Chris' blog

Last sunday I decided to fix some scenery instead of playing a game.

A few years ago, Games workshop produced a game called Mordheim which was VERY popular at our club,

they had a range of card terrain (as was the norm with GW until a couple of years ago) which was really nice, lots of destroyed buildings, which were in multi levels, something that was quite rare unless you’d played necromunda.

The club had a whole set of these buildings which were mounted onto 12″ x 12″ hardboard squares, which kept most of the buildings intact long after their life expectancy.

However, with our move a few years back from a small premises to a much larger one, the buildings got packed away into a box, and with the decline in popularity of the game the box was forgotten about. and. squashed.

So, with Malifaux becoming popular, and having a distinct lack of suitable terrain, I thought it was time I tackled the rather squashed and definatly unloved box of Mordheim terrain.

Here are a couple of (rather awful) photos of what the terrain looked like as it came out of the box

 

I set about bending back the card so it was all pretty much as straight aw I could get it, then took the pieces that had fallen (or been ripped) off and matched them up as best I could with the different board sections.

after this I cut up lots of lolly sticks to various lengths and used a hot gluegun (purely for speed), to “brace” the card, give it some strength, as the bases were all very strong anyway, the walls just needed that little bit of reeinforcing to bring them back to life.

Now, these still need cleaned up, excess glue taken off, and some painting of the lolly sticks, and a couple of the bases need polly fillered and painted, but the main aim of this session was to get the terrain in a condition where it can be used.
Hopefully someone else at the club will follow my lead and do a bit of painting!

here are the results:

I managed to get a game at the club today, I used my Viktorias (25 soulstone game, same crew as last time, Vik’s, Taelor, x3 ronin)

I played Von Schill’s crew, against my mate Dave, I had a look through our scenery at the club (of which there is a colossal amount), and found that most of the stuff we could use had been taken up already, so, I dug a little deeper, and found a box filled with old mordheim scenery, for those of you who don’t know what mordheim is, go check it out! it’s a skirmish game produced by games workshop a few years back, set in a fantasy city hit by a meteor, which becomes partially destroyed, warbands battle through the city to find “shards” of the meteor, in some respects, its a heck of a lot like malifaux, but in many, its really really not.

Anywhoo, the terrain looks like this, that link is a google search, and the first image that popped up that has the card buildings from the set, so, at the club we had quite a few buildings back in the days of mordheim, when we were in our old building in Newsham, since we moved a couple of years back the mordheim scenery just seems to have been forgotten, unfortunately, It hasn’t survived very well. However, it is fixable! and next Sunday I will be going into the club, and fixing it up as best I can, as it will be perfect for malifaux, and, hopefully, it’ll even resurrect mordheim!

I picked a few of the less battered buildings, even these however were severly damaged, but it was the best we could get, and I put together a table, and we set up.

Dave flipped for deployment and got diagonal, then flipped for strategies, Dave got slaughter and I got treasure hunt.

Dave deployed first and then we flipped for initiative, I won (Which became a recurring theme throughout the game!) and we set off, again, like the last game against Elazar we both have crews who follow pretty much the standard flow of the game, me only having the viktorias who can companion, and Dave having leader, which lets him activate a model after von schill.

The first couple of turns went pretty quick, with both of us just moving towards each other, then, in about turn three (I think I’m going to write a proper battle report in my next game, and possibly take photos, even if the mini’s are unpainted, as wall of text is starting to annoy me )  it all started to kick off,

Dave Had a trapper, who started the game out of his deployment zone, on a hill covering he objective, and the majority of his crew moved round one of the flanks, led by Von Schill, this little group was the majority of his force, so I pretty much had to go for them as he had the objective covered, and was close enough to counter attack if I just tried to dash for it.

I decided to attempt to be clever, and move around the board in pairs. It kinda worked, but only on one side.

I moved a ronin up (my) the left flank with Taelor, the two viktoria’s up the middle, and the other two ronin on the right flank.

The ronin on the left flank performed exactly how I had envisioned, after a couple of turns they snuck up on the trapper, and the ronin managed to chop his face off.

Taelor moved up in front and went for the specialist (i think it was the specialist, he had a flame cannon I think), she only managed this after the trapper managed to cause a few wounds on her, no matter, tis only a flesh wound! carry on!

so she did, she managed to smash the specialist into tiny pieces, only to find out that he explodes when he dies. an epic ball of flames ensued, barbecuing Taelor (and her chebs). ah well! she won’t be doing that again!

meanwhile, I had a plan to get the viktorias across the board in double quick time. I didn’t end up using it, as I thought it would end in one of the viktorias meeting a messy end. As it happens, she did anyway.
The plan (as any self respecting commander knows, does not survive contact with the enemy), was to use companion, and “sisters in spirit”, to move the gun toting vik forward once, then swap places with the sword toting vik, who would then charge forward into combat, with the “free” attack for charging, and her additional attack for melee expert, however I felt that this would leave her out in the open, so, I decided against it.

Instead, I left them both out in the open, just slightly furthur back than they would have been if I’d stuck to the plan, where they got the crap kicked out of them. sword toting vik met a sticky end, and gun toting vik took a few wounds, but in return I managed to take out a dude, and cause a few wounds onto Von Schill.

However the librarian decided he would heal von Schill, which I didn’t like. so I went one step better.

The Viktorias have a spell “another one” which means they can sacrifice a ronin (within 2″) and spend two soulstones, to summon a viktoria, after the sword toting vik died, I looked at my control hand and luckily had the card I needed to be sure to pull it off, so, I sacrificed a ronin who just happened to be near death anyway, and moved convinently close enough to set the spell off.

I pulled it off, and got Vik back. who then charged forward. and got owned. again.

She managed to cause a bit of damage though, I believe I took out the librarian with her? or, it might have been the ronin who took out the trapper, either way, the librarian died,

The other ronin, seeing that everyone was ignoring the objective in the middle made a dash for it over three turns, he ended the game about an inch from my deployment zone, which meant that I didn’t get any Victory Points, but on the bright side, dave didn’t get any either, so the game was a draw.

At the end my crew was pretty battered, one of the vik’s had died twice, I’d lost taelor, and sacrificed a ronin, and only one of my characters had not taken any wounds (the treasure carrying one),

Dave still had Von Schill left, who, to be fair, is nails, and could probably have taken out at least what he needed to get some VP’s if he was given a chance, but fate was against us, as we flipped to see if we would get any more turns, and the game ended.

Overall I thoroughly enjoyed the game, we both lost some models, neither player had the game in the bag at any point, and we both learned some stuff about the game. There were a couple of moments for both players where the cards were against us, and where they were on our side. A nice balanced, fun game.

Just how I like it.

Cheers Dave.

Next time I hope to smash von schill into many pieces.

Chris

Just a quick update on my progress with Malifaux, just a small thing really,

But I have decided to laminate my cards for each of my crew members, The guys at the club have already done theirs, and I thought it was a pretty good idea, seen as these cards will see action every time the models do, and although they are made from a high quality card, they are still likely to get pretty battered.

So I convinced my mother she really needed a laminator, and off she went to wilkinsons to get one.

Cost £9.99, and £1.60 for 25 A6 laminating pouches, seen as we’ll get some use out of it, its a worthwhile investment.

Pretty simple really, heres some pics of me laminating the cards.

 

 

 

Now from here I could cut them so the laminate is a nice neat edge round the card (not too close or it’ come apart), but for now I’m just going to leave them be, I’m on the lookout for an A6 ringbinder folder, if I find one, i have some space on each side of the cards to hole punch them and put them in a folder, as I assume I’m probably going to end up with quite a collection of these cards!

Something else thats been cropping up at the club are the need for counters to represent things like soulstones, corpses, scrap in the game, I’m going to be using these glass beads to represent my soulstones for now, cost £1 for a bag with about three times whats shown in the photo below. I think they should be sufficent to act as soulstones for our games

So last night I played my second game of malifaux, and I have to say that if I wasn’t hooked before, I definatly am now!

On Monday, sometime in the early afternoon I ordered the Viktorias Box set, and also a set of ronin to make my first crew, I wanted to do the viktorias, but the basic box is quite popular, so I thought I would do something a little different, and add in the ronin. I thought I was being quite individual by doing this, and was quite chuffed when I thought of it, until I was informed (after they arrived) that its actually quite a common combo. Oh well, at least I know I have a decent crew at least!

I ordered these sets from Wayland games, but I got them from their ebay store, not their website. They seem, for whatever reason to be much faster if you order off their ebay store, and, you get feedback, so my advice is to order from their ebay store. So, I ordered monday, and I received them on wednesday, which is awesome! thats the level of service I like. very pleased with that!

So they arrived wednesday, and I had arranged a game with one of the lads at the club (elazar the glorified, see his wargaming blog HERE), He too has also fallen for Malifaux in a big way, along with a few other members of our club, but he has been playing it a bit longer than me, so he offered to give me a game, we’d intended on me using one of his crews (as I hadn’t expected wayland’s service to be so swift!), but as my crew had arrived, he kindy let me use my own, which I had had time to affix to bases, and so it was the “silver surfer” viktoria crew was ready for action! (albeit minus a few arms/weapons..)

As it was only my second game, we opted to ignore the strategies (i may get some terms wrong here as I am only a n00b), the ones you have to announce or keep to your selves anyway, those, we opted not to use them, and instead just added in the “mission”, Elazar ran me through the ones we flipped for and explained how they worked, he got the one where he got extra VP’s depending on if my master(s) were on his side of the table or not at the end of the encounter (I can’t remember it in its entirety), and I got the treasure hunt one, so one treasure marker placed in the middle of the board.

Although Elazar has played more games than me, his knowledge of his own crew would contribute to his downfall (<–thats a hint to what happened!), I had only read through my characters special rules a couple of times, but luckily for me, most of my guys were the same, so I only had to learn a few rules, Elazar on the other hand chose Leviticus, who’s crew is all different, and has a boatload of special rules!

The game is supposed to be played on a 3′ x 3′ table, but at our gaming club we can only really make up (at the moment) 4′ x 4′ tables easily, so we extend the deployment areas, to make the extra room we have redundant, I won the flip for deployment, and just basically whacked my models on the table, Elazar did the same and then we started, The first turn was pretty much a walkfest, no one had anything that could do much at range, so we spent the first set of activations walking towards each other, this went pretty quickly, and only the viktorias have companion (which I didn’t find out about until about turn 3!) out of both of our crews, so the game went pretty much as it is intended too, unlike my first game where my crew all had companion, and Andy’s had companion and reactivate. which kinda throws the game out of sync a little (its intended purpose), but this game played out pretty much as the basic rules intend it to.

We played a 25 soulstone game, which meant that I got to use the majority of my miniatures.
As I said before, I bought the extra ronin to add to my crew so it wasn’t an “off the shelf” crew,  in this game I used all three ronin, Taelor (or chebs, as she is now known), and Obviously the Viktorias as my master(s), this gave me 2 soulstones left over to use in the game.

The models are beautiful sculpts, however, Johan just does nothing for me, I think he’s awful, I doubt very much he will ever make it into one of my crews, and in a 25 soulstone game, Bishop is far too expensive (however he is probably the nicest model of all the henchmen).
The Viktorias themselves are what attracted me to this crew, I love the style of the models, it should make me think of Final fantasy, but they mainly make me think of Japanese gangster type comics and films, which I also like, so thats what really drew me to them. While the sculpts are absolutely beautiful, the swords on one of the Viktorias are going to be a nightmare to glue on, with any hope of them staying glued on for any length of time. I’m also a little confused why she is holding two swords, then has two swords in scabbards on her back, surely it would have made more sense for those to be empty?

So anyway, again, no run down turn by turn of what happened, I will eventually, when we have better Malifaux scenery, and when we have painted crews, get a proper battle report up on here, with less mindless nonsense, and more actual battle reporting, but until then, its just long winded blog posts I’m afraid.

After the first turn things started to get interesting, Elazar’s crew are strange in the way that a couple of the members cause damage on themselves when performing actions, even simple walk actions, but Leviticus can resurrect himself, which is pretty cool, however, its also quite annoying for the opponent!

Taelor, unfortunatly didn’t last very long, being blown up very early on in the game by some spells, so I never got to use her other than to walk forward a couple of times, as a purely close combat character thats all she could do, other than hide and wait (but who wants to do that?!).

The viktorias have a pretty cool ability which means that they can swap places with each other for one action point, I used this quite a lot in the game, combining this with companion means that that can be pretty effective, near the end of the game I charged One viktoria into combat, she failed to kill her opponent, so I activated the other Viktoria and then swapped places with the one in combat, I didn’t get the positive flip for charging, but it meant that I got another attack basically for free, as she shouldn’t really have been in range to charge otherwise.

Another neat little skill the crew has is the ronin, they have the action “run through”, combined with melee expert, this meant that I got the chance to kill a steampunk abomination, then use my “run through” to move 6″, then use my final melee action (from Melee expert) to attack and kill Leviticus. Killing two characters, 6″ apart in one turn, which was pretty cool!

By the end of the game I managed to wipe out all of Elazar’s crew, so I pretty much won by default, as for the Victory points, neither of us got any, but I’m pretty sure a wipeout still classes as a victory!

It was pretty difficult to keep track of all the special rules, but really, Its only been my second game, so after a few more, and after I have used this crew a few times I am sure that they will become second nature. The game would probably have gone a bit different too if we play it again in a couple of months, Elazar has only just got his crew (although he knows the rules quite well), so the special rules for his guys were a bit fuzzy too, we missed out a few things, like me not remembering I had companion until about turn three, and Elazar forgetting his ability to cause an area effect type damage with a couple of his characters, which could have done some serious damage to my ronin.

I learned a great deal from the game, and I have to say that I am really enjoying it. Its very refreshing to play a new game, especially a very good one like this, and even more so when it is so different to the ones you have played in the past.

I cant wait to get my crew built up and at least start to paint it (I have a very large number of partly painted minis, but a very very small number of completely painted ones!!), ad also to get a few more games of Malifaux in over the next few weeks. Hopefully I will keep learning new things, and enjoy this system just as much as I enjoy Flames of war.

Unfortunately, I enjoyed this game so much that when I got home, I went online and ordered my second crew (I haven’t even glued the first one yet!), The Lady Justice Box, with an added Executioner, just for variety, I also have plans on my third crew, but they can wait a bit.

So today I gave malifaux a try, but first, a bit of background, as this is my first wargames post on here.

I play various wargames at a club in Northumberland in the UK called The Northumbrian Adventurers guild, find the website HERE, The club itself is older than me (I’m 24 in case your wondering), and I’ve been a member of NAG for somewhere between 10-12 years. Until recently the club was pretty stuck in its ways (this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, we all enjoyed what we did), playing mainly Games workshop products, predominantly WFB and 40k as well as a few select roleplays, but tabletop wise it was always mainly Games workshop products.

Over the past few months, and mainly since the release of the new edition of warhammer fantasy, GW games have taken a bit of a hit at the club, people have been looking for other things, and we’ve even seen a drop in numbers of people attending who would normally play WFB every week. Flames of war took off in June 2010, when a club member ran a very small tournament to introduce the game system, and it pretty much opened up the floodgates, after that we latched onto FoW BIG STYLE, as well as trying out a few other wargaming systems along the way.

Malifuax is one of the systems that has cropped up at the club, and with a few players already with painted crews it looks like its a game thats here to stay.

I’ve been looking at this game for a while now, but as with most things, I like to do a bit of research on the game before I give it a go.

Places like Games workshop (warhammer), and Battlefront (Flames of war) , both have excellent websites, which have mountains of information on them, which gives you the option to spend a bit of time actually researching what you want before you buy it, GW even have stores all round the country that you can go into and talk to the staff members about the hobby (but thats a whole different rant, erm,  i mean story..)

When I started with FoW, it was pretty easy to get into, I mean, its all about world war two, I have a pretty good grasp of what went on there from countless documentaries, history lessons at school, and my interest in the subject anyway, so I pretty much knew what the background was from the get go. Then on the website, there is a whole load of info about the game itself, how it works, what you can use, what forces are involved etc, so doing some research was fairly easy, Battlefront even give out some of their army lists free as pdf’s on their website, they have a forum where you can read through, drool over pictures of peoples minis and ask daft questions about the game system. All in all, its pretty easy to get to grips with the system, and with both GW and Battlefront having beautifully designed websites with easy to use navigation, you can sit back and click/scroll around for hours working out what you want to spend your pennies on.

Now, Malifaux. Like i said earlier, I’ve been looking at this for a while, but unlike GW and Battlefront, their website is utterly terrible. I mean, the site design itself is alright, its easy to see what pages are where and all, but as for content. There is pretty much none at all.

I mean, the main page for Malifaux isn’t even called malifaux, its listed under the “Games” page on the site, which, only has on one thing. and all the info it has is a one paragraph blurb about the game. Which to be fair is useless, i already knew the game existed, thats how I found the site. Giving me a one paragraph explanation about it hasn’t really given me much info outside what I can already guess, or by what I’ve heard from word of mouth anyway. The product description of the rulebook on the maelstrom games website was more use than the product info about the whole game on the manufacturers website. It doesn’t bode well wyrd. You should really sort it out.

Now, its not all doom and gloom, They do have a forum, where you can find out more info, but to be honest, I couldn’t really be bothered to sift through countless posts of drivel just to get to some info about the game, and the posts I did manage to read seemed to all be from people who already know the game, discussing rules which I have no clue about.

So, I headed to the online store. I thought, surely, they will have put in some effort here. oh, how wrong could I be!
Now, the catagories for the site are ok, they are set out into factions which are in use in the game, GUILD,  RESURRECTIONIST, ARCANISTS, NEVERBORN, OUTCASTS,
but unless you know what these mean, (which I didn’t) its all pretty useless. but hey, how else are they supposed to catagorise their miniatures? so i bit the bullet and went through the list one by one.
Now here is where I got really hacked off. Firstly, I have no idea about this system, other than my mates play it, they like it, so i fancy giving it a try. That, so far, is the full extent of my knowledge. So, as any self respecting wargamer does, I thought “screw it, buy something you think looks pretty. that way, even if its crap in the game, at least you like the figures…”
So, I set about looking at the models, only to find that the majority of the photos are 400×450 pixel images, half of the image is taken up by a big MALIFAUX logo.

I KNOW ITS MALIFAUX YOU PLEBS. THATS PRETTY MUCH ALL I DO KNOW!!!

The crew boxes are the worst, 5 images of the box contents squashed into a space less than 200×200 pixels, how the hell is anyone supposed to see those?!

Now admittedly, once you get into the product page itself, some of the pictures are pretty good, showing the figure in multiple poses etc, but the thumbnails are RUBBISH. I managed to go through about two of the sections before I just simply got bored. I found that the models are very hit or miss whether or not I like them or not, and unfortunatly, the guild and resurrectionists didn’t get many hits…
The sculpts are all beautiful, the quality of the minis is very very high, but for me, I just wasnt feeling them. So, after being totally disheartened by wyrd’s pretty pathetic attempt at a website, I thought I’d just look at wayland games and maelstrom’s websites instead.
Oh, and, I still have no idea whether wyrd ship to the UK from their online store, as I couldn’t find a shipping page. so, even if I did find something I liked, I have no clue whether or not I can actually buy it.
Again, Its not looking good folks.

When I get to wayland/maelstrom, they have the same product images, slightly better navigation, but still no further forward on actually seeing the minis. sod it. I’m not that desperate…

I just don’t understand it, WHY don’t Wyrd have a gallery page??? seeing the minis close up, and from what you can gather from the small images, their stuff is awesome, so why not show it off? surely they realize that a good product photo sells. no photo, or a bad photo puts people off.

its common sense, isn’t it?

So, i continued to play Flames of war, and give my money to battlefront, as at least when I wanted something new from them, I could see what it was I was buying, and find out more info than just “product supplied unpainted, may require some assembly”.
So, here we are… I finally get to the point, the tester game. Lately, I’ve been feeling pretty apathetic towards FoW for one reason or another, so, I put a shout out on the clubs forum for a game of malifaux, and one of the lads at the club offered to run me through game. Great. I finally get to see what it’s all about, and I get a game at the same time. The guy who showed me the game is called Andy, he writes a blog HERE , he set the whole thing up, and for the first time in about 5 years I turned up at the club with nothing, didn’t even need a bag of dice! (malifaux doesn’t use dice!)

He gave me a quick rundown of the game, how the turn works, the basics of the stats, and tells me a little about the crews he’s brought along for the game, now I’ve seen a couple of games of this being played in the past, but only as I’ve been playing another game, and this has been going on at the same time, or, I’ve finished my game and I come and watch the last couple of turns, so so far, I’ve only had half the picture.
Today I get to see how the game works in total, how the cards are drawn etc, and what everything means.

So we set the board up, and “flip” for the first turn, I get to go first, sweet. erm.. so what do I do?
luckily Andy knows I have no clue about what is going on, so he shows me how my crew should work, and with the little snippets of info I have picked up watching other people, its quite a successful turn. I’m not going to go into an exact breakdown of the game, as, to be honest, I can’t remember every little detail, and, we just played a basic game, so we didn’t use any of the strategies or anything like that, we just had a full on scrap in the middle of the board so that I could get to know how the game mechanics work.

I have to say, overall, after getting a game, I’m impressed, the crew I used wouldn’t have been my first choice, they performed well, and their special rules are pretty epic, Hard to wound is awesome! and unfortunately, my chosen crew doesn’t get that rule!

The game seems really fluid, and I like the fact that its done slightly differently to normal wargames I have played in the past.

Unlike games like 40k and FoW, where you move, shoot, assault with all of your models in one go, then your opponent gets a turn to do the same, or, like Inquisitor, where models get a turn in initiative order, Malifaux lets you “activate” each character individually, and you get to activate one character, then your opponent activates one, and so on until everyone has activated.
An activation means you get so spend all of your action points, generally, a character gets two of this AP’s (action points), if you want you can move twice, or attack twice, its up to you. There are special circumstances where your characters can activate other ones, meaning you get to activate more than one character at a time, which kind of throws the “you go I go” aspect a little out of sync, but its OK, because it fits in nicely with the game, and can sometimes only be done under certain circumstances.
It breaks up the turn a bit, and makes it feel a little more random, adding that extra level of tactics into the game that systems like 40k and FoW simply can’t have.

I really like the card “flip” aspect of the game too, its quite refreshing to play a game that doesn’t require a mountain of D6′s or another variety of die just to play the game. With more numbers available too than your average D6, and with the jokers in play it really makes each action that little bit more epic, knowing that any number between one and thirteen could pop out of the deck really makes you think about your actions!

It took a little getting used to where I was allowed to cheat fate, and what each card did, and the amount of special rules is just silly, but when you start to play the game more often these will start to sink in, I mean, I have only played one game, and I now know that Cassandra of the Show girls is a bitch who must always die. She gives herself reactivate every turn, so she can effectively ”go twice” each round,  but hard to wound really hurts your opponent when most of his attack flips are on a negative!!

Overall I am pretty impressed with the game, I learned a lot from the tester game I did today, and I am defiantly going to buy a crew. Thumbing through the rulebook I think I have also settled on which crew I want now, something I haven’t been able to settle on as online research has pretty much come up with nothing.

The rulebook is also VERY nice, I haven’t had a great deal of time to read through it yet, but from what I can tell its very good quality, the artwork inside is epic, and for what the book costs, I’m pretty tempted to get it just for that alone, It has lots of little stories too that I’m looking forward to sitting and reading, which I’m sure will get me even more hyped up while I wait for my crew to arrive in the post (i should probably get round to ebay and order it…). This is another thing that confuses me about wyrd games, they have an excellent system, with excellent models, and fantastic source material in the rulebooks, yet they make no attempt whatsoever to show it off?!

Now I’m hooked, so I’ll have no problem in ordering stuff, probably just based off the artwork in the book, or even if I think it’ll fit into my crew, but without having someone in my wargames club to get me started, I would quite happily have passed this one by, and continued on with my FoW armies (who are still going to get some love!),  Personally, I think Wyrd games are really letting themselves down by having such a poor website.
If I was very nearly put off by the lack of info readily available about the system,  how many people HAVE been put off, and how many potential paying customers are they turning away, purely by being lazy when it comes to promoting their products?

For someone with such a great product, I think it would be a shame for them to lose any sales, I’m now fast approaching 2500 words, oh dear. I think its time to call this one a day…

In conclusion:

Malifaux: Great game. sh!t website.

Check out some other blogs and malifaux (and Fow) related content at my friend’s blogs here:
Elazar the glorified : http://www.thegloriousworks.co.cc

James Farley: http://sixestohit.blogspot.com/

Wyrd games: http://http://www.wyrd-games.net/

Thanks for reading.

Chris