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.