack of tactics required for her to work, point and shoot, point and shoot. However, Som’er is, in my opinion, more fun to play. I like the way he still can sit at the back and pull the strings for the crew, but also get stuck in and squeel away.

So, what am I currently up to? Well I love the new stuff that has come out and am really temped to get as much as I can afford. I have everything Gremlin that is out, and am willing to wait until the Brewmaster model comes out instead of proxying. Back in Resurrections,  I’ve got Seamus and McMourning, and the lack of Nico doesn’t bother me as I really dislike the model. The new artwork looks good so I shall probably get him when the plastics come out. The other faction I dipped into was the Outcasts because in 1.5 having the Viks and Von Shill really helped when declaring Outcasts to use Gremlins and then a horrible strategy came up, like slaughter, I could switch to Viks and go hit stuffs! So I have 2 masters in each faction I own, and don’t want to /can’t expand any of them.

I did, I’m ashamed to say, dip into Neverborn to get Zoriada for the Gremlins, and the new Neverborn stuff is awesome! This means that I could be getting Lilith or Pandora as my next crew. But actually I really don’t want to do this. Not only due to my dislike of the Neverborn, but also I don’t see them as something new. I already have 1 master who I can use in them, but it feels wrong. Therefore, I’m thinking about getting a completely new crew. By this, I mean new faction which I’ve never before got close to touching. This could provide both a new tactical challenge and a chance to try something completely new modelling wise. I am currently in a fierce debate with myself on what to do to this end. 

Anyway, I shall make this the end of my first blog post. I know this one has been a bit self-centred, but that’s what is on my mind at the minute. I shall be playing Gremlins at Fist Full of Fate and so will hopefully pick up some new tactics and ideas from there.  Any comments would be greatly appreciated so long as they aren’t too mean!