Hope everyone has been well lately, as I have disappeared like a shadow in the night thanks to football season and the omnipresence of classes and homework. Bugger that! It's almost fall break, so let the slacking begin and the tabletop flow.
To start out today, I'd just like to take a moment to follow the trends I've had in the past few years in gaming. As many of you who follow this blog are probably aware, I used to play a stupid amount of Warhammer 40000, which would eventually turn into disgust and then mello out into something more akin to a general boredom with the game and everything Games Workshop does with it. Great setting, fun party game, but there are alternatives that are much better. You don't even have to look outside the company to find one! WARHAMMER FANTASY is the better of the two games BY FAR. If you haven't yet played it, give it a go. Thank me later.
However, when I started this blog it was because I had just begun to dig into some new game seriously. I had dabbled in Warmachine and hordes, but it never really appealed to me or my friends. So I set off to find a new system that would ensnare my attention and my wallet. Thus began the Summer of Spartan, which saw me collect 2 Firestorm Armada Fleets as well as a pair of Uncharted Seas Fleets. Around the same time, I began this blog and made it into Auburn University here in beautiful Alabama. With that came some of my earliest posts about Warhammer Fantasy and the tales of the Villainous Malkk and his Clan of misfits, and the brief reports of Strike Fleet Templar.
As classes picked up and time started to become something of a scarce resource, the time I had to teach people new games dwindled to almost 0, and so after enjoying a good run of games with Uncharted Seas, we resorted back to the age old game that started it all - 40k. After a flop of a well designed campaign due to lack of participation from other members in our group, we culminated the 40k with a local tournament and a 4 way game of 40k, and with that we finally put the armies up for the semester.
As the Spring semester rolled into Summer and I went home, I managed to get some headway completed on my dusty Skaven, building into the new theme of having Asian Skaven. Of course, over the summer I managed to dig my fingers into some new games - including finally breaking into my Infinity collection with my Tohaa and Japanese Sectorial Army and some Dreadball. After getting a few games in, my friends and I finally decided that for our group and for the time we had available, we needed to find alternate methods of gaming than Tabletop games, and so we finally dove into the unexplored territory of Board Games and hit the jackpot...
Progress on the Asian Skaven was slow, but I managed to get a lot done where I had been stuck at an impasse for a long time.
Infinity demo table, getting some early gaming in to get familiar to the rules.
Dreadball pitch and my Orx team that has been finished, as well as my Corporation team.
And so now we flash forward to the current semester. Still trying to work a fine balance between classes, friends, and hobby time - which is split even further between board games and a few wargames now. We have been spending the majority of the semester playing Malifaux, which is what the main point of this whole post will be...
MALIFAUX.
At one point, I used to think that Malifaux was the most poorly designed game with the clunkiest mechanics and the oddest collection of models I'd ever seen. That was years ago, and the game seemed to be just too odd for me. However, when 2nd edition came out, I was strong armed into buying a box and giving it a whirl. I have been made a believer to the snake oil that Wyrd Miniatures is peddling. So without further ado, here is a brief overview of my experiences with this amazing game.
THE BEGINNING
With the beginning of my Malifaux journey, it simply started with buying the Pocket Rulebook ($15) and the V1.5 metal Collodi crew box ($40) and I hit the ground running - I already had a deck of cards just lying around, and so that would work for the short term.
Before long, I already had a set of games under my belt with my Collodi crew against the likes of Rasputina and Sonnia Criid, fighting tooth and nail to get each victory point I possibly could out of those games, fighting hard. However, this led to Rasputina seperating Collodi from the rest of his crew and picking them off one by one; Criid blasting everything in sight to bits with fire balls and bullets. So I went back to the drawing board. I decided to buckle down and fight smarter, not harder. I then stumbled across this jewel:
I have spent entirely too much time on this wiki, learning how the various synergies work within the different crews and how each of the crews are good at certain fighting styles and for various kinds of missions. And so after doing my homework, I decided that I needed to tweak my style of play and get some additions to my growing crew.
I ended up purchasing:
Neverborn Arsenal Deck 1 ($8)
Neverborn Arsenal Deck 2 ($8)
(Dark) Fate Deck ($10)
Brutal Effigy ($9)
Hodgepodge Effigy ($9)
Bishop ($15)
And with all of that it brought my Collodi crew up to 50ss easily, and allowed me to get all sorts of nifty tricks to play against my opponents.
Early games were played on a table that wasn't quite the correct size
With everything, I simply could not resist the pull of a second Crew to get into. And so came the Swamp Hag.
With all of this, I hope that I have intrigued you enough to continue to search about Malifaux. When I post next, hopefully that I will be able to give you some full battle reports and show off some painted models for the Swamp Hag. Until then, keep gaming!
