Introductions and Salutations
Hello! If you're reading this the chances are you're one of the poor souls I've roped into giving me your 'honest opinion' on this (that means nod, smile, tell me it's amazing and you'll be sitting on the main page clicking the refresh button, waiting with baited breath until the next post comes up). If not, welcome! My name's Seb, I'm an actor, voice-actor and generalist nerd with an all-consuming addiction to pushing small men/women around a board and fake-murdering other people's small men/women.
At this particular moment, my current vice is Malifaux, which is like as not what has drawn any of you non-emotional conscripts to this dusty corner of the blogosphere today. And boy, has it hit me hard, I'm currently four games in, a rather large sum of money down, and have spent the last few days with my face buried in books, forums and pullmyfinger articles. I'm hooked, utterly hooked, so hooked that I'm actually physically compelled to splurge my feelings about the game into the web in the form of this blog; so here we are. This will be a blog about my not-so-tentative first forays into the world of Malifaux; replete with battle-reports, musings, over-zealous analysis of the game and just about anything else my extremely short attention span drives me to write about at any given moment. I hope you enjoy your time here, or at the very least learn how to turn the word 'hello' into two paragraphs.
It Begins
Three weeks ago, I was sitting on my sofa, staring at a laptop screen upon which is the pullmyfinger wiki page, the core rules on my lap, mind abuzz with what to do. I'm a faction-hopper by nature (honestly, I'm even classified as one by my Myers-Briggs personality type), I like to experience as much as I possibly can, and that usually involves me finding as many different excuses to swap around as possible. Mentally, by this point, I'd played three different factions, Ressers, Gremlins and Outcasts; and trust me it was a lot of work to boil it down to those three. In another tab is an online wargames shop with the Malifaux page open, I've promised myself I will decide who to play tonight.
The mouse slides up to the Von Schill box.
Then down to the Somer box.
Then to the Mcmourning box.
Finally, it comes to a rest on the Hamelin box.
I click buy.
Fast forward a handful of days and I'm spewing rats out all over a Colette crew on Squatter's Rights, I've managed to dump Killjoy onto my Murder Protege target turn 1 only to flip an untimely black joker and have her pushed away to safety. A solution to my problem, MORE RATS! I manage to out-activate consistently and eventually wander a rat-catcher into a group of enemies, who, telling them not to mind him, plants a stick of dynamite in the middle of them before being soundly beaten to death (netting me 3 VP in the process with plant explosives though). Killjoy, whose been stuck in one spot playing whack-a-mole with damned steam arachnids for the last few turns finally cuts himself free and yanks the Firestarter to him Mortal Kombat style, although it takes him two rounds to finish him off. A timely obey followed by a sound 'thwonk' on the head from Hamelin ends a breakthrough attempt and by the skin of my teeth I manage to pull a victory out of the hat (get it?).
Next game sees me face off against the mighty Perdita and her crew of gunslingers in Turf War; the first turn sees Abuela get a little over-confident, walking into range to be obey'd, and sending the Austringer next to her to the deepest pits of hell with a well-placed slug, only then to follow him on his journey after a brief encounter with Killjoy. Clearly murdering people's grandma is not the best idea in territorial disputes however, as the fury of the Ortega's descended upon Hamelin and his company of undead/diseased children and big, blubbery hellspawn. Killjoy was cut down in short order, Nix followed shortly after, Hamelin held out as Hamelin does but was eventually downed by Perdita herself. I learned the pain of Austringers as a bird carrying dynamite compelled Perdita to drop the explosives in a bunch of rats, and finally, whilst my attempt to bluff breakthrough worked, a random and I quote "I may as well" shot from Perdita ended my hopes of scoring outflank. A rather crushing defeat (but I still killed Grandma).
A week on and I'm staring down The Human Blender aka Lady Justice in Squatter's Rights. Long story short, the Walking Damage Flip rips open a Strongarm Suit scoring murder protege on turn 2, and clockwork traps are dicks. On the plus side, I did get Lady Justice blighted enough that she had to flee from my army of children and I discovered just what kind of horrible things Trappers can do once you start applying them to the right targets.
My final game thus far came against Malifaux's most violent hippy: Lilith. Having decided that all the children really needed adult supervision, Hamelin had brought a number of responsible grownups this time, including two Trappers and a Strongarm. Hamelin decided that this was not the time for more rats, and instead spent most of the game telling the Trappers to shoot more (although of course, he probably should have told them to shoot at Nekima rather than Graves before she walked into combat with everything and made life horrible). Nix lost his life early on after a brief trip to the shadow world, for some reason the Strongarm and the Wretch ended up on scheme duty (note to self; Wk 4 summoning models are not ideal for this job) and Nekima decided to be what is commonly referred to as 'a colossal pain in the arse!'. Funnily enough, I really nearly managed to win this one, the final score being 8-6, as I got overly greedy attempting to kill Iggy and failed to save my Red Joker for defence, allowing me to score a full 3 VP from take prisoner on Lilith, but alas, it was not to be. Perhaps the crowning achievement of the game was a single rat, spawned by the obedient wretch on turn 1, who managed to inflict a grand total of 15 blight tokens to two different models, survive two rounds of combat and flip two red jokers for defence, I have since dubbed him the Rat of Destiny.
And that's it so far! Apologies for the short summaries of the games, from this point on I'll try and record battle-reports in full.
I hope you enjoyed this brief foray with me and you'll stick around to see what happens next.
See ya soon!
Seb.
No comments:
Post a Comment