090 - Tale of Malifaux Bloggers - Part 2

Welcome to the next exciting instalment! In this post I'll be covering my progress with my Misaki crew from 19th February - 18th March. Previous posts tracking my #ToMB progress are here:
Part 1


Modelling/Painting

It will come as no surprise to many of you that I've completely missed the deadline when it comes to getting my initial crew painted. Total proportion of models completed = 0%.

However, it isn't all bad! I did manage to slap some colour on 7 out of 9 of the models, and almost finish Misaki herself. She's had to be put on hold temporarily while I order up some new thinner drill bits. I had hoped that the weapon swap would hold with plenty of Liquid Poly glue, but every time I repair it, it falls off a couple of turns into the very next game. I'm therefore going to take the plunge and drill out Misaki's hand, replacing the weapon with something more solid like a brass rod.

I've taken the unusual (for me) decision to paint this crew all at once, instead of my usual system which is to focus on one model at a time. I've found this has helped with getting a feel for what the entire crew is going to look like, allowing me to plan and balance colour schemes on each individual model.

As you can see, I'm going predominantly turquoise and yellow, both colours that I have zero experience of so I'm way out of my comfort zone here. That being said, I'm enjoying the challenge of working with something new, and the vibrancy of the colours on the tabletop makes my crew really stand out.

I'll talk more about colour choices and specific painting techniques in future posts, however given the lacklustre progress I think it's necessary to motivate myself to get more painting done in Month 2. Part of the difficulty with #ToMB is that the painting is frontloaded into Month 1 with more than twice as many figures to complete in the same time period, so with the pressure easing in future months I think I should be able to catch up. To make this ambition a reality though, I'm going to commit to producing a painting diary for Month 2. I'll report back with a daily record of what I achieve - hopefully that will give me the kick up the arse to stop procrastinating and progress faster...


Gaming

I've had a fair few games with Misaki over the last month, and I really feel like I'm starting to get the hang of her and her crew. I'll save a more in depth analysis of individual models for a future post, so for now I'll just touch on some of the main things that I feel like I've learned as a complete beginner to the models.

• Many Ten Thunders upgrades have the requirement that you must discard the upgrade at the start of your activation to get a bonus, and coming from a faction that had none of this type of thing, I'm finding I forget *consistently*. More than one game has been lost due to sending Misaki on an assassination run half-cocked, only for her to come within a hair of killing her target and then falling over herself. Solution? I've started leaving a bead/marker on the table next to Misaki that follows her around, so that I see it before I move her anywhere and consider my upgrade options first!
• If Deliver the Message or Assassinate is in the scheme pool, they seem to be very attractive options for your opponent to choose. Deliver the Message is reasonably easy for Misaki to dodge though - she can charge into melee and then make sure she pushes out of engagement range on the last attack using the automatic Next Target trigger.
• Deadly Dance seems very situational - I've never felt it a worthy enough contender for her APs to use it. That being said, I can see it being used in conjunction with the Disguise upgrade to prevent any enemies engaging Misaki that she doesn't want to be engaged by. At 2SS for Disguise though, that becomes a costly tactic that I'm not yet sure how to maximise.
• Smoke and Shadows is a very nice upgrade indeed - I haven't yet managed to pull anything tricky with it, but I can see the potential.
• Cutpurse and Untouchable I've also not yet used - Stalking Bisento and Recalled Training seem like stronger upgrades overall, but I plan to experiment with different loadouts in the coming months.
• Shang has been a nice extra when I have SS to spare - the extra card draw each turn practically pays for his hiring cost, and the extra activation is useful to stop me getting swamped by larger crews. I've been told of some filthy healing combos in a Misaki Outcast crew that I may get around to testing out in the future too.
• Torakage are solid 6SS minions. I love the thematics of their Rapid Fire combined with automatic Leaf Steps triggers to get them where they need to be, and with Wk6 they've made excellent objective runners. Sneaking one down a flank has worked a couple of times to drop scheme markers for Breakthrough or similar, then bury using Smoke and Shadows only to reappear in the thick of the action once they'd achieved their mission.
• I'm yet to see Ototo do anything impressive, unfortunately. At 10SS basic he's very pricey, and his 1SS upgrade gives him a trigger that, while synergistic, isn't especially that much more powerful than to Critical Strike and still relys on you to be sitting on a high Ram in your Control Hand to get the most out of. Admittedly the (0) action it also grants is powerful in it's own right, but that's 11SS in one package - almost two Torakage! I haven't given up on him though - I'll be making a point of trying to get more out of him in Month 2 games.
• I'm loving Thunder Archers, particularly for getting themselves situated with LOS to the objective in something like Turf War and just pincushioning any enemies that try to claim it. Shooting into engagements is golden, their Slow trigger is very easy to pull off, and their Leap Aside Df trigger has made for some of the most cinematic moments of my games so far.

Ototo attempts to take most of a McMourning crew by himself. There's poison everywhere!

Collecting

For Month 2 of the Tale, I'm allowed an extra $25 to put towards new stuff for the crew, which added to my remaining budget from Month 1 gives me $29 to spend.

My preference at the moment is to try and remain 100% plastic, but thankfully for the Ten Thunders this is less of a restriction as the majority of their models are already released in plastic. Less handy is the fact that many of the juiciest minion choices - Illuminated, Rail Workers, Wastrels - are only found in crew boxes that I don't have the budget for. In addition I'd rather focus on Misaki for the time being instead of seguing in to a different Master so soon.

Plastic Ten Thunders available outside of crew boxes are a bit thinner on the ground - Oiran would be nice for slightly cheaper minions to bulk out my activation count and to provide the ever-useful Lure spell, whereas Yamaziko or Ama No Zako would make alternative Henchmen for games where I didn't fancy breaking out Ototo. Alternatively they could be used when I wanted an ultra-elite crew of heavy hitters with multiple Henchmen.

On the bright side, the Ten Thunders range is about to see significant expansion! Fuhatsu, Low River Monks, Samurai and the Dawn Serpent all slated for release in Q2 of this year, which makes me very happy indeed! Fuhatsu in particular looks like he's going to make an incredible model. All the new stuff on the horizon means I'm erring on the side of spending a little less this month, just in case my options open up in Month 3 and I can go wild. With that in mind, my Month 2 spend is therefore:

Previously this lovely lady was an Outcast, but following the conclusion of 2nd Edition Beta she has been given dual faction status - Ten Thunder/Outcast. This is ideal for me because it means she can follow Misaki to whichever faction she declares. Ama brings an attack with a great damage spread and an Obey-type ability which gives me some out-of-activation movement options and control, as well as being nice and survivable with several self-healing effects. Plus she can Swallow gremlins whole!

That being said, I'll admit to being driven mostly by the rule of cool here, I want a big centrepiece model for my crew, and Ama is a huge model that completely fills her 50mm base.

She costs me $16, meaning I can carry forward the remaining $13 to next month for a whopping $38 spending spree! Watch out shops!

Tale of Malifaux Bloggers is a group project in which a small group of players document the process of collecting, painting and playing with their new Malifaux crews over a period of several months. For further information, check out Episode 10 of Chasing Bacon or the introductory post on Play it Like Beatdown . A list of participants can be found on the Wyrd forum thread

089 - Tale of Malifaux Bloggers - Part 1

Going forwards, I'm going to be loosely structuring each of my #ToMB posts into three broad sections: Collecting, Modelling/Painting, and Gaming.

Collecting

The #ToMB guidelines state that every month each participant will allow themselves a budget of $25 with which to expand their model pools, but thankfully the first month's budget is a bit larger to get everybody started. With an initial Month 1 budget of $60 which I can spend on a crew box to get me on my way, I headed to the Wyrd web-store to see what was available. The only sensible place to start a Misaki crew from is, of course, The Thunder boxed set. Into the shopping cart it goes.

Coming in at $35, the box contains Misaki herself, her totem Shang the kitsune, Ototo the Angry Henchman and three deadly ninja minions, the Torakage. These six models on their own would be perfectly fine enough by themselves to play a small game of up to 35 soulstones, however with a "standard sized" Malifaux game being 50 soulstones on each side I would need a little more if I wanted to play the size of game that most people are used to.

So, with $25 left in the budget I decided that I would stick with the plan I have in my head to only build and paint plastic models (whether I can stick to this throughout the whole of #ToMB remains to be seen - the Ten Thunders plastic range isn't fully fleshed out yet) and grab some Thunder Archers. As a nice mid-range shooter, I figure these guys can support the rest of the crew, with the key ability on the Archers being that they can shoot into melee without having to randomise to see if they hit their friends. With most of those friends, and crucially Misaki herself, wanting to be close to the action, this could be very useful indeed.

The Archers cost $21, so that more or less accounts for my Month 1 allowance. I get to keep the remaining unspent $4 aside, which I can carry forwards to add to my meagre Month 2 allowance which is going to drop to only $25 next month.

I should point out that because these boxed sets were ordered directly from the Wyrd webstore, they came with an "M2E" sticker on the front, and 2nd edition stat cards inside. Boxed sets bought from UK retailers could potentially be from older stock including 1st edition cards i.e. not compatible with the new rules. If you end up with one of these older boxes, you can find up-to-date stat cards in the Ten Thunders "Arsenal deck", which also includes the Ten Thunders generic Upgrade cards. Indeed, you might want to grab the Arsenal deck anyway so that you have access to these Upgrades, and this is exactly what I did. I also picked up an Outcast Arsenal deck in case I wanted to expand the crew in that direction as well (because, as a Dual-faction master, Misaki can lead crews from either the Ten Thunders or Outcasts factions).

The only other things I needed in order to play my first game with the crew would be a Rulebook and a Fate Deck. I already have a the former, and a sizeable collection of the latter, so I didn't need to factor those into my purchase plans.

Modelling/Painting

I was eager to get started working on the new models as soon as they hit my doormat, so in a flagrant breach of the #ToMB guidelines I started assembly before the official start date. So sue me...!

Before I show them off in their grey plastic glory, some musings on the kits themselves:

• The Thunder boxed set was (alongside Mei Feng's Rail Crew and Jakob Lynch's Dark Debts Crew), Wyrd's first attempt at making plastic boxed crews, and it shows.
• The kit is *awful* to assemble. I consider myself  a skilled modeller. I have steady hands, a razor sharp knife, and a lot of modelling experience (no, not that kind...), but I struggled to assemble these figures. I would hate for a true beginner to the game to be faced with this kit as their first experience of Malifaux, as I honestly believe it has the potential put people off the game before they even get started.
• Many of the pieces are attached to the sprue using chunky joins that don't clearly differentiate between where the sprue ends and the model starts. My advice for others assembling this box is to be conservative and cut off closer to the sprue than you think you need to. You can always carefully trim off the excess afterwards to get the correct fit.
• The pieces of the six models are spread all over the sprue, and it comes with no instructions. Although the pieces of each model are labelled A-F for The Thunder, and A-C for the Archers, I found this picture incredibly useful as a reference. Thanks to whomever created it!

• While the recent new M2E plastics have been accused of having fiddly bits, the Misaki boxed set takes it to the extreme. Chains, spears and arrows are modelled at true scale, and protrude from the model at all angles. This means you get arrows that are thinner than the average sewing pin, that you have to cut from the sprue without them breaking. Good luck with that... I had to make several repair jobs to damaged pieces, some of which had been knocked off the sprue in transit before I even opened it.
• The Ten Thunder Archers are probably the worst offenders. Their heads come in 4 pieces, three of which fit ambiguously in sockets, all need to be glued simultaneously, and are too small for adult fingers to properly manipulate. I spent around an hour just gluing together the three heads correctly.

Despite all that moaning, the final result is (almost) worth the headache, because the finished models are very nice indeed. And I should stress again, that the more recent M2E plastics are much easier to work with in my experience. The Misaki crew is a very challenging modelling project, but as long as a player is warned about that going in, and accepts that challenge, I suppose it's acceptable.

Here's the crew, with the notable absence of its Master. As you can see, I've decided to go with a slate rock basing scheme - the plan is that it will will be decorated in autumn foliage after painting. I had a lot of fun gluing the rocks into different configurations, and the dynamic poses of the models made for some great action shots.

 

 

I've never been a fan of the posing on Misaki herself - if you want to make your mark on the model, the high kicking leg means that people find themselves having to justify the ridiculous pose, and there's only so many variations of "Misaki high-kicking something behind her" out there. My original plan for the crew was to do something similar to Matt Spooner, who perfectly depicted her in the theme of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, leaping between bamboo shoots. I didn't want to be derivative though, so came up with a plan to dissect the model and reassemble it in a new pose.

Although this might seem daunting, working in plastic makes this easier than it sounds. I cut off her right leg at the hip joint, spun it around, and re-positioned her knee. I was going to model her with the Bisento in both arms held like a spear, but I had to cut it in half in order to rotate the arms into forward positions, and at that point it seemed more natural to leave her with two weapons. The blade on the raised weapon is taken from an old Warhammer Empire Halbardier I had in my bits box. A bit of greenstuff work to fill in the gaps, and she was good to go.

I'm really pleased with the final model - I actually didn't need to move or remove her feet at all, but they've still come out looking like she's gracefully tip-toeing around her stalked prey.


Painting will commence through the rest of February and early March, and hopefully I'll have some more colourful pictures to show off next month.

Gaming

Nothing to report as yet.

I'll get the initial crew test driven in the coming weeks, and have some feedback on their performance to report for next time. It would be nice if I could only put painted models on the tabletop, so it's possible that my initial games with Misaki will be on Vassal until I can get some models completed and off my painting table. My resolve on this point is likely to waver though.

That's it for Month 1. Don't forget to check back on the 17th March to see how I get on, and to tell me off for failing to get even half of this stuff painted!


Tale of Malifaux Bloggers is a group project in which a small group of players document the process of collecting, painting and playing with their new Malifaux crews over a period of several months. For further information, check out Episode 10 of Chasing Bacon or the introductory post on Play it Like Beatdown . A list of participants can be found on the Wyrd forum thread

088 - Tale of Malifaux Bloggers - Part 0

Welcome to the first in a series of blog posts charting my progress as a contributor to the Tale of Malifaux Bloggers. Otherwise known as #ToMB (formerly #SecretStuff), the aim of the project is to get a crowd of bloggers and other miscreants to keep a running diary of the process of starting a new crew over a period of six months or so. We all have a different Master in mind, and we all have a monthly budget - it's going to be a lot of fun!

I've decided that the time is ripe for some ninja action, and I've opted to begin a Misaki crew.

Misaki is the leader of the Ten Thunders organisation in Malifaux, where she is responsible for ensuring the wishes of her father, the Oyabun who remains Earthside, are carried out to the letter. Few are privy to the detail of the Ten Thunders' overall ambitions, but it is becoming apparent that they have infiltrated their agents into all the other factions of Malifaux and are poised to take a major role in upcoming events.

Misaki herself is a relatively simple Master on the face of it. She has a long stick and she pokes people with it. Very hard. The Ten Thunders faction contains a plethora of high-cost elite models, but with Wave 2 hitting our pdf-readers next week, some lower cost minions become available to round out the faction nicely.

The cool thing about Misaki (apart from her being a death dealing female ninja), and what led me to pick her over other potential Master choices, is that she ties in nicely with my plans for 2014, namely the "Year of the Rainbow". My resolution for the year is to use all seven Malifaux factions at different events over the course of 2014, and to do so in rainbow colour order. Lucky for me then, that Misaki is a dual-faction Master, meaning that when she is chosen as the crew leader she can be nominated as either Ten Thunders (Orange) or Outcasts (Yellow) - giving her a wide variety of hireable minions to choose from, and being able to pull double duty for #YotR

Recent months have seen a few people in the UK Malifaux community pick up Misaki and paint her and her crew in some exciting themes - it's going to be an interesting challenge to see what I can do to compete with their incredible themed basing.

Join me again soon for #ToMB: Part 1, where I'll be explaining my initial purchases for the crew, and getting glue all over my fingers.

Tale of Malifaux Bloggers is a group project in which a small group of players document the process of collecting, painting and playing with their new Malifaux crews over a period of several months. For further information, check out Episode 10 of Chasing Bacon or the introductory post on Play it Like Beatdown .

087 - UK Rankings Proposals

There's a discussion currently in full swing on the Wyrd forums at the moment on the subject of the Rankings system, and whether it should be changed going forwards. Brace yourself - things are about to get ramble-y!

For those not in the know, the current system ranks the tournament performance of each player in the UK by assigning a score for each event they attend. Taking first place at an event is worth 100 points (assuming the event had a turnout of at least 20 players), with second place receiving 95 points, third place receiving 90 points, etc. If there are less than 20 attendees, the maximum score for first place is reduced by 1 point for each player below 20 (so winning a 15 player event would score 95 points), and all other scores are reduced proportionally. A player's best three scores from all the tournaments they enter in a rolling 12 month period are added together to give a total score out of 300.

The potential changes that are being discussed are:

1) Increase the number of events counted in your score from a players best 3 to their best 4.
2) Increase the threshold for scoring "maximum" points from being a 20 player event, to something higher. 24, 26, 28 and 30 have all been suggested for the new threshold.

I have a suspicion that a lot of people are weighing in on this discussion without having consulted any actual data first, so I figure that looking at some numbers will help people frame the debate more clearly:

Increase the number of scoring events from 3 to 4

First, we must consider what this change is intended to achieve. The argument goes that the scores at the top of the table are pretty close together, and that moving to a system of four events would distinguish these people a little more.The top 40 of the rankings table as at time writing (29th January 2014) looks like this:

 

The third column of the table shows the number of events that each player has on record that are not currently contributing to their score - ie. the excess events above three.

Couple of initial observations

• As you progress down the table from high ranks to low, the number of unscored events decreases.
• Outside the Top 10, the vast majority of players have only 3 or 4, or less, events to their name. Even among the Top 40, players attending only 3 events in a year appears to be the most common type of player.
• There is a very small number of people that have attended a large number of events - where I'm classing "large number" as more than 6 events.
• The scores at the top aren't particularly grouped up, with the exception that three players are sitting at two-hundred and seventy something. One of these players has only one other tournament that could be added to their score, where the other two have 6 and 8 events to choose the best result from. Intuitively, the players with more options are at an advantage in the tie break.

Highlighted green are the players who would benefit significantly by being able to add another event to their score - because they have more events to choose their next best from. Highlighted orange are players that would benefit somewhat by adding their 4th (and only other) event to their score - this 4th event might not necessarily be a high scoring one though. Highlighted red are the players that would be disadvantaged by the fact that they have only attended three or less events in the last 12 months, so could not gain any more points than they already have.

In moving to a "Best 4" system, the effect would be that players in green would, generally, move up significantly, players in orange would move up a bit, and players in red would move down.

Below Rank 40 there are significantly more players who have only 2 or 3 tournaments to their name. Most of these players would remain in the same rankings order, however the gap between the "Top" players and the "Rest" would widen significantly, creating what would essentially be a two-tier system.

I'd expect the impact for "The Rest" to be:

a) Rankings become less relevant. If you are in the "lower" tier (having 1, 2 or 3 tournaments to your name) it is harder for you to make a meaningful comparison between your score and the "Top" players.

b) It is harder for newer players to break into the higher ranks. Some of the players that have recently jumped into the Top 20 would not be there under a "Best 4" system, and introducing new blood to the competitive mix is always good to keep things fresh.

These two points are why I'm unsure about this particular change - the benefits (in terms of distinguishing the "Top" players) are marginal at best, and affect only a limited number of people, whereas the *vast* majority of people for whom 4 events in a year is just too much of a stretch are disadvantaged, so my preference would be to stick with a "Best 3" system.


Increase the Threshold for Scoring Max Points from 20 to X

This second change is intended to reward attendance at an event with "many" people, and award less rankings points to an event where "fewer" people attend.

The rationale for this must presumably be: "It is harder to place higher at an event when there are more players".

What makes an event more "difficult" to win? The strength of the competition is probably the most obvious answer. Unfortunately, so many factors contribute to a measure of "strength of competition" that it's not that easy to fully analyse.

Some things we can examine though. I've seen it suggested that smaller tournaments could be easier to win due to attracting a different mix of players - with more local/casual players and less of the experienced tournament crowd. I checked this out by analysing the last 12 months of events, calculating an average score* for all the participants, and plotting that against the number of participants at the event.

As you can see, there isn't really any trend of smaller events being a pushover due to having easier opponents - the smallest events tend to have a similar average ranking score attending them as the larger ones, reflecting the willingness for people to travel a long way for an event, even more so if the event is ranked.

The number of rounds played also has an impact - it is a fact that winning 4 games in a row is necessarily harder than winning 3 games in a row. Regrettably, due to time constraints, most Malifaux events recently have run to only 3 rounds. In an ideal world, with 16 players there would be a 4th round, and with 32 players there would be a 5th round. If this recommendation was implemented, it would provide justification all by itself for larger events scoring more points than smaller.

Limited by playing time constraints (it is difficult to get 4 games, let alone 5 games, into a single day event) and with tournaments typically featuring only 3-games, we should consider the tournament "journey" for a player who goes on to win 1st place in a small tournament and in a large tournament, and we notice that the journey is pretty much identical. Their first game is against a random opponent which we would generally expect them to win, their second game will tend to be against a more difficult opponent than their first, and their third and final game will generally be against another of the top players at the event (which, by the scatter graph above, isn't actually going to be an easier opponent in a smaller event than a larger event). What is it about the three games played at the larger event that we should deem it be worth more points? It doesn't sound any more arduous or accomplished - the only difference seems to be how many people are sitting at adjacent tables.

Many people seem to think the threshold should be increased by a fair margin, and I believe the current 20 is somewhat arbitrary, so I wouldn't be opposed to edging it up slightly to 24, but anything beyond that seems rather unnecessary. Indeed, there have been only *four* events in the last 12 months with 24 or more attendees. (Having 24, 29, 33 and 39 participants), and two of those were M1E events, so going beyond that level seems to be out of step with what we've seen of attendances in 2013. Indeed, increasing the threshold to 24 would cause *seven* events between 20 and 23 attendees to no longer have counted max points. That feels somewhat on the ruthless side, and I admit that it would make it pretty much impossible to get multiple players at the top of the table on the same score. Is that all that's required? Probably.

* Players were assigned weights from 100 to 1 based on their current ranking position, and the score was the mean average of those weights. Players absent from the rankings were assumed to be local/casual players and assigned a weight of 1.

086 - Malifaux Masters 2014

So it turns out that through some strange twist of fate I managed to qualify for the UK Masters this year. I remember the 2012 UK Masters being among the most enjoyable events I've been to since I started playing Malifaux, so I excitedly accepted the invite.

I'm currently placed at 15th in the rankings, so only just squeezed into the Top 16 by a hair. Naturally then, the rest of the field is some incredibly tough opposition! And predictably, my competitive record against the majority of them isn't too great... (W/D/L)

1 Joel Henry - 0/0/0
2 James Doxey - 1/0/1
3 Jimmy Balderstone - 1/0/0
4 Luke Cocksedge - 0/0/0
5 Ant Hoult - 2/0/1
7 Craig Johnson - 0/0/3
9 Martin Wodehouse- 0/0/0
10 Rob Smith - 0/0/0
12 Nathan Chenery - 0/1/0
13 Gregory Piskosz - 0/0/1
15 Mike Taylor
16 Maria Wieland - 0/0/1
18 Tim Brown - 0/1/0
19 Jakab Sennett - 1/0/4
21 Robert Balmforth - 0/0/2
22 Matt Ledgewood -0/0/1

So overall that's 5/2/14, and four players that I'm completely untested against.With relatively few M2E games under my belt to date as well, I'm probably gearing up for a painful weekend...

On the bright side, both Joel and Rob are in my pool, so I'm guaranteed games against two players I've never played before. Rounded off with another game against Ant, which is always enjoyable, that's certainly worth travelling to a tournament for any day of the week!

085 - Chasing Basing

Greetings and Happy 2014! Welcome to the first post of the new year - and the start of my fourth year blogging Malifaux! To business.....!


I recently managed to get my hands on a solitary plastic Witchling Stalker - a model which has taken the dubious honour of being the first of the "M2E" plastics that I've put paint to.

Still work in progress. Note - my first attempt at NMM is coming along nicely!

With the little guy almost finished, I was faced with an agonising decision - what do I want to do with my basing going forwards? Looking back, my previous bases have lacked flair. I've done:

Flagstones cut from cereal packets on my Neverborn

Sand + dried grass & cacti on my Guild

Greenstuff Sculpted cobblestones on my Ressurectionists

Wooden plank resin bases on my Ten Thunders

You might be seeing the theme....? Flatter than a pancake in the wake of a steamroller!

After casting an eye over some of the available options, I saw something I liked in a Twitter post of @RdeValmont, who has used Micro Arts Studio Cobblestone bases to great effect on his McMourning crew. I was particularly drawn to the way the bases have different height levels, and how the cobblestones themselves extended beyond the edges of the base in an organic way instead of being restricted to clean lines.

I *really* need me some of these sexy new Rotten Belles!

I hopped on over to Element Games and threw a couple of packs into my shopping cart. As per usual from Element, the order arrived at my door quick as a flash, however unfortunately when they arrived there was disappointment in store.

It turns out that Micro Arts Studio has been through a phase of resculpting their resin bases through 2013, and the ones pictured on Element's site (and above being modelled by Belles) are the old versions. The new ones look like this:

Much flatter, and with cobblestones flush with the base edge. In other words - exactly what I didn't want! Element Games were incredibly helpful, and apologetic for the fact that the picture on the store didn't match the item they were sending out (Note: The pictures on the site are still incorrect as of the date of writing - so caveat emptor if placing a resin base order with Element in the near future).

So now it was dilemma time - I could try and source the "old style" bases elsewhere, with the risk that stocks could be limited and I could only get half a crew based, or go back to the drawing board.

As it happens, while their new Cobblestone bases weren't to my liking, the new sculpts of Micro Arts Studio "Old Factory" are actually rather nice indeed. Unlike the "old style" Old Factory bases which, frankly, look like arse.

True to form, Element Games were very obliging and sent out some of the bases on the right as a replacement. I set to work doing my best to come up with the right shade of red brick to start basing my Guild models on.

Hang on a minute.... Red brick.....? Guild models.....?

I've always made a bit of effort to factor in the Faction colour when painting Malifaux. My Pandora has a purple coat. My Perdita has a red halter top. It just feels right.

What if I could escape from that compulsion by theming the models' bases with the faction colour? I'd be free to put whatever colour I wanted on the model itself, and use different bases for different crews, but with a unifying colour for the whole faction.

Micro Arts Red Bricks - Sounds like the building that collapsed on Lady Justice..
Micro Arts Red Tiles - Sonnia doing a bit of rooftop witch-stalking
Desert Red Sandstone - Perdita in the Badlands.

Moving to Ressers, lots of things are green! Eg. verdant green static grass plus gravestones works nicely for Nicodem.

What's that you say? Dual Faction? No problem!

Yan Lo - Green grass plus fallen orange autumnal leaves
McMourning - Green grass plus garden walls of red brick.
Zoraida - Brown cave/mine with protruding purple crystals

The possibilities are endless!

Getting excited now - I'll be back with a picture of a finished model soon!

084 - The MaliBlog List

As the first step in re-vitalising things around here (which might even culminate in a complete theme re-build if I get the time) I've gone through my Blogroll and deleted a few links to blogs that were no longer relevant. Quite a few of the places I was linking had moved on from Malifaux long ago, and were either not posting at all, or posting stuff that was nothing to do with Malifaux. Some of them had even inexplicably started blogging about 40k! They've all gone.

In their place, I've scoured the internet for some of the new blogs on the scene. It certainly seems that Malifaux blogs are now "in", and all of a sudden everyone is getting involved, which can only be a good thing!

Here's a small selection of the newly added:

Justin Drawing Dead - Justin Gibbs

Not only does Justin offer obligatory reading in the form of regular glimpses behind the curtain of the M2E design process, his "off-topic" posts also make for interesting reading; his recent Hunger Games posts being good examples.

The Philosophy of Uncertainty - Joel Henry

Joel offers up a mix of deep insight on Malifaux and general gaming strategy (and being among the top competitive players, he knows his stuff), and creative hobby projects. His Goldilocks themed Lilith crew is just right, and has to be seen to be appreciated.

Black Swamp Bayou - rgarbonzo

A new blog celebrating the new faction on the block, the Black Swamp blog started off recently with a post asking the question on everyone's lips - "What *is* a Gremlin anyway?". Recent posts have focused on getting the most out of some of the new Gremlin masters.

Workbench Warriors - Richardb

In his brand spanking new blog, Richard is going to be charting his hobby progress as he gets started in Malifaux. His first post showing his step by step Bayou bases is nice inspiration for anyone looking to move away from resin bases and inserts.

Carrion & Hodgepodge - Ana Polanscak

Not generally a very wordy blog, but contains plenty of picture gallery posts showcasing some of the new Malifaux plastic range painted to an incredibly high standard. Something for us all to aspire to!

With such a healthy blog scene at the moment, I'll be keeping an eye on all the above blogs, along with the multitude of others in the list you can see on the right, and I'll be highlighting some of my other favourites in future posts.

083 - Year of the Rainbow

Wow- my last post was July? Really? And only 9 so far this year? That’s unbelievably shameful.

I’ve just returned from a nice holiday feeling plenty refreshed and excited to get back to playing this lovely game of ours. Hopefully if I get writing now I can get some blog-mentum going through into the start of 2014.

First let me preface this post by giving due credit to everyone’s favourite penguin-onesie wearer Mr Craig Johnson who came up with an idea on Twitter a couple of weeks ago:

Simple and elegant – six words that encompass an entire year of buying, modelling, painting and gaming. I love this idea, so I’m mercilessly stealing it and dubbing it Year of the Rainbow.

Richard of York gave battle in vain.

Guild 10T Outcasts Resurrectionists Arcanists Gremlins Neverborn.

(Yes I know there’s no Brown/Gremlins in a rainbow, but since all the others work, and Gremlins are only pretending to be a faction anyway, we’ll all agree to let that slide…)

Taking seven factions to seven events is going to be a bit of a stretch in terms of hobby time. In theory I'm already over half way there. Model-wise I can currently field reasonably flexible crews for Guild, Resurrectionists and Neverborn, I could let Lynch represent Ten Thunders for once, and I have an Ophelia boxed crew that I could use at a punch for Gremlins. No Outcasts or Arcanists though, painted or otherwise.

In practise though, I don't want to just stick with the same metal crews I've been taking to tournaments for the last couple of years - so I'm going to want to buy new stuff, and with me being on a plastic only diet from now on, my options (at least towards the start of 2014) will be more limited.

Also worth noting that getting to seven events over the course of the year is around double what I achieved in 2013, so hopefully I'll find myself with a few more free weekends. Looks like the first event of the year will be Vapnartak in early February, which gives me two months to settle on a crew and paint it if necessary. If I'm strict with myself and stick with the order of the rainbow colours, I'll be needing a Guild crew.

Anyway, now that I have an excuse to buy new toys, it’s time to start planning which Master(s) I want to use to represent each faction…

082 - Wyrd Postage Rates

With GenCon only a month away, we're all getting a bit antsy to hear which new toys Wyrd are going to make available for us to order online while the convention is happening. We know that the Malifaux M2E book is going to be available, and that many of the first wave Masters' boxed sets will be up for grabs, but we don't know which ones, with the exception of Nightmare Tara.

As usual, Wyrd will be including a limited edition "Miss" model with every order over $100 which, for those of us thinking about combining orders with our friends to minimise postage costs to the UK, presents us with an interesting dilemma. How much does it cost us to split up the orders into $100 chunks?

I spent half an hour on the Wyrd online store yesterday putting dummy orders into their system, to try and work out the best way to combine orders. I used the Rail Crew boxed set ($35) and the Storm of Shadows book ($30) as a best estimate of the size and weight of the stuff we'll all be ordering next month, and input various multiples of these into the checkout, noting the UK postage cost for each combination. The results were interesting.

The top green table shows the postage cost for multiple books and multiple boxed sets. The dark green indicates an order that is valued over $100, so would qualify for a free Miss model.

The 2nd table shows how much the postage goes up for each book you add to a single order. For example, my local gaming group will want at least 5 books, and the table shows that for each book you add to the order after the first one, it costs an extra $11.60 in shipping. This table should be read by going across, from left to right.

The 3rd table shows the same thing for adding extra crew boxes. You can see that adding an extra crew box to your order will cost you an additional $2.60, *except* if the order doesn't include any books, in which case your second and third crews do not cost any extra. This table should be read going down, from top to bottom.

The interesting part of the tables is the top left of the second table. You can see that if your order contains boxed sets, adding a single book to the order will cost you slightly less than $11.60. It's not a massive difference, but worth noting.

The lesson we can take from this?

If you don't want books, but you want as many Miss models as possible, group your crew boxes together in threes. Your first Miss will be effectively free. Your second Miss will cost you $4, and your third Miss will cost you only $3. Seems like a bargain to me!

If you want books, don't group them together in a separate order to the models. If you do, each book will cost you $11.60 shipping. Admittedly, you only get a very marginal benefit by grouping a single book in with 1 - 3 boxed sets, but it's worth taking. If you do this, your orders will probably be in groups of 1 book & 3 boxes, saving you $2 on each book. It's not a lot, but every penny helps right?

DISCLAIMER: Wyrd have the power to alter their postage rates for GenCon. If they do so (and I have no idea if they will or not), all of the above becomes irrelevant.

081 - Monkeefaux & Breachside Brawl Tournaments

Note: This post was written over a month ago, and I was intending to write up my Breachside Brawl tournament games in the same post, but never got back to it. I'm throwing the post up now in case anybody is interested in reading about some of my last ever M1E games.

Sorry for the prolonged quietness here - the release of the Malifaux 2nd Edition beta files has meant that I've been spending precious lunchtimes at work pouring over the new details rather than blogging. Shame on me. I still haven't had opportunity to get the new rules on the tabletop (soon to change I hope!), but I'm feeling very positive about practically everything I've seen so far. I'll be back with some more detailed musings soon.

Order of today, though, is to give a quick rundown of a tournament I attended last month.

I was very much looking forward to making the trip to York for Monkeefaux. Despite the organiser Guildmonkee's attempts to label it something else, the name seems to have stuck. I took my Perdita crew along, after pulling together a 70ss pool of Guild models which basically consisted of everything I have painted for the faction.

Game 1 - Shared Land Grab vs Dave Chandler (Mei Feng)

This was my first time I've played against Mei Feng (and against Dave) so I was wary straight off the bat. Not only that, but most of Dave's crew were unfamiliar to me, being predominantly made up of Union Miners and Willie. I'd have probably played a cagey early game until I'd worked out what she might do, however Dave took that choice out of my hands by launching Mei across the board using Railwalker in the first turn in an attempt to take out his Kill Protege target. Although she succeeed, this left her exposed in the middle of my entire crew, and a Family alpha-strike in turn two almost managed to take her down. Only liberal use of soulstones managed to keep her on the table, at which point Dave remembered that he'd selected Bodyguard for his scheme and regretted the whole thing. The Miners showed up and so began a bit of a scrap just outside my deployment zone. The Guild's raw damage output prevailed, with Mei limping away and my survivors chasing her down and spreading out for strategy points. A final charge from Perdita across the table and up a cliffside saw her get a bead on Willie (my Kill Protege target who'd been hiding all game) and take him out with the final card flip of the encounter.

Mei Feng begins to regret being so reckless

Game 2 - Shared Line in the Sand vs Ant Hoult (Yan Lo)

The first time I'd faced Yan Lo in the hands of somebody who wasn't testing him out for the first time, I expected Ant to be able to use the guy to his fullest potential and he definitely didn't disappoint. With Toshiro and 3 Ashigaru advancing on one flank, I quickly understood what his plan was going to be - he would advance onto two of the strategy markers and use the Ashigaru to prevent anybody getting close. The combined shooting from Perdita, Santiago and Nino (and a luckily relatively sparse terrain board) meant that I'd killed the Ashigaru before they got close enough, and Perdita's speed allowed her to start capturing markers in Turn 2.
Toshiro summoned up a couple of new Ashigaru, while on the opposite flank Yan Lo laid some smack down on a Death Marshall and Francisco. My Immune to Influence Watcher proved useful in holding a marker against a Belle who was unable to Lure him closer. Yan Lo had powered up through all the surrounding carnage, which meant that he'd gained enough abilities to charge Perdita, kill her, push to Nino, kill him, and then activate a trigger which gave him multiple hits on Santiago. I'd been feeling relatively comfortable until that point, but suddenly most of my crew was dead or dying.
With some incredible luck, though, I managed to squeak a win despite losing both of my schemes. Fortunately for me my deck had been flipping very well the whole game, and despite some poor control hands, I always seemed to land on the required card (including not flipping a single weak damage on Ashigaru, who have additional mitigation against it, all game)

Game 3 - Shared Beatdown vs Nathan Chennery (Viktorias)

This was going to be painful. I've never managed to beat the Viktorias before, and here I was on table 2 in a strategy that plays to all their strengths. I had a couple of secret weapons though: Lucius, and Papa Loco. With the addition of the Executioner and an Austringer my small elite crew was complete. Lucius would be great in Beatdown due to being a high cost soulstone user that is difficult to target (negative flips on all attacks). Papa Loco's ability to blow himself up would come into its own since he wouldn't count for strategy purposes if killed in this way (and neither would any of my models caught in the blast).
The Viks darted up one flank in cover and were ready to strike in Turn 2, were it not for Lucius and his Issue Command ability, which sent 4 Austringer shots at them and forced them to retreat to lick their wounds and count their remaining soulstones. Lazarus advanced up the centre and became engaged with the Executioner, while Perdita grappled with Johan on my right. In waded Papa Loco, who detonated himself in a massive explosion, killing himself, the Executioner, Lazarus and a Ronin in an almighty BOOM! The only survivors were the Viks, Perdita, Lucius and the Austringer. With hindsight I should have sacrificed the Austringer using Lucius to gain reactivate, because the Viks barrelled around the wood terrain my gun/bird platform was hiding behind, and picked off the Austringer in one turn and then Lucius in the next (damn those paired swords bypassing his negative flip defense!!). These two kills were enough to pull the game back to a draw, and a well fought one at that.

My final standings for the day? WWD put me in 3rd place for my first podium finish in two years of tournaments, so I was very pleased with how the day worked out!

080 - Checking In

Once again, it’s been a while - sorry about that!

Malifaux 2.0

I don’t need to tell anybody that Malifaux 2.0 is looming ever closer. Only 2 weeks to go until the open beta starts and we get a flood of information – not only the new core rules but the cards for a significant proportion of the range will be revealed in their M2E form. I can’t wait.
The announcement of the new edition has thrown a bit of a spanner in my Malifaux plans for the year though, primarily because I’ve suddenly lost my motivation to paint metal models, now that I know that many of them will be replaced by new plastics. Therefore everything I said a couple of posts ago is kinda moot.
Instead… Mei Feng will be pushed to the top of the pile and be the first plastic box set I work on, which should give me something to play for the next few months. I’m really really hoping she’s included in the Ten Thunders section of the first book, otherwise I won’t be able to play her in M2E until September…
If she isn’t though, that won’t be an issue. Pandora and Seamus will come back out the case for beta testing and I’ll be doing my bit to make sure that the former hasn’t been nerfed *too* much as a reaction to her perceived current OP-ness, and the latter doesn’t get *too* powerful in an attempt to compensate for his perceived current lack of power. I’m excited to see how both my favourite Masters look in the new version, and don’t want to see them lose any of their current character.

Henchman

I applied last week to join the ranks of the Henchman, and was pleased to be accepted. Getting involved in organising events in the local area, and building interest in the run up to the new edition is going to be a lot of fun, but challenging at the same time. As well as a bit of work at the local level, I’m starting to gather some thoughts around running a tournament at some point in Q3. Watch this space.

Monkeefaux

On the very same day that my Henchman application was accepted, I managed to pull a 3^rd place result out of the bag at the recent tournament in York, using Perdita in all three games! Talk about a good day in gaming! As my first ever podium finish I was incredibly pleased, so I’ll try to throw up a post with some brief battle reports next week.

079 - How to Bake a Cactus

Yes, you read the title correctly...

I've been experimenting with Fimo sculpting this week, with the aim of building something for my Watcher to stand on. I've seen a few people in the past use the lamp post from the Wyrd Victorian base accessories, with their Watcher perched on the very top, and I always thought it made a nice characterful base for the model, if a little precarious and top-heavy.

Wanting something more in keeping with the desert-y themed bases I've already used on the rest of my Guild, I figured that a cactus would be just right, and set about trying to find manufacturers of plastic or resin cacti. The first thing you realise when searching for companies that sell plastic or resin 28mm cacti is: pickings are very slim indeed.

Pegasus Hobbies do a decent range of small and medium sized cacti. Although the plastic is poor quality (it feels like the same kind of plastic they make those cheap christmas-cracker prizes out of), I find with a lick of paint they are fine for sticking onto bases as decoration. Definitely not large enough to stand a Watcher on top of though. Another site (which I can't now find a link to) sold groups of resin cacti that from the pictures looked poorly detailed, and which also came with a resin "area terrain" piece for them to stand on, bumping the price above what I wanted to pay. I finally found what might have been an ideal cactus on an aquarium website and ordered one, only to be told that it was no longer in production.

There was nothing for it but to buy something squidgy and have a go and making my own. I've never really sculpted anything beyond filling gaps and touching up conversions, so to make something from scratch was a bit daunting.

I built an armature out of a few paperclips twisted together, wrapped it in Fimo Soft, and scored lines into the putty from top to bottom to give it some texture. One difficulty I found straight away was that it's difficult to keep the lines defined, because when you turn the cactus over to texture the opposite side, your fingers would be smoothing out the texture you already applied! If anyone has any tips for not smudging your own sculpting while handling Fimo I'd happily receive them!

Duly sculpted, the cactus went in the oven to harden. 20 minutes later, finding a funny smell in the air throughout my house, I rushed back to the kitchen to find it filled with noxious gas, with the cracked, blackened and charred remnants of my cactus sitting on the baking tray.

It turns out there's these things called..... "Farenheit", which as far as I can tell are just numbers they put on packaging right next to the Celsius temperature, purely to confuse people. It further turns out that baking Fimo at 230ºC, rather than 110ºC (230ºF!) has the unfortunate side effect of rendering your oven completely useless for food preparation for at least 7 days (unless you happen to enjoy chips that taste like burned plastic...)

Back to the drawing board. For my second attempt, I Iad the bright idea that, in order to prevent me from smudging my own texture lines, I would finish the basic shape and then bake it for just a couple of minutes to firm it up slightly before texturing it, then finishing off the bake afterwards. Turns out this doesn't work - even after only 3 minutes in the oven (at the correct temperature!), the Fimo becomes crumbly and unsuitable for scoring lines in. I scraped a few chunks off the second version before giving it up and going back to the start for a third time. We live and learn.

And it was, as they say, third time lucky. I took extra care with the texturing, baked at the correct temperature, and ended up with a nice little spot for my Watcher to perch and survey the battlefield. I just need to get some paint on him ready for a tournament at the weekend, as I'll be giving my Guild their first competitive outing, and I know he'll be worth his weight in gold in those objective-based strategies!

078 - 2013: Year of the X

I decided at the end of last year that I would be retiring my current Masters from competitive play in 2013. That means no Pandora or Seamus, and probably no Neverborn at all. They've served me faithfully (although not particularly effectively recently), but it's time for a change, and they'll be missed.

I'm therefore left with a tough decision of what to progress for the rest of the year... Due to a complete lack of focus I've managed to get several projects half completed but not enough of anything to make a complete crew. My choices basically boil down to:

1) Gremlins
I'd intended to get a Gremlin crew completed for the GT 2011 (I know!!), but it didn't materialise and 18 months later most of my Gremlin models are still unpainted. I did dabble in the green-stuff at the start of last year, and even took Ophelia to a tournament (where she got total 3 pastings out of 4 games, but let's not go in to that again) back in March, but never got around to finishing the faction off.

2) Guild
I'd had a Perdita boxed set knocking around for quite a while, and finally got it painted last year, along with a couple of additional minions, but I've only ever used them in games once or twice. A couple of reinforcements would be all it would take to get them tournament ready, and the skeleton of an Ortega crew is fully painted already, so I have a base to build from.

Latest work-in-progress

3) Arcanists
I've wanted to get a Rasputina crew done for a long time, and I painted an Ice Gamin as a test piece recently, and really enjoyed it. I have most of the crew bought and assembled, but there's a lot of painting to slog through before they're tournament ready. Mei Feng and Kaeris are also appealing, giving me some nice expansion options.

Complete except for the hands, and snow on the base

After ruminating, cogitating and digesting the above for a while, I've decided to set myself the following goals:

A) Get the Guild tournament-ready in time for an event in March. There are two tourneys happening relatively locally (one Harrogate, one Sheffield), and I'll be able to get to just one of them, and I'm hoping to be able to paint enough additional minions for Perdita to be a viable Master choice

B) Post-March, get to work on Rasputina's crew, with a view to taking her to a tournament in the summer. There's a lot of work to do, and I've decided to really pull out the stops on the crew painting-wise, so this could be a challenging goal.

C) Take the Gremlins to the GT, or another tournament towards the end of the year. This is another large project, but I really do want to give the little greenies the table time they deserve.

Three crews in a year I hear you say? It can't be done! (Well, apart from those of you who paint a crew a week. Or 5 crews in a week....). It might be a little unfocused, but what was it they say about the "spice of life"...?

077 - Vassal-faux (aka "Guild Riflemen are broken")

At the end of last year, Wyrd launched an official Malifaux module for Vassal, enabling everybody to play online games of Malifaux in their underpants from the comfort of their computer chair. Naturally, enthusiasm for this new way of playing the game is high, and organising a game of Malifaux is now as easy as popping onto Twitter and requesting somebody to join you in a Skype call. No need to drive to the local club or further away, and no pesky models required!

 

Last week I got my first look at the new toy that everybody is raving about and I have to say I'm impressed. I spectated in a game first to get the hang of what all the buttons do, and a couple of evenings later got a chance to try it out myself.

 

Following my game, here's the pros and cons of Vassal-faux as I see them:

 

Pros

 

a) No models required

This manifests in several ways. You can now test out new additions for your existing crews without having to buy the models first, and decide whether you really need them or not. You can try out a completely new crew every game if you like, making Vassal an ideal toybox to play about in. If you're not big on the hobby side of the game, you can even play without needing to paint a single figure.

 

b) Battle report friendly

Vassal allows you to save screenshots of the battlefield, making reporting on the battle afterwards so much easier. I took screenshots at the end of each turn in my game, and you'll find a short summary of the game, largely in picture form, at the end of this post. I realise you could do the same thing with a real game using a camera, but it's not nearly as easy, or as clear for the reader to follow.

 

c) Pausability

Need to go to tend to an emergency? No problem! Save the game and continue another time once disaster has been averted.

 

d) Accessibility

Possibly the biggest pro, is that with Vassal you're not limited to playing the same bunch of local players, but can instead challenge people anywhere in the world. Yes that's right! All that international trash-talk from both sides of the pond now has an outlet!

 

Cons

 

a) No models required

Yes, this is also down as a pro, but to me, playing Malifaux (or any wargame) without figures seems a pointless endeavour. A large part of my enjoyment of the game comes from seeing scenes and conflicts playing out in front of me, and small circles with names written on them does not have the same appeal as fully painted crews on evocative terrain.

 

b) Range

Viewing the game in 2D form takes away the players' natural ability to judge distance, potentially penalising some actions. On the flip side, there's no way of preventing your opponent pre-measuring anything they like by putting a ruler up against the screen.

 

c) Too many windows

With separate windows for the game board, the two fate decks, the side board and the chat window, the screen can get very cluttered. If you have two monitors you'll be fine, but for the rest of us that don't you either have to keep clicking between the various windows, or set up your screen in such a way that things are zoomed out and you can squeeze everything on. I managed the squeeze, but was frustrated to find that the configuation settings would not remember my set-up and that I'd have to resize everything afresh every time I used the program

 

Battle Report -Shared Supply Wagon

Me - Perdita, Nino, Santiago, Francisco, Guardian, Austringer (Stake a Claim, Assassinate)

vs

Adam - Lady Justice + Avatar, Executioner, 3 Guild Riflemen, 5 Guild Hounds (Stake a Claim, Breakthrough)

 

Adam's plan was clearly to group up the dogs and run them all into my deployment zone to ensure they were significant and claim his two schemes. I figured that Justice would have to come at me, and that with concentrated effort I could take her down easily enough. My stake a claim was the cactus in the centre, close to where the Supply Wagons would both be ending up. Santiago and the accompanying Guardian had escort duties, and I was trying the Guardian for the first time after reading that they could be an effective pairing. 

 

The pictures below show the position at the end of each turn.

 

Turn 1

 

My Austringer took up position hiding in my building, and Francisco moved to cover the right flank from the approaching dogs. Everything else shuffled forwards.

 

 

Turn 2

 

I advanced Santiago and the Guardian, but in my inexperience missed out on switching on the +Armour buff. Lady Justice dived in, and with a hand full of masks managed to put out at least 6 attacks through Onslaught that killed both models without breaking a sweat. So much for trying out the pair! She was also in easy striking range to take out Nino next turn. The Austringer sniped one of the Riflemen, and Francisco became embroiled in a melee with two dogs.

 

 

 

Turn 3

 

Lady Justice layed down the smack on Nino, but this left her exposed to Perdita who took 9 of her 12 wounds in a soulstoned fuel round of shooting. Francisco took down one of the Hounds, while another three dogs sneaked around on my left flank. At the end of the turn, the Executioner charged Perdita, but was unable to damage her.

 

 

 

 

Turn 4

Winning initiative, I took a chance and moved Perdita into melee with Justice. Luckily she was able to finish the job and put down Adam's master. Francisco continued to face down the remaining dog, and the Austringer also found himself facing canines in the form of three sneaky Hounds who surrounded him and prevented him escaping. The surviving Guild Rifleman fired into the melee between Perdita and the Executioner. Perdita's high defense was enough to protect her from the first shot, but the second shot hit the Executioner, and using the trigger "Two Birds..", he was able to do a splash damage onto Perdita for 3 wounds, bypassing her defense altogether!

 

 

 

Turn 5

Perdita and Francisco both finished off their melee opponents, as the Executioner and Hound finally succumbed. The Austinger fell to the very first Hound attack, and the group separated - two advanced to claim both of Adam's schemes, and the other moved to protect the now vulnerable wagon. Francisco ran back towards my deployment zone, hoping for an extra turn to be able to stop the hounds that were currently scoring Adam 4 points.

 

 

 

Turn 6

Left with a difficult choice, I activated Perdita first. The hound was protected by the Supply Wagon, so she had to move to kill it (preventing it from attacking my wagon, which was on 1 Wound), and then move to claim my Stake a Claim objective. Unfortunately this left her no spare AP to attack Adam's wagon. The Guild Rifleman stood nearby then proceeded to pull out his knife, and gut Perdita (I Black Jokered the defense flip, and she took 5 wounds!) My hand full of high cards proved useless in saving her, and she was out of Soulstones from her duels with Justice and the Executioner, so down she went - the Rifleman had killed her single handedly.

 

Turn 6 proved to be the last turn, so we tallied up to find that Adam had won the game 6-2.

 

 

Closing Thoughts

 

I think my mistake was in not addressing the group of 3 Hounds earlier, but this was largely down to being activation starved. The three models (Santiago, Guardian, Nino) that I lost to Lady J early in the game were intended to tie up the centre, and without them Perdita was forced to do the job herself. rather than being able to run around doing what needed to be done. She performed admirably, but she wasn't able to track down the dogs as I'd first intended - I'd have only needed to kill two of the three to prevent them being able to claim the objective, and Francisco did a great job of holding up my right flank and stopping any dogs getting through. Oh and Guild Riflemen are filth. Nuff Said.