Rumors: Release dates for new models FEB-APR

I again emphasize that this is a "rumor" based off of an internet website.
Prices also subject to change depending on your location.

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FEBRUARY

McMourning Box Set: Body of Evidence, $45

Nicodem Box Set: Open Graves, $40

Perdita Box Set: The Latigo Posse, $45

Nurse (2?), $15

Witchling Stalker (3?), $18

MARCH

Ophelia Box Set: The Kin, $40

Som’er Box Set: The Bayou Boss, $45

Dawn Serpent, $15

Flesh Construct (w/ Victim), $15

Fuhatsu*, $30

Killjoy, $18

The Lone Marshal*, $35

Monk of the Low River (3), $21

Teddy, $18

Brown 30mm Bases (10), $5

Brown 40mm Bases (5), $5

Brown 50mm Bases (3), $5

Orange 30mm Bases (10), $5

Orange 40mm Bases (5), $5

Orange 50mm Bases (3), $5

Clear 30mm Bases (10), $5

Clear 40mm Bases (5), $5

Clear 50mm Bases (3), $5

APRIL

Brewmaster Box Set: Closing Time, $45

Bete Noire, $11

Bishop, $11

Convict Gunslinger (2), $16

December Acolyte (3), $21

Doppleganger, $11

Guild Guard (2?), $16

Hans, $11

Hoarcat Pride (3), $15

Punk Zombie (3), $21

Samurai (3), $24

* These models were scheduled for January originally.

Game 5 - another loss

Blech. Another loss with ol' Seamus facing off against Ophelia again.
I feel like this game was a bit close though so maybe I'm making progress in figuring out how to face Ophelia. Lesson learned today... don't try to kill those pesky little Gremlins, but concentrate more on using Seamus movement, and the Belle's lure, to gain better placement for the Schemes.

Another lesson learned today is that you can only "cheat" one time. I've confirmed this by doing a search on the Wyrd forums, but I still can't seem to find it in the rulebook. I was under the impression that as long as you are "losing" the battle, you were allowed to cheat... but apparently this is incorrect.

One thing I miss from the Warmachine days... on the Privateer Press forums, they have something called "Infernals" that are sort of the "last word" on any rules question. It seems that Wyrd, at one time, had a similar status, but they decided to eliminate it. Instead, you have to depend on the community of people answering.

In spite of the loss (again), I still enjoyed the game, and I think we also made it through by only referring to the rulebook about 4-5 times. I think I'm slowly learning the rules!

Game 4 - Seamus vs Ophelia and TYPO!

Yep, I had another game with Chris M. and his Ophelia/Gremlins crew.
I won't go into the details, but lets just say I was shot up again like swiss cheese. :)
I was able to get one of my Schemes so the VP points were a little closer this time around (7-3), but just couldn't prevent him from gaining points via the "Squatters" strategy.

I NEED to figure out how to mitigate all the ranged attacks in some way. I brought a Punk Zombie to try out for the first time, and he was shot up to only one health point left by the 2nd turn. Never even got him into melee.

Wow! Perry (the exploding one) is brutal! I've GOT to start being mindful of his 6" range and keep my models farther apart.

Still a fun game.

Oh... AND... I might have actually had a better score. I discovered there was a TYPO in the mini-rulebook! I had a Red Joker in my hand (yay!) and had saved it up for Seamus' pistol attack onto Lenny. My intent was to cheat the Red Joker, to guarantee me a hit, and a "Severe + Weak" which would have killed him. But come to find out, the chart on Page 52 of the mini-rulebook is incorrect. Turns out, the Red Joker ONLY guarantees a HIT on the attack phase, and you then still would have to flip for a DMG. I posted to the Facebook group and confirmed that this was a typo. Someone from FB has also re-posted the question on the Wyrd Forums, in the hopes of getting an official comment.

Lastly, our game this time around only lasted 2 hours... we were able to shave a full hour from our time, as we both are getting more comfortable with the rules.

Game 3: Seamus vs Ophelia

(Ophelia Lacroix - Gremlins)

Another game in the record books!
I met up at the LGS and played Chris M. in a 40SS game of Malifaux.
As usual I had fun (even though I lost with a 7-1 VP score).

Chris played the master known as "Ophelia" as part of the Gremlin Faction. It was a little easier for me, in the sense that Ophelia is VERY similar to Perdita's Crew (I've played Perdita 2x now).

In a nutshell, the game went similar to my last Perdita game, in that, Turn 1, my opponent ran/moved/pushed his crew pretty far up the board. I then cautiously moved up a little bit and attempted to Lure Ophelia from the center of the table. In hindsight, I may have helped his placement.

Turn Two, the battles started. I noticed this with Perdita as well, that once Perdita, and Ophelia get their models in place, the battle basically turns into a shoot out, with very little movement anymore.
I used Seamus and Copycat to try and take shots with their pistols, while Chris' Gremlins returned fire.
Also similar to Perdita, he has a model (I forget the name) that is like "Nino" (I think that's the right name), who basically is a walking ticking bomb. I made the mistake of getting my models too close to one another, and his model walked in and exploded, doing quite a bit of damage to 3-4 of my models. On the next turn (or two) when I killed his model, it also exploded upon death, which did another 4-5 points of damage to the same handful of models.

The shared Strategy was "Reconnoiter", which I had not played before, and was a little confused on how it worked (I understand it now). Because Chris had the board pretty well covered, he kept me from scoring any points under that Strategy.

My two Schemes were: Line in the Sand (only because I'm familiar with that one), and then I chose "Murder Protege" and Chose Sybelle as my target, which I scored the one VP point for her.

All in all, it was another learning game, and I enjoyed some of the Gremlin "shenanigans". Chris really dealt a lot of damage out, which I was able to resist fairly well, but in the long run, it took it's toll and I ended up losing most of my models by turn 5.

I'm wondering too... I may not be taking advantage of Seamus' movement shenanigans. I'll need to concentrate on that in the future and look to see how I can make the terrain work the best for my plans.

(Also, the 40SS game took us almost 3 hours to complete, because we are both new players and had to refer to the manual quite often to look up rules and conditions).

Pizzafaux part 2

(lousy photo - sorry)

Well, game two of my adventures into Malifaux is in the books. It so happened that I was able to play my buddy Chris again (with his Perdita list). We had a bit of a slow time (again) setting up and getting started, but once we got rolling things seemed to move along.
I found the setup process a bit tedious, only because we had to keep referring to the manual, but I think we did everything correctly so that's a good sign. As soon as time allows, I hope to make a small cheat sheet for the setup process, along with a listing of the Shared Strategies, and the Scheme lists.
While I'm not intending this post as a detailed "battle report", I will just mention a few highlights (or lowlights depending on which side of the table you're on).

We each picked the same Scheme (murder protege), which was kinda funny, because we both were not familiar enough with our opponents army, so we had to look at one another's cards, in order to pick the model with the highest SS cost. So, we both decided to "announce" that scheme as well, since it was obvious.

I chose for my second Scheme the default "line in the sand" - which again, I thought was obvious once I started measuring from the edge of the table to plant my markers, but lucky for me, Chris didn't catch on, until I placed my last marker.
I posted this question in the Wyrd forums, about how to go about this scheme without measuring, and received a couple good tips.
*I'm confused on the wording of this scheme... It says if you reveal, you get an "additional 1 VP" if you only have 2 markers at the end of the game.
Additional? Meaning you get a total of 3VPS for having 2 markers? or you only still get 1VP for Two markers, then 3VP for having all 4 markers.

First turn, yep, you guessed it... walking and running.

Turn 2, we started to see some action. I chose his Francisco model and he chose Madam Sybelle, so we had a couple good volleys there. He ended up taking out Madam Sybelle first, and then on either turn 4 or 5, I managed to get Francisco.

He had a model (I forget the name - Nino?) who was able to be placed on the table at the start of the game, so he chose the high ground for a good sniper position. That caused me several problems in trying to figure out a way around that.

Also, he took out Seamus by hitting him twice, and using a trigger called "Headshot" that forced me to discard 2 cards (or 2 soulstones)... on the second hit, I didn't have enough cards or soulstones so he killed me outright. I think that was the key to winning the game there.
He also has one of the "Assassinate" Schemes to which he chose Seamus, so he got a couple more VP's there.

As mentioned before, I did manage to get all 4 of my markers down for "Line in the Sand", and could have tied the game, but I got a sense that Chris had forgotten one of the rules... that lets an opponent pick up a marker. So, being a good sportsman, I reminded him, and he was in fact, able to remove one of my markers, thus denying me the VP's. It was all in good fun of course.
So, if memory serves I think the score was 8-6 for him.

Oh, I should have mentioned our shared Strategy was "Turf war" and that's how Chris was able to score more points than myself. He was able to remove TWO of my Belle's when his one model blew himself up with dynamite! I tried to resurrect one with Seamus, but failed the attempt.

All in all a fun game, and I look forward to more games in the future. This Wednesday we're going to try and get more players together at the LGS, so maybe (time permitting) I can get another game in then. From what I saw, we had approx 5-7 people show up for the Pizzafaux event (sadly, I don't think everyone got to get a game in, due to the times, and odd number of players.)

A big thanks to our local Henchman Jim for getting this organized, and for some good pizza too.

PS> I hope to have a some better photos, if so, I'll post in another post, or update this one.

Pizzafaux!

I have to admit... I'm really looking forward to tomorrow (1/12/14) for our first official Malifaux event at my Local Gaming Store (LGS)! They've called it "Pizzafaux" in order to tempt new players to showing up. If you play a demo game, you get some free pizza!

At this point, I think we're going to have about 5-7 players show up (I think almost all of them, but 2 are beginners like myself). So it will be great to start a game with a handful of people all at the same basic skill level.

At this stage, I've pretty much read the mini-rulebook cover to cover, but obviously it's a lot to absorb. I've also been posting some of my questions in the Wyrd Facebook group (which has been an awesome experience - usually within a matter of minutes the questions are answered by multiple people). In addition, I've been posting questions on the official Wyrd Forums, and I've been getting great responses there too.

So I'm sure there will be lots of questions after tomorrow. Even so... I'm still looking to get some fun games in, meet some new players, and hopefully start a solid foundation of other Malifaux players at our LGS.

Seamus = done

(click to enlarge - to see all my mistakes)

What better way to spend a cold winter afternoon than painting a miniature. I'm still not sure I like the green base color, but I'm going to look at it for a few days to see if I'll keep it that color.
Other than that, there are only a few tiny spots I want to touch up, but basically I think I'm calling this one done.

Malifaux scale

I've been thinking of making some very simple terrain pieces for Malifaux. Our local game store does have terrain of course, but the pieces are all sort of jumbled and mismatched from different sources. They also don't provide a lot of terrain choices in regards to levels or height. I like some of the photos of the "Terraclips" that I've seen online (also sold by Wyrd). I like the various levels with ramps and stairs, doors, etc... My hesitation in buying the Terraclips is that it looks like it would take a long time to assemble, and that it's rather pricey for a bunch of cardboard (they do look nice though). I also learned you pretty much have to buy TWO packs in order to cover a standard 3'x3' playing area for Malifaux.

So, I've been thinking of something simple, that I could transport easily back and forth to the game store, and that would take only a few minutes to set up. While I haven't actually attempted this yet, I'm thinking of either one or two solutions (or a combo of each).

Option one: a bunch of wooden blocks (approx. 1.25" sq.) - along with some wooden strips to provide walkways or ramps. The strips could just be thin balsa wood and or maybe "plasticard".

Option two: foam core. Somewhat easy to cut into irregular sizes (like building footprints). So I'm thinking they wouldn't have to necessarily be to and actual height. They could just represent a 2" building or platform.

Obviously I'm still thinking this all through, and not sure which option would be best.

The last thing I wanted to post, was regarding the issue of scale. IF I wanted to build a small simple building and yet keep it somewhat to scale, what would that look like. After a bunch of web surfing, and a post to the "Wyrd" Facebook group, I've determined some basic numbers. Malifaux is a 32mm scale game (It actually says that on the back of the mini-rulebook). But what does the 32mm mean!? According to different web posts, this is where it gets a bit confusing. 32mm equals 6 feet tall. But there is something called "heroic 32mm" and there is also a standard in relation to miniatures where the actual measurement is supposed to be from the feet to the eyes, because of hair, helmets and hats.

So long story short (too late for that)... Malifaux = 32mm = 6' tall... with the understanding that it's not a precise measurement.

New Blog, and post for beginners...

This blog post via "GMorts" is very helpful to a beginner in understanding the basic mechanics behind the "Duels" in Malifaux.

http://gmortschaotica.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/m2e-for-beginners-basic-opposed-duel.html

It looks like there is a LOT of good information on the blog - I encourage you to check it out.

http://gmortschaotica.blogspot.co.uk