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"...?