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Malifaux 3E: bad things happen
surfpossum
A nonentitytrying to preserve the anonymity he so richly deserves.Registered User regular
A nonentitytrying to preserve the anonymity he so richly deserves.Registered User regular
This is a thread about a game where you put little toys on a table and then move them around.
Disclaimer: it probably but unfortunately comes as no surprise that a lot of minis featuring women in this game are highly sexualized, and there are a few wince-inducing characters (most famously Seamus, a Jack the ripper type who zombifies his female victims). Malifaux is also supposed to be a big melting pot of a bunch of different cultures/religions/etc. but this uh... can feel a bit hamfisted at times, even if the general intent seems to be wanting to include cool/interesting stuff.
FACTIONS: (clickable)
There were two things that convinced me I wanted to play this game:
First and foremost is the fact that it uses a deck of playing cards instead of dice. Mechanically, this is an incredible idea. You each flip a card and compare totals, with the usual advantage/disadvantage mechanics of flipping multiple cards and using the highest/lowest. HOWEVER! You have a hand of cards that you can use to "cheat fate," replacing the card you flipped with one from your hand. This is absolutely brilliant, it totally changes the feeling of helplessness when you just roll poorly: you can save the good cards in your hand for the actions you really care about. But the good stuff doesn't stop there: the suits on the cards matter. Most actions will have "triggers," additional effects that you can get if you flip (or cheat in) a card of the corresponding suit. And of course the black joker is a suitless, uncheatable critical failure while the red joker is a critical success of any suit. So good!
The other main attraction is that the game is objective based. There are five turns in a game, and each game has one of many "strategies." Players can score one point off the strategy each turn after the first, and they all involve some kind of activity like running up to and tagging pillars, or kicking things back and forth across the centerline, or trying to plant explosives on the opponent's side, etc. They're very back and forth public objectives that you fight over but which never require you to kill anything. In addition to this, each game gets a pool of five "schemes," from which each player secretly selects two. Each scheme has one point that you can score at the end of a turn, and one point you can score at the end of the game. They include things like dropping markers near enemies, getting into a fight and then running away, simple assassinations, getting units into specific areas, etc. They're all inventive and fun and introduce so much variety into the game that playing the same crews against each other can result in wildly different experiences.
The bonus third thing is that a full crew is, like, 8 to 10 models generally.
A big problem I've had is that there are so many amazing crews in the game that I've accumulated five starter boxes and I love each of them but there are so many I still want and I'm not even going to play any of them because I love my actual crew so much. One of them has a leader that can take actions through all their models, a witch of the woods whose will-o'-the-wisps lure enemies into severe terrain which then allows all the treefolk to attack them from anywhere as long as they're in the same type of terrain. There's a crew of reporters who basically don't attack, they just debuff and tie down enemy models with relentless journalism while they get to keep interacting with schemes and strategies. There's a crew of lamplighters who create streetlamps at the start of game and can light them to gain bonuses/blind enemies. There's a plague lord who creates an engine of rats, stacking blight on enemies and then exploding them into more rats. And these are the crews I haven't been playing! Never mind each of the eight factions being interesting, nearly every single crew I look at makes me go oooh, that's so cool. They are so varied creatively and mechanically that each one really feels like a completely unique experience. And, according to people who know way more about this than me, there are some crews that are considered strong but none to the point where playing something else is a suboptimal choice, which is crazy.
Resources
There are a ton of fluffy lore podcasts! They range from mediocre to decent fun, tho the first 50ish have awful sound mixing.
The rules: here they are!
There's a free app, it's made by one guy and is actually very functional and helpful. You can run games in it, build crews in it, it's got all the stat cards, a rules reference and a link to the full rules, it's an incredibly useful thing.
There's also a free Vassal module if that's your sort of thing.
These guys have several episodes, especially in the early ones, that are really good info for beginners:
https://www.theothercoastpodcast.com/blog/
Anyway I mainly wanted to make a big post about Malifaux it's very good.
Malifaux, a twisted mirror of an alternate Earth in the 1900s; a world of gothic horror, Victorian structures, steampunk constructs, and wild west gunslingers. Rife with undead amalgamations, monstrous vengeful apparitions, and other creatures that bump in the night, these near-lawless lands are still worth treading for some, as the Soulstones deep within the cavernous catacombs are worth more than the sweat and blood it takes to obtain them.
The lure of Malifaux’s valuable Soulstones has brought the powerful, the desperate, the ambitious, and the cunning to Malifaux from Earth. The Guild’s control of the Breach ensures that it remains a dominant power within Malifaux City, but it is challenged on all sides by the sabotage and magical prowess of the Arcanists and the shuffling undead that serve the foul Resurrectionists. The Outcasts, a loose collection of mercenaries and other ne’er-do-wells, sell their services to the highest bidder when not pursuing their own individual objectives, and the mysterious Ten Thunders crime syndicate works from the shadows to extend its influence throughout the city.
Not every threat to Malifaux comes from Earth, however. The ancient Neverborn will not easily surrender their lands to what they see as foreign invaders, and the Gremlins of the Bayou have become quite powerful by learning from and mimicking the humans that seized control of Malifaux City.
Disclaimer: it probably but unfortunately comes as no surprise that a lot of minis featuring women in this game are highly sexualized, and there are a few wince-inducing characters (most famously Seamus, a Jack the ripper type who zombifies his female victims). Malifaux is also supposed to be a big melting pot of a bunch of different cultures/religions/etc. but this uh... can feel a bit hamfisted at times, even if the general intent seems to be wanting to include cool/interesting stuff.
FACTIONS: (clickable)
There were two things that convinced me I wanted to play this game:
First and foremost is the fact that it uses a deck of playing cards instead of dice. Mechanically, this is an incredible idea. You each flip a card and compare totals, with the usual advantage/disadvantage mechanics of flipping multiple cards and using the highest/lowest. HOWEVER! You have a hand of cards that you can use to "cheat fate," replacing the card you flipped with one from your hand. This is absolutely brilliant, it totally changes the feeling of helplessness when you just roll poorly: you can save the good cards in your hand for the actions you really care about. But the good stuff doesn't stop there: the suits on the cards matter. Most actions will have "triggers," additional effects that you can get if you flip (or cheat in) a card of the corresponding suit. And of course the black joker is a suitless, uncheatable critical failure while the red joker is a critical success of any suit. So good!
The other main attraction is that the game is objective based. There are five turns in a game, and each game has one of many "strategies." Players can score one point off the strategy each turn after the first, and they all involve some kind of activity like running up to and tagging pillars, or kicking things back and forth across the centerline, or trying to plant explosives on the opponent's side, etc. They're very back and forth public objectives that you fight over but which never require you to kill anything. In addition to this, each game gets a pool of five "schemes," from which each player secretly selects two. Each scheme has one point that you can score at the end of a turn, and one point you can score at the end of the game. They include things like dropping markers near enemies, getting into a fight and then running away, simple assassinations, getting units into specific areas, etc. They're all inventive and fun and introduce so much variety into the game that playing the same crews against each other can result in wildly different experiences.
The bonus third thing is that a full crew is, like, 8 to 10 models generally.
A big problem I've had is that there are so many amazing crews in the game that I've accumulated five starter boxes and I love each of them but there are so many I still want and I'm not even going to play any of them because I love my actual crew so much. One of them has a leader that can take actions through all their models, a witch of the woods whose will-o'-the-wisps lure enemies into severe terrain which then allows all the treefolk to attack them from anywhere as long as they're in the same type of terrain. There's a crew of reporters who basically don't attack, they just debuff and tie down enemy models with relentless journalism while they get to keep interacting with schemes and strategies. There's a crew of lamplighters who create streetlamps at the start of game and can light them to gain bonuses/blind enemies. There's a plague lord who creates an engine of rats, stacking blight on enemies and then exploding them into more rats. And these are the crews I haven't been playing! Never mind each of the eight factions being interesting, nearly every single crew I look at makes me go oooh, that's so cool. They are so varied creatively and mechanically that each one really feels like a completely unique experience. And, according to people who know way more about this than me, there are some crews that are considered strong but none to the point where playing something else is a suboptimal choice, which is crazy.
Resources
There are a ton of fluffy lore podcasts! They range from mediocre to decent fun, tho the first 50ish have awful sound mixing.
The rules: here they are!
There's a free app, it's made by one guy and is actually very functional and helpful. You can run games in it, build crews in it, it's got all the stat cards, a rules reference and a link to the full rules, it's an incredibly useful thing.
There's also a free Vassal module if that's your sort of thing.
These guys have several episodes, especially in the early ones, that are really good info for beginners:
https://www.theothercoastpodcast.com/blog/
Anyway I mainly wanted to make a big post about Malifaux it's very good.
+5
Posts
I was lucky enough that a local guy who organizes a bunch of stuff started up a weekly thing at our FLGS and once I got a few games in I could confidently strongarm my friends into playing as well because it's rull good.
Like, the fact that you generally go through most of the deck in a turn means that your luck will generally average out, unlike with dice.
So even if you have a terrible hand at the start of the turn, at least those bad cards are not in the deck to get flipped. Or if you miss a string of attacks, each consecutive one gets a little more likely to hit.
And even if your opponent spends a card to make you miss, you still did some damage to them by making them use a high value card defensively rather than offensively.
There are so many ways in which it provides opportunities for interesting decisions and subtle upsides to "flipping poorly" while still keeping the spice of randomness that rolling dice just cannot compete. So many instances of me spending focuses and target locks in X-Wing only to miss regardless because dice don't care what you did before the roll.
But the possible combinations are so varied and they all significantly impact the game that it will take many, many games before you play some that feel familiar.
There are 4 different strategies, 13 schemes, 4 types of deployment zones, fifty something masters (each with an alternate version now), and then of course whatever terrain you want.
Magic is the only other game I've gotten into in a big way, and one point of comparison I like to make is that new Magic sets generally have, like A Thing that's fairly different but for the most part new cards are just variations on old themes. Which is fine! I think WotC is very good at what they do. But each one of Malifaux's crews feels completely different and interesting in a way that I just don't get from Magic anymore; pretty much every single one I look up makes me go, oh, that seems so cool, I want to try doing that.
It's a problem and my children are starving
I don't want to assume that you haven't played but for anybody who's been curious, the full game is incredibly intimidating and not really recommended as a way to start, so:
Instead, there's a mode called Henchman Hardcore, where you have a Henchman as your leader and three Enforcer/Minion models as your crew. I thiiiiiiink every Core box comes with a Master, a Henchman, and three Minions, so it's pretty easy to get something ready to go (they might be wildly imbalanced tho).
Normally the mode just says kill each other but the recommended setup in our local scene is:
Deployment: Wedge
Strategy: Break the Lines
Schemes: Vendetta and Death Beds
This is enough stuff that you can get a feel for the various parts of the game while limiting the number of models you have to process, and is far better than attempting a full game right off the bat.
The absolute bare minimum you'll need (besides a 3'x3' board with some terrain) are some 30mm bases (maybe some 40mm and 50mm ones), two 54 card decks of playing cards, and a way to measure inches. The app has all the scheme and strat and stat cards in it and lets you build crews and run games (tracking health/activations/conditions/etc), and the rules are available for free.
https://www.theothercoastpodcast.com/blog/
Most of the other ones are geared towards more experienced players, but these guys do a really good job of going over some core concepts.
It might have more value once you have a game or two under your belt so you are familiar with the mechanics, but it's good stuff.
Two of them played a full game against each other, Wong vs Ophelia.
Ophelia equips like four guns and starts blastin' while Wong throws explosions everywhere, damaging his own units to give them "glowy" and speed buffs.
One of Ophelia's guns makes a huge mess and drops shards of glass (the blue tokens) everywhere it hits:
I played a smaller scale game of Sparks vs Cassandra.
Cassandra is the henchman of smuggler/showgirl Colette; she and her showgirls stack Distracted onto enemies before stabbing them. Sparks is a gremlin engineer whose crew can ride the rails between Scrap markers they create.
The highlight of this one was I got to ramp the Mechanized Porkchop over a wall and onto a showgirl, steam vents screaming as it belly flopped her into paste:
The big twist is that insignificant models, which normally can't interact with strategies/schemes at all, are hyperactive "children" and can check any terrain they come into contact with for free.
We had Mah Tucket and Ophelia (title version) bring their respective clans together for an Easter egg hunt that became violently competitive. Ophelia has 3 insignificant Young LaCroix who very rapidly started tearing through the map, quickly finding two eggs and searching right up until Mah's Bushwhackers got them in their sights.
The Bushwhackers pumped kilos of lead into Ophelia's crew while Big Brain Brin mind controlled his cyborg monkey into searching a bunch of nearby terrain to no avail. Mah Tucket horribly holler'd the rest of the crew around to maximize their search area, also to no avail.
Then we discovered that Ophelia could resummon the younglings all in one go, and suddenly Mah was looking outnumbered again (despite the out of keyword Hog Whisperer summoning Piglet after Piglet).
Merris LaCroix, being able to fly around with her jetpack, managed to lock down several of Mah's egg hunters, but a few eventually managed to break through to find a single egg. Ophelia's Bo Peep rode her pig into Mah's backline but the monkey was able to tackle and slow her, preventing her from getting to the hidden eggs. Mah Tucket herself waded in at the end, engaging two of the recently resummoned younglings and sending one right back with her giant spoon.
In the end Mah managed to pull out a win despite having found only one egg to Ophelia's two. Merris scored one point off of Vendetta, having killed her Bushwhacker target. The monkey tackling Bo Peep triggered the first point of Catch and Release, and he was able to scamper away and earn the second point at the end of the game. Bo Peep also was my Bait and Switch target, so Mah scored a point from her being so far back on her side.
It ended up being an extremely bloody Easter egg hunt; every pale green token here is a corpse marker:
I think one of the brilliant things about this game is that it's so extremely complex that it's hard to completely break it. Even this weird randomly created strat led to a really fun and thematic game. Just great stuff.
Like, I have no idea what play style, if any, I would enjoy, because 2D strategy in general feels like a language I don't speak.
wrt Malifaux itself, the best approach is to start small, with a pared down gamemode. This wall of text hidden amongst the other walls of text further up the page lays out the version we use locally, and it works pretty well. Keep in mind that your first full 50ss game will take about an hour for each turn, and that's assuming you've played a few games of the smaller version. This does get down to about three hours for a full game with experience, but it is a b i g game. My first half a dozen games were pretty much just learning what my models actually do on the board.
If that doesn't scare you off, to suggest a starting crew I generally ask people what they like to do in other games: do you like to build a big engine that generates a lot of resources? Do you like to go full aggro, just trying to murder your way through everything fast? Do you want to try and play defensively and deny your opponent points? etc. and then I go ask one of the people with a much more encyclopedic knowledge of the game about what they'd recommend. (and then I recommend the best faction, Bayou, made of redneck gremlins)
But also pretty much every crew in the game is perfectly viable and does lots of interesting stuff, so you can preeeeeetty safely just pick something you think looks cool.
Also the class I signed up for to get my "professional development" hours in happens to take place smack dab in the middle of Malifaux night at my FLGS so I'm jonesing, feel free to ask any and all questions
I haven't played Malifaux in years, but adored the game mechanics, setting, and crews.
Sometimes you just wanna rock Jack the Ripper and his motley crew of zombie hookers.
My biggest gripe right now is I still haven't gotten over Plastcraft going out of business. I was a huge fan of their pre-colored terrain, it made making a good looking table easy and relatively cheap. I never got around to buying their other Malifaux terrain and now it's gone forever.
This was my Bayou board. All I painted myself was the log piles and crates.
We immediately piled into a massive scrum over the central strat marker; they were playing Dreamer, who gets to summon a bunch of nightmares and has a few big beefy units that will pounce onto anyone tackled by the nightmares. I was running Mecha Meemaw, trying out a crew with a bunch of armor and healing.
My dudes Rode the Rails into the center, where Teddy and Lord Chompy bits proceeded to charge into them. Here's Mah Tucket getting ready to scramble into the fray:
Followed by Bo Peep barreling in, stampeding into multiple units and healing up everyone around her:
We only got through two turns, but it was lots of fun! Many big swings, lots of models punching each other, good times all around
The new strats seem cool and designed to be more approachable by a variety of crews rather than emphasizing hiring for a specific task; they'll still significantly impact what you're trying to do in a game, but seems like you can approach them without needing specific tools so much?
A good (relatively) brief discussion can be found in the second half of this:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-other-coast/id1529498507?i=1000571547174
Today Mecha Meemaw faced off against Professor Von Schtook and his zombie robot students. Von Schtook started the game standing on the roof of a building, surveying the battlefield, proudly watching his students/creations march into battle... only to have Mah waddle forward, yank him off the roof with her rusty trusty harpoon gun and beat him to a pulp.
Von Schtook after having been yoinked from his perch
The harpoon gun also dropped a bunch of scrap, which allowed Sparks, the factory working union gremlin, to Ride the Rails into the middle of his crew and create a Hostile Work Environment, preventing Von Schtook from passing out upgrades.
Sparks LeBlanc and his trusty wrench
The MVPs were definitely the two Test Subjects, a cyborg monkey and chicken, who got to Charge every time one of the professor's crew cheated in a card... which his crew is designed to do constantly.
MVPs
Bo Peep was also fantastic, ensuring that everybody stayed in the fight far longer than they had any right to.
Everybody heals up whenever they damage an enemy? Ludicrous
This was the first game where Mecha Meemaw's crew really felt like it was coming together; the exciting part is that Trixiebelle was hired on specifically for this strategy, and so I feel like there's a decent amount of wiggle room for adjustments to be made as well.
Anyway I'm super glad the FLGS is open for games again, I've really missed this.
All books are lightly to moderately used. No dog-earring or musty smells.
Book list as follows, links are so you know which edition/version of the item it is. Not my sales.:
Warhammer 40k
Warmachine
Malifaux 2E
Kings of War
Flames of War
If you are interested in any of these, please shoot me a PM and we can figure something out.
But with the new(ish) title system, Wyrd seems to be encouraging sticking to your keyword and versatiles more; the two versions of your leader can provide a lot of variety and will inform what sort of crew you want to build around them
So the latest wave of Malifaux is* upon us; are you interested in a nomad whose crew flips between two modes on a whim? An artillery crew that features a walking cannon that doubles as a tea tray? Some random vampire dude that probably has lore? A librarian managing a bunch of stories that came to life? A guy convicted of unlicensed magic use who stored his brain in a box? Some gremlins who like to fish?
As a reminder, Wyrd is creating two versions of each master now, which greatly expands the capabilities of each keyword. This makes it much easier to pick a crew and play it in a large variety of scenarios, rather than needing to learn a bunch of different crews
If you don't already have the free app (it's good! it's free! search "m3e crew builder" in yr app store!) you can find a big list of all the masters here:
https://biggerhat.net/advanced?station=1
And you can search their keyword to see all the models that share it
And then we can discuss which faction is the best and why it's bayou
* has been for a while, really, but posting is hard
So I've been trying to build local interest for Malifaux and it's been harder than you'd expect, which is strange because four hours away, NC's triangle is home to what I've been told is largely considered one of the stronger "metas" from a few years back.
That being said, my hard work finally paid off and I had two people run a demo-ish game today. One person actually had played a game before and even had nicely painted minis! The other person was just curious, and used my shameful gray plastic.
The "veteran" player on the left had Zoraida's core box, and the newbie on the right used Reva's core box. I had them each just go with core boxes and get three soulstones each. On @Surfpossum 's idea I played the Strategy of Guard the Cache (the caches are marked with the cross-hairs), and let them each choose one scheme between Assassinate and Leave your Mark. Zoraida took Leave your Mark and Reva took Assassinate.
I only got a picture of the deployment, because I was really busy explaining rules and helping them both figure out how actions should resolve, etc.
Zoraida kind of stomped the Reva player, mostly because the Zoraida player had at least a vague idea of what their crew could do and the Reva player had one goal: blow up a corpse candle under Zoraida, which he accomplished, so who was the real winner here, huh?
Overall it seems that there might be enough people to get a regular group going- the Zoraida player knows someone else with models and there's one other person I've been talking to with models who just wasn't able to make it today. So including myself and my wife there are at least four people with models, and one person with an interest.
If only I wasn't about to have a relatively large life change* that will limit my ability to organize a local meta....
*when can babies play Malifaux?