League of Extraordinary Henchman Sunday Recap

Day two Philippa and I got up and grabbed a quick bite to eat before Joe picked us up again and drove us to the venue. We were both a bit low on energy and low and behold we get drawn for our first matchup and we are facing each other on table one! Who'd have thought?!

Game 1 vs Philippa

Stake a Claim (Flank)

LITS

Distract

Protect Territory

Plant Evidence

Frame for Murder

My List: 

Dreamer with Wings of Darkness, Dreams of Pain, Otherworldly

2 silurids

2 insidious Madness’

Coppelius with On Dreaming Wings

2 Day Dreams

Cache of 7

Her List:

Rasputina with Arcane Reservoir, Armour of December

3 Ice Gamin

Silent One

Wendigo

Snowstorm with Imbued Energies

2 December Acolytes

I won 8-2

My Plans: 

I was laughing to start this game as I got to play Philippa in a game that was heavily favoured in my advantage as my crew is very good at stake a claim (due to Silurids and dreamer giving walk 7 insidious madness’/Coppelius fast) compared to her much slower crew. I basically planned on ignoring her and focusing on just getting down as many Stake a Claim and scheme markers as possible. Just flood the board with markers so she couldn’t keep up. Unluckily I underestimated how Flank deployment would affect the game, which almost cost me. I managed to take it 8-2 scoring max points as the game ended after turn 3. But there were several times in this game where Philippa managed to tie me up on stake a claim markers, requiring me to adapt on the fly to score the strat. She got her two points for distract, which I had actually forgotten was in the pool. Unluckily she decided to take Frame for Murder on Snow Storm which was a bad call as I was taking a crew with basically no damage potential and I never even came close to killing him. Not sure I ever even attacked him all game.

League of Extraordinary Henchman Saturday Recap

First of all I would like to thank Mike Marshall, Lee Batrick and anyone else involved in running this event. I would also like to thank Joe Wood for driving Philippa and I up from London and picking us up from our hotel and taking us to the event each morning. The event was a ton of fun and it wouldn’t have been possible without you guys. 

Last year I played in two 10-person tournaments at Table Top Nation in Essex, but until this weekend hadn’t really tested my mettle on the larger UK tournament scene. It was a great first introduction as having the top 16 players in the country out of the pool due to the Masters gave me some more confidence that I could do ok this weekend. My main goal for the weekend was to come out with a winning record. I went 3-3 in my 6 tournament games in 2014 and wanted to improve upon that. I would need to likely go 3-1 on one of the days to achieve this goal. I was also looking forward to meeting some of the guys I had been chatting with on twitter in person. I also wanted to focus on having fun and not making any major mistakes. I could accept getting outplayed by better players, especially against players with crews I had never seen, but didn’t want to beat myself by forgetting things like Terrifying…

Learning from League of Extraordinary Henchmen

I went to Coalville along with Insidiously Mad for my first big tournament, League of Extraordinary Henchmen. It was a challenge to pit myself and my Arcanist crew against Factions which provoke me to paralyse and blast everything in line of sight with Raspy. Not that I need much provocation.

Most games didn’t turn out the way I would have wanted them to as I am still learning my own crew. I learnt so much about other model's (Witchling stalker's condition removal abilities are so annoying!) and there were a few priceless moments (distracting the eponymous insidious madness with Wendigo being one of them :p).

All my adversaries were as gentlemanly as henchmen can be - thank you to everyone who I played against and who made me feel so welcome.

I didn't take any notes during the game but here are a few highlights and things that I have learnt through one game or more.

Table confidence.

Table confidence.

As with many things your mind set plays a big part of any competitive game and Malifaux is no exception.

Now in Malifaux you have simple bluffing about what schemes you’re doing and how good you control hand is but before any of that you have how confident you are about the game and it shows from the moment you sit at the table.

Having A Blast Tournament.

With help from the rest of the Abnormalifaux crew we will be running a 50ss tournament at Dark Sphere in London on the 21st of February.

If you are interested you can find the rules pack here https://www.dropbox.com/s/9evseow70uatrc8/Having%20a%20Blast%2021.2.15%20rules%20pack.pdf?dl=0

And you can get tickets here https://www.darksphere.co.uk/p.php?p=57980

Hopefully we'll get to see some of you there.

And the dead shall walk

Well I’ve been playing Nicodem for the slow grow league and a tournament which means I’ve had about 20 or so games with him so far. I have a bit of a love hate relationship with him at the moment. I have won 1 game with him. The rest have been epic disasters with some 10-0 losses in the mix. I’ve learned lots and will certainly admit that I am not a very good player (I have an epic loss record across every system I play and if it is a 1^st person shooter I struggle on easy settings unless the enemy stand still and I’m behind them!)

I struggled with Nicodem in the early game, then push hard in the mid game (often making my opponent mutter things about being doomed, and how broken Nicodem is) then things fall apart in the end game again. 

Things I’ve learned that Nicodem does well

The Real Cost Of Getting In To Malifaux

Malifaux is credited with being one of the cheapest miniature games to get in to with a suggested cost of 1 boxed crew and rule book. Realistically though there are a number of things that a new player will want to buy to get the fullest experience.

THINGS YOU NEED

1. The Rule Manual

Malifaux is one of the simpler war games to learn the rules of, however that doesn't mean that you're not going to need to refer back to rule book to settle a dispute or if you want to look up what is and isn't possible to do. Malifaux is great in this regard as it comes with two options for rule books, the full version which has information for all of the models available at the time of print (1st wave) and a smaller, cheaper rule book which simply contains everything you need to play.

Additionally M2E offers the option for an additional book (though likely to get more later) which contain the stat cards for all the models in their line, current and planned. Both this book and the full rules manual offer a good way for players who want to enter the competitive scene to understand the models that they will be playing against, even if they only buy a few models or only one faction. If however you intend to only play with a small group, one rules manual will be sufficient for any number of players.

Malifaux Rules Manual - RRP £10
Malifaux 2nd Edition Rule Book (includes stats) - RRP £27.99
Malifaux 2E Crossroads (new models' stats only) - RRP £30

2. A Crew (plus extras)

It should go without saying that you will need miniatures to play with. Whilst you do not strictly need to buy official miniatures for casual play, tournament play requires that the model be identifiable and although they allow for customisation, that does mean you will want to get the official releases.

New Years Resolutions

Well, it's that time of year. Time to make promises that will never be kept. THIS year I will definitely make use of that gym pass. I'll eat healthy, study harder in my spare time, and save the world from poverty. ... Resolutions are hard. We always go in with the best of intentions. Often we are delusional or denying our own personalities when we make these resolution. Therefore when it comes to Malifaux for 2015, I'd like to think of the following more as goals than resolutions. Things I will aim to do rather than anything I can promise. With that caveat, here are my goals for 2015:

1) End the year in the UK top 50 (Malifaux Rankings). People needed 4 solid showings to make the top 50 this year. Think it will be even harder for 2015 so will probably need to end in the top 3rd of 4 events (just a guess, hard to say in advance). Also now that their are faction rankings up I would also like to end up in the Neverborn top 10.

It's 2015, technically.

I thought I'd take a bit of time to talk about my malifaux plans for 2015. The fact that I have any plans for 2015 is a surprise to me as to be honest I'm not known for my forward planning.

I'll start with my henchman type plans, the largest of those is to TO my first tournament. 

With a lot of much needed help from my the rest of the Abnormalifaux crew and also from my friendly neighborhood games store I'm looking to run my first ever tournament and if things go well hopefully it'll be the first of many.

Monday Malifaux Musings: Strategy Fun Rankings

I thought I would try something different this post. Because I am the kind of person who likes to keep things organized (...sure why not) I've decided that I will organize all my crazy ramblings under the heading Monday Malifaux Musings. I was originally going to go with Madness' Monday Morning Malifaux Musings but I thought someone might charge me with excessive alliteration. 

Rather than focus on anything tactical I want to talk about FUN! Specifically about which Strategies I find lead to the most fun and least fun games. This was written before the new strategies came out for Gaming Ground 2015, but I will definitely do a part 2 next year including those strategies once I have played them all a few times. Thought I might as well combine this with my love/obsession with ranking things so therefore:

1)      Squatters Rights

Man I love Squatters Rights. It’s like all the good parts of the other strategies put into one. You have the fight in the centre from turf war (over the 3 middle markers), the need to have models that can function on their own like Reconnoitre (the outside markers), the need to take lots of interact actions (Stake a Claim), and the need to kill your opponent to stop them from doing all of these things (Reckoning I guess…). I also love Squatters Rights because I think it is the strategy that has the most tactical options open for it. You can try to win through speed by getting to the markers before your opponent can (especially the outside ones) through speedy models, From the Shadows allowing you to start deployed on the markers, or from utilizing pushes. You can win through manipulation (Doppelganger Don’t Mind Me, Chatty denying interacts, Obeying models off of markers so you can flip them, Lucius allowing all minions within 6” interact while in combat to name a few). You can win through killing power by just wiping your opponent off the markers. Every Master has a tactical way they can take on this strategy. I do believe it is the most balanced scheme by Master due to this reason and it is the most fun for this reason. There are so many ways you can go about the strategy (and denying your opponent his markers) that it leads to a great tactical chess match between opponents that I just love to see.