Bayou Brawl - Malifaux Tournament

I attended my first Malifaux tournament at the weekend.  It was a relatively small 1 day event, held in Worlds at War in Livingston, there were 10 people playing over 3 games.  Strangely it somewhat followed the wider tendency for Neverborn to be very popular (and I took mine too) with 5/10 players bringing Neverborn.  The total breakdown was 5 Neverborn, 2 Guild, 1 Resurrectionist , 1 Arcanist and 1 Outcast crews.  The other unusual thing was the event was a brawl, so 2 masters per list if players wanted but only 30 stone lists in order to keep the game time down to a sensible length.  Rather than being fixed faction it was also fixed lists, so you picked from 2 pre-submitted lists for the 3 games.

I took 2 Zoraida list but chose not to have a second master as I didn’t want to overcomplicate things for my first tournament.  Basically 1 list was a bunch of big hitters and the other one was very manoeuvrable as the strategies were pre defined so I could tailor to fit them.  The strategies were: Shared Distract, Shared Deliver a message and shared Escape & Survive and with being a brawl there  were 3 schemes for each round and you weren’t allowed to repeat schemes either, so it really meant you used virtually all of them. 

I was really happy with how I played in the event, overall results I went 1-1-1, which was unfortunate as it was done purely on game result rather than cumulative vps as are often used and probably meant I placed lower than I would otherwise have done but I wasn’t really bothered about my result.  The three games were 8-2 win, 6-6 draw and 4-5 loss. 

The win was a bit odd in that I only got all my vps on the very final turn so until then I was 0-2 down but confident I could always get at least 4 vps out the game due to the scenario as I killed his master (Hoffman).  I got max for that but only 2 scheme (assassinate – Sonnia and framed for murder on Lelu), failing to achieve kidnap (didn’t even kill 1 of those models!). 

Game 2 I suffered a T1 deliver the message due to a mistake on my part, but then delivered the message myself the next turn, I was then able to get eye for an eye and bodyguard failing on deliver a message as I’d have had to expose Zoraida to achieve it and didn’t want to chance Levi killing her.

Game 3 was frustrating as my opponents crew had been built for this objective unlike mine.  Lilith, 1 mature, 3 young and Tuco.  My opponent also had the 4 blood counters scheme, stake a claim and frame for murder, I had stake a claim, breakthrough and grudge but killed the mature with ranged fire so couldn’t get the objectives.  I tried to deny my opponent but he got 4 blood counters in the final turn from discarding soul stones and the stake a claim, other than that we pretty much wiped out each others crews but as he started with less I couldn’t stop the 1 vp for having lost less models than me.  So I lost 4-5.  This was the most annoying game as there were loads of rules queries (all went in my favour) and his movement was incredibly sloppy, I’m pretty sure he was measuring middle of back to back of base when he moved so his combat crew was even faster than it should have been.  Only 1 time I picked him up on something was when he measured a 6” spell which was clearly way out and said ‘yup that’s fine’, it was over 7” when I checked it.  Also would have had a sports hit if such things existed. 2 poison on his mature he does his turn and afterwards I remind him of the wounds, he refused to apply them as out of sequence, at that stage his mature only had 3 wounds left so would have killed it next turn when it activated.  Somewhat shocked by that but if he’s that desperate to win...

All of that over I came 7/10 as win record was the decider over vps but did pick up something to make me not care in the least.

Warhammer Wanes, Malifaux waxes

So recently my appetite for all things Warhammer has been on a downwards spiral, this is no doubt in part driven by the fact I've spent months preparing for the Warhammer ETC being held in Poland this year but I'm not actually going.

Having become team captain at the event last year I was looking forward to it immensely but then life did it's usual thing of changing plans and with child number 1 due in September I've ended up arranging not to go myself but still doing a load of the admin work for the 8 players who are going.  Not something that particularly bothers me but now that it's all done and out the way there's nothing else for me to do other than wish the guys luck and find something to fill my time.

I briefly filled that space by churning out a unit of 40 stormvermin for my skaven army which I was lending out to Mark Wildman for the Midlands Open event, again an event I wasn't going to (due to being on holiday), seems the army performed well enough in the hands of a competent player and he came in the top 20 (80 odd player event).

The next few models I then painted were Malifaux figures.  I'd been a bit naughty and broken my own rule of only buying new figs once all the old ones were complete but I did it to get some stuff cheap so at least it was for a good reason.  But because of that I had a bit of a backlog of figures kicking around which I really don't want to happen for another game system!  So I got to painting a few of them.  Months ago I'd primed a guild guard white but then been stuck for a paint scheme, well I came back to him and hit some inspiration which allowed me to quickly bash out the model.  After that I remembered what a joy Malifaux figures were to paint.  So I dug out a couple more in this case both single piece models in the Convict Gunslinger (who I'd traded for the limited edition Miss Demeanor gunslinger as I didn't like her model) and the Doppleganger.  Again both of them flew off my brush at a  rate of knots and I was very happy with the final products.

Finally I started work on Avatar Zoraida, now the avatars are something I've not been entirely sold on.  With the game being pretty complex I've never been entirely on top of the rules interactions as it was, so adding in a model with 2 sides of rules which determine purely how you can put it on the table I felt it might be a bit of overkill.  But the model is kind of nice and apparently it's stupidly good in game!  I like the figure of the model and the tree is ok, but the swamp thing (bad Juju) doesn't really do anything for me.  So I'm part way through painting that and I'm happy with how it's going but that's got my juices going for painting up the rest of my Wyrd stuff.

Currently I've got 1 guild guard, 1 austringer, 3 wicked dolls, Lelu and Liletu sat unpainted in boxes (and yes that's my 2nd lelu&liletu because I'm a filthy power gamer!).  Plus I've also got the nightmare edition Lady J box and nightmare Teddy sat waiting but they're a bit special so I'm not sure if I'll get round to them any time soon.

All of this has me back on the Wyrd forums and taking an interest again which is pretty dangerous given we're just before Gencon and they'll be releasingt he next wave of 000's of models shortly!