Malifaux: Battle Night!

This past weekend I went and joined the occasional Malifaux night that Josh throws at his house. With his entire basement converted into a gaming center (complete with four 3'x3' tables full of terrain), it gives a great location for multiple people to get together and play games. I had been present to two of these nights previous: the first time was a fairly busy night, with about six people total in attendance the first night and just Darren, Josh and I the second. This night, however, had the basement crammed full with ten people!

The first round of games (only) had seven people in attendance, so we decided to break into three groups: two 1v1 games and one three-person free-for-all. We flipped cards to determine our partners (two lowest and two highest together, the rest for the three-person game) and I was matched up with a fellow named Curtis. I had been talking to him before the games started and found out that he collected Guild almost exclusively and that he did not play very often with the guys, but enjoyed coming out every once in a while for the company and good times. He was very self-deprecating about his skill with Malifaux, ensuring me he barely understood the rules, to which I laughed and told him this would be only my second game so I couldn't be much better off. With that, we both consulted our rule books and got started.

(I also apologize in advance for the lack of pictures; my phone died midway through the night so I couldn't record any evidence of the games. Next time, I'm going to take an actual camera and do things right! Promise!)

Malifaux: First Battle Report

(I apologize if the following entry is a bit confusing to people; if you are truly interested in a quick primer of the rules and procedures of Malifaux, just leave a comment and I'll do a quick version in a future post!)

Last time I talked about Malifaux, I spent the whole time either giving a brief explanation of the premise of the game or talking about how I felt about actually getting into the wargaming hobby. Well, this time, let's skip all the preamble and get right into it:

Recently, I played my first full game of Malifaux. I had in my possession two entire boxes of models, the Kaeris and Mei Feng box sets, but had not yet completed the assembly and/or painting of all the models. Couple that with the fact that I've yet to find an adequate carrying case and I instead found myself borrowing a few models from my friend (and host for the game) Josh. The other person was another friend named Darren; together, they were the collective force that got me involved with Malifaux and gave me the push to get started with the hobby.

(For the battle report itself, I'm recounting this mostly from memory. There was only two pictures taken of the entire game -- thanks to Darren for those -- and they were at roughly the same time. So I apologize if I get the order of some things mixed up!)

Setup

Darren is in the middle, Josh and I were
on opposite table edges. You may ignore the dots.

We decided to do a 1v1v1 match-up, using the multiplayer rules from the Wyrd Chronicles. Even though I was borrowing models from Josh, I forced myself to choose only models that I actually owned in order to start getting a better understanding on how to use them for my own future matches; this led to me declaring Arcanists as my faction. Darren declared Neverborn and Josh declared Resurrectionists and we agreed on a 30 Soulstone limit. The location was the Arcanist Lab with the Recalibration Device feature (more on this later). As an indoor location, we used the Terraclips table that Josh has in his basement, as opposed to the outdoor wilderness table.

As we were using the multiplayer rules, the 3-person deployment is the picture to the right; we flipped to see who was in the middle and Darren was the "monkey in the middle". The Strategy for the match (the objective to complete to earn Victory Points) was Darren's choice and he chose Shared Contain Power -- all the multiplayer games use shared strategies, meaning all opponents have to complete the same objective. The main difference with multiplayer Contain Power, however, is that each player needs to designate a different target, and no target can be nominated twice. These targets were ultimately decided during the deployment phase, so we'll get to that in a bit.