Welcome to my nightmare... edition crew

Following on from last weeks progress report I have now finished the Dark Carnival This is just a quick post as there wasn't a huge amount left to work on.

First up is the mechanical wonder that is the mannequin. I found this quite tricky to paint as the is so little detail but such character in its plainness that it was hard to know where to stop. I ended up just sticking to three colours and just trying to add some depth to each colour.

2017 Resolutions

Alright, finally had time to write up my New Years Resolutions for this year. Since we started the blog a couple years back this will be my third Resolutions post. 2015 was a smashing success and 2016 a rousing failure. So let's see how we do this time..

Gaming Resolutions: 
1) 4 more masters in 10+ game club
For anyone who knows me, it is not a surprise to know that I love nice round statistics. As I track all the games I play (at least which Master and if I won/lost) I noticed that in 2014-2015 I played 4 Masters 10+ times (Dreamer, Pandora, Lilith, Lynch). In 2016 4 more Masters jumped into the 10+ game club (Viktorias, Collodi, Zoraida, Lucius). Now this does not mean I played those 4 masters 10 times in 2016 (the only master I played 10+ times in 2016 alone was Collodi), rather it is referring to the fact that those were Masters I had played fewer than 10 games total with prior to 2016 who after 2016 I had played a total of 10+ games with. ... I think I made that sound more complicated than it needed to be... Anyway, this year I want to get another 4 masters past the 10+ game number. My current Masters under 10 games are Ophelia (7 games played), Shenlong (5), Marcus (2), Mr Cooper (2), Titania (1) and Misaki (0). So the likelihood is the 4 masters come from there but it could always be a new Master I add and fall in love with. Shenlong is very likely to be next to hit 10 games as I am painting him atm and can't wait to get him on the table.

2) Try 8 new Masters (inc Wrath)

I've currently played 13 Masters so this would be a pretty massive jump. Also the only "Masters" I own that I haven't played are Misaki and Wrath. So those will definitely be two of the 8. I really want to try out some Masters that I doubt I will pick up just to give them a game or two. Would especially like to borrow some Ressurs as they are the only faction I don't own any Masters of. Also I will prob try Philippa's 3 Masters since they are at home and thus accessible (Plus Raspy, Ironsides and Nellie are all quite different). This leaves me with a few others I'll need to borrow off someone else or proxy, but that shouldn't be a huge problem. This is a goal I will have to focus on but should definitely be doable.

3) Attend 10 ranked Malifaux eventsNow we start on a goal that I am not at all confident in. In 2015 I attended 13 ranked events... last year it was down to 6. This is partially due to qualifying for Masters from 2015 (so no LOEH in 2016), playing more Guildball, and also just personal life getting in the way (doing a musical in the spring took up a lot of my usual tournament weekends. This year I am aiming to get a bit closer to the number I attended in 2015.. Although 13 seems unlikely when you come to the next goal..

4) Attend 4 ranked guildball eventsI attended 4 guildball events last year, but one of them didn't end up ranked so I am still fairly low down in GB rankings (which like Malifaux are based on top 4 events). This year I'd really like to get to at least 4 ranked events to see how I could do. I've also really enjoyed all the GB events I've attended and am hoping to play in more. The main downside is the tournament scene around here (London, Essex, Woking) seems far busier for Malifaux than Guildball so Guildball requires more of a commitment to travel atm.. which means earlier mornings :P But hopefully there will be a few more local events popping up and I can get to a few events a bit further away. Currently have first event of year booked in late Feb.

I met her in a club down in old Malifaux...

So one of the bonuses of starting a new faction is that I get to paint a new faction, and it also means I finally have an excuse to paint my Dark Carnival crew.

First step was building and tidying the carnival folk. You'll notice there are no pictures of this step. That's because it's hard to take photos while you are curled up in a ball on the floor sobbing about gap filling the middle of a monkeys face. I'm fairly sure that the "Dark" in the name Dark Carnival comes from the place where the sprue designer was when they made it.

So built, cleaned up, washed in middle aged tears, and primed. Next step was thinking about how to paint them. This went back and forth through hundreds of different ideas, from monochrome to sepia, vampiric to flamboyant, oriental to Aztec. In the end I decided to just work off my alt performers style and go from there.

The alternative performer is painted around the idea of a rockabilly flamenco dancer.

My painted crews

In June 2015, about a year into my time playing Malifaux, I wrote an article where I took a photo of all my painted Malifaux. A year and a half later and I thought it was time to provide an updated cache of photos of my painted Malifaux. This will be a bit less wordy than my usual posts... so here we go!

My faux as of June 2015

It is crazy to think how much I have painted since then... 

My painted force at the end of 2016 (missing: Two rooster riders)

Now let's start breaking that giant photo down a bit..

My painted Masters

When I last posted my painting progress I had only painted 3 Masters (Dreamer, Zoraida and Pandora), now I am to 10 inc all 7 of the original Neverborn.

The Totally Arbitrary Look at 2016.

So if you're anything like me, your 2016 consisted of a lot of "Oh shit, who's died NOW?!" Seriously. That happened way too often for my liking quite frankly this year. Plus lots of swearing about world events. That also happened far too often.

Buuuuuuut 2016 also consisted of hobby! And events! And flailing! And I'm using far too many exclamation points! (This is why I'm not allowed coffee.)

So I decided to look back at a few highlights of 2016. Let's jump right in with my 3 favourite events of the year, in no particular order of merit;

Malifaux Nationals - I think this one goes without saying really. The largest Malifaux event ever with over 100 players. This was organised by the Lord of Malifaux Mike Marshall (with amazing help from Jen, Lee, Matt and more I'm probably forgetting) and the whole thing ran like clockwork. It was a very buzzy event, the social side was loads of fun (getting Stuart Snares to fulfil his forfeit of wearing glittery clips in his beard was a highlight) and it's always good to see a new venue, in this case Battlefield Hobbies in Daventry. If only my in-game performance could have risen to the occasion. <sigh>

Grumpy Goblin Charity Event - Yet more proof, if it was needed, that the Malifaux community is made up of some very very amazing people. From Dave Hill running the whole event dressed as Radioactive Man (and taking a cream pie to the face) to Joe Wood dressing like a Rotten Belle whilst running a joke crew of Leviticus and 9 Belles (yet still finishing in the top 5, it's definitely broken!) this bonkers, fun and fairly large event raised over £1000 for Ronald McDonald House Charities. I also got to play the lovely Lee Battrick in the first round which was a lot of fun. Hope to see more events at the Grumpy Goblin in 2017.

HoHoFaux - another event organised by Mike Marshall with help from Dave Brown but with the added insanity that is a story event. HoHoFaux was a fun, lighthearted and very festive story event with a surprisingly large number of players. It was one of the few events I was able to convince my partner Rich to come along to and he ended up coming home with the star prize of a very Christmassy voodoo doll. The whole mood was very giggly, I ran Dreamer all day (after all, Christmas is a time for the kids and their toys), played 3 new opponents (including Matt Spooner and my fellow Gremlin pal Simon Matless) and had 3 great games using 3 amusing scenarios written by Mike & Dave. It was also great to see that our winner was the very lovely Jen, who was playing in her first solo event! Go Jen!

2016 Resolutions: A Colossal Failure

It's 2017! And you know what the means?! It's time to look back at all our personal failings from 2016. Looking back at my resolutions from the start of last year and seeing how I did seemed like an appropriate post to start the New Year. Last year I did really well on my New Years resolutions, succeeding in 10 compared to failing only two. This year... well you'll see.

Gaming Resolutions: 
1) Get the Rainbow Badge
This one was not even close. Not only did I not get the Rainbow Badge. I didn't even attend enough events to get it if I had run a different faction at each event. Having only ever run Neverborn in events prior to 2016 I did manage to run Neverborn, Gremlins, Outcasts and Ten Thunders in events. Sadly due to only attending 6 events and not having any painted masters for the other three factions this goal was a failure. I also doubt I will make it a goal for next year, as I still haven't really got any interest in playing Guild, and I don't have the time or money for starting Ressurs. I will definitely be getting Arcanists added into the rotation this year, but I didn't really like taking just Viks to an event, as they don't really suit me, so I am not sure I will end up using Outcasts in an event again this year.

2) 10+ games played with all my masters.
When I made this goal I had 4 masters at 10+ games. By the end of 2016 I was up to 8 masters (All 7 Neverborn and the Viks). I only missed out on this goal by one Master, Mr Cooper, who I only managed to get one game played with. I ended up playing 7 Games with a Master I picked up after these resolutions (Ophelia) and if I had got her to 10 I prob could've justified this as a win, but oh well. As you will see in my painting goals, I didn't end up getting around to Dark Carnival in 2016 (which I have only finished building recently) so Cooper caused me to fail this. Still happy to have doubled my masters at 10+ games though.. maybe I should make my goal to get 4 masters past the 10 game threshold each year...

3) Take all my masters in a tournament game
This one was also quite close. If you swap Ophelia in for Cooper (as mentioned above) since she ended up jumping the quay, I actually took 8/9 Masters to events. I even took Zoraida and Lynch in events in each of their factions. The only exception was Lucius who I didn't manage to get painted in time for an event. Spoiler alert, he will be getting into a tournament game very shortly.. So although I failed I went from having only used 3 masters in an event to 8.. which is pretty good.

4) Play in at least 1 tournament in two non malifaux games (likely at Daffcon)
This was the only goal this year I truly smashed it out of the park. I played in events for Of Gods and Mortals, Frostgrave, Saga and Guildball at Daffcon (so four events in non-malifaux games). Furthermore, I attended 4 other Guildball tournaments, and even won my first Guildball tournament (and also my first best painted award) at Tanelorn. Sadly it wasn't entered into rankings, otherwise I would've ended the year in the UK top 50 for Guildball, which would've been cool. But it's nice to finally succeed at one of these..

Gaming Goals 2017.

I thought I'd take a minute to share my gaming goals for 2017, (GG17 for short. Nothing uses that already right?)