2/27/2015

Malifaux! On a Thurday!

Thursday Night Game Night


                Good Afternoon all, hope you are having a happy Friday and are ready for the weekend, I know that I am for sure.  With the weekend approaching quickly today, I am hoping to get some blog posts up by the end of the weekend – as this post is my witness.  On Thursday night, we had our usual game night with the guys, which is usually the night for X-Wing in the land of Atlanta.  On this particular evening, my buddy wanted to break in his brand new Colette crew for Malifaux and learn how to play Malifaux proper.  We had played a game of extremely basic Malifaux, using henchmen and both of my crews – Zoraida and Collodi (Bad Juju vs Vasilisa for this game) – to play a very fast game.  That “very fast game” ended up being a 2.5 hour slug fest that was an absolute blast.  That was all 2 weeks ago though, and we actually got to play a proper game of Malifaux.

                For our game on Thursday, we decided that we should play an 80% real Malifaux game, setting up the terrain, flipping schemes and strategies, and various other book keeping things like that.  For flipping schemes, we decided that we should keep the minor objectives simpler for both of our sakes.  What I mean is that we flipped for schemes, picked the same two, and played with them revealed.  Our deployment, strategy, and schemes were as follows:  Corners, Turf War, Outflank, and Plant Evidence.

                These schemes worked well for the two crews that we were running, which featured a lot of movement tricks for both of our crews, dominating our activations for the most part.  Speaking of our crews, let me follow this up by listing them below.

Collodi Crew
Collodi – Fated, Threads of Fate, On Wings of Darkness
Vasilisa – A Friend to Talk To, Pact
Brutal Effigy
Marionettes x4

Colette Crew
Colette – Cabaret Choreography, (forgot the remaining upgrades)
Cassandra – Cassandra’s upgrade
Performers x2
Mannequin x2

                The lists, as you can see, have fairly simple strategies for them.  My Collodi crew is going to keep clustered together for the most part, using Collodi’s abilities to take the effect from the effigy (when you damage enemies, you heal a point of health) and distribute it to all friendly puppet models within a radius of Collodi, and therefore all of the crew will move towards the center in an attempt to gain the upper hand with the Turf War marker.  Vasilisa will go out to the corner, dragging one of the marionettes with her to the outside of the board with her A Friend to Talk To.  Colette had a very similar strategy, pushing Cassandra with her nimbleness out to the corner for Outflank, and then the remainder of the crew muscle their way forward to the center of the table and duke it out with the puppets.  With the mission and strategies pretty much determined, we set up to play out our little skirmish.

                The game went great, with the first combat starting in turn 3 with a bang – my Brutal Effigy took a shot in the dark at a performer, managing to drop the Red Joker, killing the model out right.  After that opening shot, the game descended into madness – and once again I failed to get anything more than take a single picture of set up, for which I apologize.  Colette and her crew managed to assault the Marionettes and the Brutal Effigy, while Collodi took a backseat just outside of the killing zone.  With the blood bath in the middle going, Colette sent out a strike force of a mannequin and a performer out to the corner where Vasilisa and the marionette were sitting, which lead to Vasilisa playing the showgirls like puppets, and sending them back their way, before Colette manufactured a mechanical dove that Collodi blew up over the performer and mannequin that were barreling down to Vasilisa.

                As the game progressed, Colette and her crew became more violent and my buddy began to finally feel the way his crew would work together and the combos that his models could bring to the table.  With that, the gloves started to come off on both sides of the table, and therefore the game exploded with violence.  Before long, a mannequin had died, 2 marionettes had died, and Cassandra had taken some damage.  The end of the game was fast approaching.  Collodi took advantage of his flight ability from his “Wings of Darkness” to fly to the opposite corner of the table, as Cassandra left earlier in the game to put the beat down on some models.  Vasilisa sprinted to the enemy side of the table to plant evidence in an old building, while the showgirls planted evidence all across my zone, at an alarming rate that I simply could not stop them.  And just like that, the game was suddenly over after 6 turns.  Colette and a performer stood gasping for breath in the center of the battlefield, surveying the destruction they had caused.  Collodi had thrown himself into the night air and was carried off to the musky forest in the north, plotting his next move from afar.  Vasilisa stood with her minion marionette that she had borrowed from her master Collodi.  She began to skulk off to the far wilderness, realizing that the battle had only just been lost. 

                The final game score was way too close for either one of our liking, but it made it a great game: 6-7 victory for Colette and the showgirls.  This elated my opponent, who was only playing his second game of Malifaux, but really only his first real game with his own crew.  He is effectively hooked on Malifaux for the time being.  So much so that he impulse bought the Rasputina and Kaeris crews, in addition to his Colette crew.  He is not the only one arming himself for the coming Malifaux explosion either – I have my Collodi, Zoraida, Tara, Colette (which I will probably sell or use as spare models), and now Viktorias crews all at my disposal, with plans to pick up Molly Squidpiddge and build a Wong Crew from scratch, which would leave me with a lovely assortment of crews and a good amount of crossover for tournament play – 2 Neverborn, 2 Gremlin, 2 Outcast, 2 Ressers – 8 variations of crews made from 6 crews.  Each with a solid amount of play styles:  Collodi with movement tricks and control, Zoraida with complete control, Tara with status effects, Viktorias with sheer damage output, Molly for summoning, and Wong for ridiculous explosions in all of the right places.

                Malifaux is an amazing game, with so much variation that it is impossible to come up with every flavor of every faction – but these crews that I am preparing to embark upon are quite frankly the best amount of variation I can get without going completely bananas, even though I may have already crossed that line by wanting to pick up 6 crews – 7 if you don’t count the Colette crew that I will most likely avoid using as a Colette crew.

                Whelp, that’s all I got for you guys – sorry that I don’t have any pictures for you.  At the time of posting this, I have played 3 other games of Malifaux with more pictures, but I will need some time to get them uploaded and some battle reports written up!  So until then, happy gaming!


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