Seamus and friends visit Croydon

So I have been testing a new Resser master finally. And it is the fearsome Seamus. And I figured what better way to test him out than to take him to an event. Prior to this event I had managed three games with him, so figured this would be a good chance to see how he held up.

Connor and the Too Much Infaux guys were running April Faux and that was perfect. Grant turned up to collect me nice and early. We arrived at the venue way before kick off and had breakfast next door with Connor.

Then off to the venue, the Croydon Conference centre. This is a great venue with plenty of space, a load of good quality terrain (many of it supplied by the TMI gang) and a bar.

We were due to discover the S&S as the games were to kick off so not too much I could prepare for...

Molly goes to Hockley

2016 was not a great year of gaming for me. I managed to play at Warboar towards the beginning of the year and maybe a handful of games the rest of the year. This was mostly due to real life and work getting in the way. The plan is for 2017 to be more productive on the gaming front.

So I signed up for a few events, discovered a fellow resser that lives pretty close to me and scored a lift to Snowdown in Hockley. Here begins the recap of my first tournament for 2017.

The morning began with two of the Croydon lot arriving to give me a lift. The driver, Grant has set his satnav to speak like Mortimer. A rather thematic beginning to the day. We arrived with plenty of time to spare and picked up some breakfast at the Sainsbury's. Then the general greetings as all the folk started shuffling into the venue and complaining about being awake so early on a Sunday.

Game 1 - George (McCabe)

George admitted that this was his tournament with Guild as he was normally an Arcanist player and apologised upfront about needing to repeatedly read his cards. I assured him that this was not a problem as I was pretty rusty myself. So that set the scene for a game that was always going to be laid back in attitude from both of us.

The board had little rivers and bridges everywhere and a few buildings, trees and ruins. We decided to make the rivers hazardous.

George dropped McCabe, Francisco, a lawyer, executioner, Lunar and a million dogs.

I ran:

• Molly with her spirit upgrage, take back the night. 
• Sybelle and bleeding tongue
• Izamu and decaying aura
• Datsue and my little helper
• Phil and my little helper
• Dead doxey

Turn 1 Molly and Sybelle were near the centre with a dog. Izamu had been pushed up by his friends and he charged in and murdered the executioner. 3 points for me and 2 for George (Quick Murder and Frame for Murder). Phil was cycling cards at the back. Datsue was heading for my right stash marker.

The lawyer was a real pain this game and kept paralysing Izamu. I think my hyper aggressive Izamu fooled George into thinking he was framed for murder - he wasn't. George was brave and ran a sword wielding Lunar into Datsue to try remove my right marker. Datsue survived and turned Lunar into a Gaki. This through George's plans for scoring claim jump as his corner dogs were now mostly useless.

This was a fantastic game with each of us doing our best to delay activations to try figure out what the other was up to. Although I started with less I managed to remove a few of his early making it much closer. Final activation of the game (in round 3 or 4 - we were slow) I had one marker down for the trap. I attempt to summon a drowned with Molly to leave another with finish the job (this would have bumped it to a 3 VP scheme) and I flip the black joker. Meaning I only scored 1. Bollocks. This left the game at a 5 all draw. Which I was still pleased with. Fun game. Great opponent.


Round 2 - Joe Wood (Collodi)

Typical. In 3 of my last 4 tournaments I have faced Joe.

I can't actually remember the fifth scheme, but no one would have picked last stand so it works.

This game had 2 ponds either side of the centre and we elected to make them hazardous. I had some windmill thing in front of me in the centre. Joe had a bunch of crates in a similar position on his side. I hate playing against Collodi. Joe had Collodi with things, Widow weaver, 3 stitched, an insidious madness and a bunch of the marionettes.

I ran:

• Molly with her spirit upgrage, take back the night. 
• Sybelle and bleeding tongue
• Izamu and unnerving aura
• Datsue and my little helper
• Phil and my little helper
• Dead doxey
• Grave spirit

This was quite a bloody game in the middle. I cycled cards with phil and pushed Izamu forward with Datsue and the doxey. Sybelle took Molly for a lift. His marionnettes wasted time. Izamu wiped a stitched off the board and then got hit multiple times and flipping  a bloody 7 with gamble your life. Bye Izamu.

Second turn Collodi and the stitched and thrown more damage around. But I managed to wipe the last two stitched from the board. Joe started dropping claim jump markers but I managed to engage a marionette with Datsue to stop him scoring. I picked up some points for hunting party, but think Sybelle went down. All the dead stitched and models had dropped enough scrap and corpses for the weaver to bring out a Teddy.

Turn 3 is when it really started turning against me. I was running out of enough models to really prevent Joe's plans. In the end it went 9-4 to Joe. I had picked up a few points for claim jump and hunting party. I managed to block at least one of the accusation points (would've been two if I had won initative on the last turn).

All in all it was still a fun game.

Round 3 - Grant - my lift home (Nicodem)

I can't remember the fifth scheme on this one either so chose one at random.

I was a little nervous going into this game. Interference is not my favourite, Molly is ok at blocking it, but not so great at scoring it.

Grant ran Nicodem with the card draw upgrade and the muhahahaha one. He had a carrion emissary (MLH), phil, Mortimer (MLH), necropunk and a nurse.

I ran:

• Molly with her spirit upgrage, take back the night.
• Sybelle and bleeding tongue
• Izamu and decaying aura
• Phil and my little helper
• Dead doxey
• 2 crooligans

The board had a few forestsand big buildings and some ruin thing in the middle.

I decided that I would try hide some crooligans for claim jump and take a sneaky show of force as I thought it would go uncontested.

I hid my crooligans behind a building. His nurse and emissary ran down the flank towards my right. And the rest stayed in the corner feeding Nico cards and corpses. I sent Izamu, Sybelle and Molly towards the emissary. Phil and the doxey did some card draw shenanigans. Turn 1 I brought out a hanged and knocked some wounds off both the emissary and the nurse. Nico then summoned a hanged and a shikome.

Turn 2 Grant went first and using MLH managed to toss up a massive wall to block Molly from seeing him and killed the hanged. I could see the shikome aiming for my crooligans. So I activated Molly she used her (0) to give Izamu a walk and then he charged across and murdered the shikome. Izamu never left that spot. Grant kept bringing out punk zombies to harass him. I think must have murdered three over the course of the game. He was also in the 6" bubble and not scoring interference but he did net me 3 for show of force all on his own.

At this point the vulture moved into the middle and gave Nico huge range and he created a massive amount of zombies and a few punk zombies.

Molly was basically pinned into that corner for the rest of the game and fended off quite a few rounds of zombies and hanged. But ultimately her and sybelle went down. Both annoyingly to paralyse and being eaten by a flesh construct. I wont forget that one. That gave Grant 3 points for Eliminate the Leadership, we both thought it was less for being after round 3, but we were out of date on our schemes.

Phil quickly removed the vulture with his shooting action from that (0) upgrade he desperately needed! This forced Nico to venture forth from the corner and waste valuable AP. At one point Grant tried to drop schemes in my half for leave your mark, but Phil turned those into corpses. I wasn't sure if that was a good idea against Nico, but figured he wasn't short of corpse markers so what the hell.

In the end we both picked up 3 for the strategy. I netted a full 6 on my schemes and he could not get any for leave your mark. So 9-6 and a potential walk home. Another great game.It had been a while since I had played against Nico...MLH and the emissary have been fantastic for him.


I was happy with the day. My opponents were all great. I finished middle of the pack. George went on to pick up best Guild player, Joe picked up best Neverborn and 4th overall. So the games where I dropped points were against strong players. Looking forward to the next tournament, which for me will be 1 April in Croydon.

The Grandest Nationals

I want to start by saying a huge thank you to Mike for putting in so much time and effort, all of the people giving up their time to help out on the day, and all the people that set up tables (including the man with a city worth of terrain in his van Mr Dave Brown). Also a shout to the staff at Battlefield hobbies, it's a great venue and they worked non stop for the whole weekend.

All my opponents were amazing and everyone I chatted to was great as well.

Lastly thanks to everyone who helped out and those that pulled in enough favours so that I could finally make it to what was The Biggest Ever Malifaux Tournament. Just to let that sink in The Biggest Ever Malifaux Tournament!!!

The

Biggest

Ever

Malifaux

Tournament

Get back in your box

Last hurrah of the Ressers!

A little while ago I decided that next year I was going to make the switch from Resurrectionists to the rebellious bookworms that are the Arcanists.

The reasons for the switch are wide and varied and clever and ... Okay really I just want to paint some monsters and robots and they have both plus I'm tired of painting dead things.

As I'm full of imagination I'm going to start on book one when it comes to Masters, Rasputina, Marcus, and Ramos. Unlike when I play Ressers I'm going to try and be a bit more specialist and try to match the Master to the game (you know play it like it's supposed to be played). I'll probably do a post in the new year about where I see each Master and my flailing attempts at list building. Also expect plenty of "I painted a thing" posts as I will need to paint all the things. With painting the stuff if anyone has painting based targets or challenges to throw at me feel free. Always keen to push the painting up a notch, This year I attempted to learn NMM. Last year was painting patterns.

Hey boy, Hey girl, superstar Nico here we go...

A couple more games with Nciodem done and a couple more learning experiences (losses). So out of six games with the one legged wonder I'm up to two win and four losses. I'm getting the hang of Nico's various different abilities and upgrades but not quite there for how to convert that into VP. I'll get to that and where I'm head after I give a brief run down of the most recent games.

This was a rare bit of non event day faux when a few of us decided to bunk off being adults and head to town to play toy soldiers. There ended up being eight Malifaux players on a random Wednesday afternoon at Dark Sphere, which was great fun having loads of 'faux chat going on.

He's the re-animator, twisted re-animator.

So as most people know I'm a Resser player, but I've always steered clear of Nicodem. This was mainly because of how slow he looks to play and also the amount of models needed.

But no more, I'm now diving into the gentleman of the undead. Nicodem is my new master. Generally when I start a new master I just play them on repeat until something clicks. This time I'm going to try and share that process with everyone else.

I tend to do everything on a trial and error basis (emphasis on the error). The plan was to play a few games with the framework of what is my standard crew build and then adapt it to fit Nico as I progressed.

My first game looked like this.

Extraction: Take Prisoner, Leave Your Mark, Set Up, Mark For Death and Convict labour.
I chose to take Leave your mark and Mark for death. The thinking being that MFD would be simple to put on while around the Extraction marker and LYM would be good for when he pulled forward to reach the marker I could slip into the back lines.

I was up against Arcanists. More precisely Marcus.

I'm now going to run through my list and give a rough idea of why I took what.

The Full English GT

This is my write up of the recent English GT held at Wayland Games in Essex.

Before I start I will warn you this is not for the faint of heart or for those with a nervous disposition. There will be graphic references to playing very, very poorly along with gratuitous sulking. To help people avoid this any sulking and/or whining will be marked out in red.

So my first ever two day event and also the event I'd chosen as my gaming target this year. I wasn't feeling too confident going in due to being really out of practice, work and illness has meant that I've hardly played for the last few months.  So determined to give it a shot and have a couple of fun days of gaming I headed off to Sunny Hockley Saturday morning.

No hassle getting there and even time to run over to the cafe for a tea before standing about outside Wayland chatting to all the regular faces and a couple of new ones as well.

The doors opened and we all rushed in to join the queue (very British) to register with first time TO Stuart SNEZZLEY Snares and his better half Claire. We all received a very snazzy English GT bag containing our score sheets and some sweets. At which point people split into two groups. The people who think its OK the eat haribo for breakfast and the people who are wrong.

So onto game one.
Turf War
Me vs Graeme Nicholls
Molly vs Mah

So first game of the GT I'm facing gremlins on a table that has planets across it (I was beginning to think there was more than sugar in those sweets).
I was confident to start throwing Molly across the board for a turn one summon or two then some punk zombie action. It was all down hill from there...
The swarm of rooster riders sprinted down one side of the board to tie up my rogue necro and phil & nan while Molly and sybelle tried to hold the centre and scheme run at the same time.
Stupidly I tried to score Convict with 2 marker with in 3" of the centre line instead of vice-versa.
I got a couple of points for my necro being roostered to death but not much else
Finished 4-10. Really fun game and despite the loss I was almost happy with how I played.

Lunch! Wayland special. This time I opted for a cheese burger over the hot dog (I'm not sure if it makes any difference) Quick, easy and filling and then its back to the action.

- Quick run back to the cafe area for a top up of tea.

Game two.
Head Hunter
Me (again) vs SNEZZLEY. (TO pulling double duty as ringer)
Seamus vs Lucius

As relaxed of a game as you are ever likely to get at an event. Seamus shot things, Bete slashed things , Nekima tore through everything... Lucius wondered around looking posh and getting in the way. (He really is the David Cameron of Malifaux)
Finished 8-5 in my favour... I could say I played great but Stu was running Lucius if I'd lost I should of been handed the spoon there and then. Always a pleasure to play Stuart and it was nice to score some points.

Game three.
Collect the Bounty
Me (still) vs Anthony Fenton
Seamus vs Tara

Always a game to look forward to, I'm fairly sure Ant is my most played opponent this year facing off at about three Wayland events.
It started well Seamus took out a void wretch, necro punks got some markers down and student of sinew was in a position to flurry next turn...
It turns out that would be all I would succeed at this game. After Seamus and a shikome failing to make a mark on the nothing beast then the nothing beast vaporising the shikome and a necro punk.
Tara managed to be an effective scheme runner and also keep my models pinned down with slow before Sybelle killed then.
To sum up this game Anthony had no hand left Seamus took a shoot and two Ca at a belle, not a single one hit. the all missed by 1.
Final score 1-10 and a well deserved win for Tony and Tara.

End of Day one. Lots of sad farewells and wishes of good luck for those risking a night out in Southend, to be honest I didn't expect all of them to survive.

Day Two (I've never had a day two of an event before I'm very proud of myself for this mediocre achievement)

Starts off with a repeat of day one. Tea, chatting outside, a bit of a queue etc.

Game four.
Reconnoitre (my least favourite strat)
Me (just about) vs Kai Young
Molly vs McMourning

The plan here was to hold back use Molly and Datsue to swamp one side of the board while McM came to me... What is the first thing I did? Run Molly and Datsue off in different directions spreading my crew out too thin to do much of anything. (I'm a bloody genius)
Kai (Mr ranking himself) Did a great job of keeping his models in just the right position to score and other than me killing McM he had the upper hand the whole game.
Great game right to the end despite my inability to score points.
3-10 to Kai.

Lunch!!! Once again a copy of day one but this time I also spent some money in the shop and put my crew out for the painting comp.

Game five. The Final
Extraction
Me (I think) vs The one and only Ben Panzer Harris.
Molly vs Hoffman

I knew going into this game that it would be brutal, neither Panzer or Guild are known for their subtlety.
But the the power looped burning train of death that is the rail golem smashed into Molly turn 2. I quickly soulstones keeping her alive (barely) The come back never quite happened due to an inability to draw a crow or any card above an eight.

went through all my
It was great to finally get to play Ben, even if it meant being destroyed. (not unexpected really)
Finished up 1-9 to Mr Harris.

And that was it five games over two day done. There were prizes given out but I have no idea who won what if you really want to know pop over to the rankings and the results will be there somewhere.

I have to say it was a great weekend and really well run by Stuart (more likely Claire did all the hard work)
I learned a few lessons, mainly pay attention to whats happening, choose schemes you actually think you can do and remember the bloody plan.
Also whine about cards and luck less (this maybe a separate rant in the near future) and realize earlier that because of a dodgy tooth you've been spitting when you talk all weekend and you really shouldn't be allowed out in public.

Thanks to everyone for the games and the chat and everything else I've forgotten.
I think it's time to put away Molly and Seamus for a while they've had a good run this year. Next up will be some Nicodem with a bit of Marcus thrown in for variety.

If you liked the sound of this remember there is a Scottish GT coming up that you should all check out and plenty more events to try out as well.

A Showdown in Spring

I thought I give a quick run down of my recent trip down Wayland Games for the most recent of the Showdown series of Malifaux tournaments

So on a sunny Sunday morning I jumped into the car and headed down to Hockley. I didn't get lost, I didn't get pulled over an no vital parts of the car dropped off so I called it a success.
Quick spot of breakfast first at the local cafe in the company of some of the friendly chaps from Kent. I would say I held court and filled the cafe with witty banter, but no I sat nodded along and tried not to spill food down myself... A partial success, bean juice has a life of its own.

So into the hallowed halls of Wayland gaming centre and kick off by saying hello to everyone (it's all very British, lots of handshakes and how are you's) this was followed by a queue (we've practiced this we all knew the drill no drama here.)
Registration done, I declared ressers and got my wyrd poker chip thing (we all want them but no one knows what they are) and a friendly quip from the TO, none other than one half of the Legendary steampunk detectives Mr Mike Marshall himself.

Other stuff happened I wasn't really paying attention, I'd gone to get tea. Round one draw and I get the King of the South - Jamming Ben Crowe.
Headhunter with Molly vs Collodi. We all knew where this was heading so no presume for game 1 made it a really relaxed fun game. Molly threw punk zombies at people. Collodi basically did the playground classic of "stop hitting yourself. Stop hitting yourself" the game finished 9-2 to... Drum roll ... Mr Crowe.

If you're Gaki and you know it...

Dr Walnut

 

The next in my posts about spirits will be about the sharknado of the spirit work the Gaki
(I hear some of you saying "what about night terrors surely they come first" true they do but I skipping them as a protest to them not being out in plastic still)

The Gaki is a cheap summon needing an eight to bring one in or four soulstones it you want to hire one.
They are tougher than they look with five wounds and two possible heals they can stick around if they need to.

Bringing Molly back from the dead

I have been somewhat absent on here of late. I do not get much time to do much gaming at the beginning of the year due to work. Plus my second daughter was born in December, so I have been juggling work and child rearing duties rather than gaming.

Boarfaux was my first tournament in 2016 and before the weekend I had actually only managed two games of Malifaux. Of those only one  was with the new GG2016 schemes. Nothing better than learning in a live situation though.

As usual John ran a great event. Between him and Warboar there were some fantastic tables and the Warboar staff were great. They even brought us drinks during games...apparently their booze license is in the works so hopefully next time I will have a couple of beers to improve my gameplay. This was their first Malifaux tournament at the venue and I am looking forward to the next one. It was also the biggest in London to date at 32 players.

I was keen to get Molly back on the table after such a long break. It was also good to go into the tournament with no expectations other than to learn more.

It was a great day and I managed to play against four fantastic opponents - none of whom I had ever played before. So how did it go?

What's (Lost) love (4) got to do with it.

Second tournament of the year for me, once again down at Wayland Games in Hockley. Lost Love 4 the annual event run by Dave "Mr TO" Brown. For those that haven't been Lost love is a 45ss fixed master event with a 70ss hiring pool.

I took the plucky young reporter Molly with a pool of horrors and spirits. As I take a fairly static list with Molly the pool restriction wasn't an issue for me. I took my usual horror Molly list with a few spirits in the pool in case I wanted to run Spirit Molly (something I always want to do but never get around to). I also put a few Belles in the pool so people would think I was cool and knew what I was doing but I didn't hire one all day.

I really enjoyed the event last year despite taking home the (very handsome) wooden spoon. So I was keen this year to use Lost Love as a test to see how, or if I've progressed.

So after a quick tea it was time for registration, this may have taken a bit longer than expected due to a last minute surge in tickets there were 33 of us there excited to push some toys around. (Odd number meant there was a buy but you can't have everything)

So once registered we got to got to see what we were working with... GG16 the new tournament scheme set for the year. I'll get my GG16 review out the way now, despite not really understanding most of them I like the changes made to the schemes and I think they should have a positive impact on the game.

Battle report: Pandora v Kirai

So here is a short battle report for my first outing with Pandora

I had 26ss to play with. The Strategy was Turf War. I took Take Prisoner and Distract as my schemes. Dr Walnut took Breakthrough and A Line in the Sand! 

I was really nervous when it came time to deploy. He had Kirai, Izamu, Lost Love and Philip & the Nanny. I had 

Pandora The Box Opens, Aether Connection and Wings of Darkness (I think)

Candy Best Behaviour

Doppleganger

Primordial Magic. 

I was really, really sure I was going to be wiped out easily. My crew was built to buff and debuff but I didn't actually have any hitters. On the upside I was drawing 7 cards a turn and able to prevent 2 damage on my prevention flips for Pandora. She also had Terrifying 13(All). That at least made me confident she would be ok in the centre for a bit. 

As we went into turns 1-2, the Kirai crew just grew, adding Gaki, Onryo and a Hanged. I think he must have added a good 30ss to his crew over the game. Filthy, filthy ressers, especially in a 26ss game and he was basically running a 50s crew. 

In the spirit of things

   

With a new year and a new tournament season plus a new slow grow at Dark Sphere I thought it would be a good time for something new.

Now I wanted to stay with Ressers as I enjoy my undead horde, so I thought that Kirai with her legion of spirits was the ideal choice. I get to stay with the other masters I like but also get to add something new with the sea of spirits over my shambling zombies.



This gave me a slight pause as a lot of spirits work completely differently to zombies and knowing what to use where and when is almost like using a new faction. So I decided to use the blog as a place to work out what I know and what I don't about spirits.

I'm going to work through Kirai's list of summons share what I think of the and how I might use them.

So first off Kirai's favourite little friends the Seishin.

Seishin are 0 cost peons that can't be hired only summoned. They can be summoned on a 0 action by Kirai herself and Datsue ba and brought in when a non seishin dies with in 6" of someone with the spirit becon upgrade.

So I have a few seishin floating around what can I do with them? They are insignificant with low stats across the board so they won't be hanging around too long.

Their abilities that jump out as useful are only either which makes them immue to auras and Enslaved soul which lets them be placed into base contact with friendly leader at the start of the leaders activation. Enslaved soul almost defines the place these models want to be.

Molly heads to Croydon (well more Sidcup but hey)

CROFAUX II

Going into this event it had been 6 or so weeks since I had last played a game of Malifaux. So I was a little rusty and I had only given Molly about 4 games. So I was mostly looking forward to a long day full of Malifaux.

By this stage I had reflected a little on my last few games and had trimmed Molly of her Gorgon's Tear and was running Datsue Ba lighter on upgrades. Sybelle, Izamu and Grave Spirit were my core crew with Belles featuring quite regularly.

Overall I came 15th out of 29, which I was fairly happy with. And given some of my opponents I felt I had done well. It also gave me some great insight into things I wanted to try out more. In particular the game with Joe highlighted how useful Phil and the Nanny could be.

Onto the games:

Taking Molly out for a spin

Here is the summary of my first few games with Molly. This is a follow up from my Gorgon's Tear post.

Highlights:

• The Madame Sybelle delivery service is amazing for Molly. It allows her to skip spending AP on needless walking and also gives her an incredible threat range for summoning even in turn 1.
• Izamu and unnerving aura just create a massive threat range. If you can tag the grave spirit in there too Izamu won't be giving up space soon. Molly's zero action can be great to make Izamu use his heal out of turn.
• Onryos are great little summons. They are dangerous enough in combat that they need to be dealt with. Plus on their way out they give even more WP tests for slow AND hand out Adversary. This is fantastic.
• Shikome and Hanged are terrifying summons and can have a huge impact on the game, particularly if the Onryos have done their Adversary duties.
• I think I have mastered Molly's summoning actions, but I need to not forget her other actions. Whispered Secret can ruin a model's life.
• Molly is so card hungry. I was running out of cards so quickly. As a result I found that I was not really able to take advantage of her reactivate (0) action. This really calls into question my original thoughts on Tear of the Gorgon...for the turns you can do this it is fantastic, but they turn out to be loss common that I'd like. I will try dropping this in future.
• If your opponent bunches up you can really punish them. 

Detailed game analyses:

Battle Report Molly v Shenlong (Both players views)

It should be clear by now that the Abnormalifaux lot like a good club game as well as plenty of tournaments. We all thought that we do plenty of tournaments write ups, but not so many of our club games have been written up on the blog. To change that, here is a battle report from both players perspective.

Pre-game

We pre-flipped our strategy and schemes

Strat: Turf War

Schemes: Breakthrough, Distract, Spring the Trap, Take Prisoner, Line in the Sand. 

Molly view

Turf War, fantastic! This is a strategy that Molly loves. You know that your opponent is going to need to bunch up near the centre. This increases the effectiveness of her summoned models and creates a larger zone of black blood death. There is nothing additional that I will need to pack for this.

The schemes though are a much more difficult prospect. Breakthrough is an obvious choice and I have no shortage of scheme runners if needed, but I was unsure where else I could pick up 3 VPs. Distract can be a good choice in some games, but I play Molly very aggressively and with all the black blood splashing I may end up killing distracted models, so that’s probably out. A line in the sand, hell no. So that really leaves spring the trap or take prisoner. I have never had much success with either of those schemes. 

I was 90% certain that I would be facing off against Shenlong, I don’t know much about him, but I do know that he can be an absolute tank to take down, so I figured that going in I would probably be aiming for spring the trap.

So who to take? My Molly build has been leaned down quite a bit over my last few games and I am almost happy with where I am with her. The new addition today was Philip and the Nanny. I have avoided her recently as I am building her a scenic base and didn’t want her out without it. I have been struggling with card draw though, Molly really hogs cards and I always find myself short. So Phil was shoved in. This left me with:

Molly: Forgotten path and take back the night

Madame Sybelle: Bleeding tongue

Philip and Nanny

Datsue Ba: Spirit Whispers

Izamu: Unnerving Aura

Graveyard Spirit

Rotten Belle

6 soulstones

Up the painting ladder

After a few big ranty post I thought I post up a quick progress report on my current painting progress.

So some people may have read a post earlier in the year where I said I wanted to improve my painting, just raise the average standard a step or too and I thought I'd share my attempts to do this

Before I get into my current painting progress I'll give you a quick run down of my painting history (don't worry it won't take long) I started painting about four years ago after picking up a reduced GW paint set in a Hobbycraft while my wife was shopping for something. thought it would be fun to do on a rainy Sunday. This led to me picking up a few more and watching a few youtube videos and eventually actually playing and painting models to go on a table as well.

My first Malifaux models were Perdita and family about two years ago and I was incredibly proud of this paint job for a while.

Punk (rocker) Zombies

I've decided to have a go at writing a tactica / review. Now as I'm not the greatest of players I've opted out of writing anything about masters or henchman as that would make my head hurt, so I've decided to try and keep it simple and talk about a minion, but a cool minion so it's okay.

Punk Zombies

First off before I get to the card I'll give a fluffy run down of the punks.
Punk zombies fluff comes in two flavours either they are the still blood hungry corpes of killers or they appeared in Malifaux after the Three Kingdoms began to settle on the fun side of the Breach. Clans like the Ten Thunders included highly skilled warriors and swordsmen (not highly skilled enough to stay alive but still good). As with all corpses sooner or later a resurrectionist had a crack at reanimating one of these warriors and was pleasantly surprised to find that these zombies retained a bit of their martial training. This made them a popular choice for strong necromancers to practice their art on. I lean towards the second description as the better of the two but the first does give you some leeway on swapping out the weapons and them still fitting the fluff.

The Gorgon's Tear

Seamus gazed into Molly's lifeless eyes and bowed his head over her,whispering "You are a lovely one, aren't you?"

Seamus Crashes A Funeral, Wyrd Chronicles, Volume 2

I still need to the OSL and water effects on the minis above.

I have been dying to play Molly for some time, but I was quite caught up with my Tara experiments. Then I managed to pick up a few of the old metal spirits plus the new plastic Molly box and here we are. Much like Seamus I have fallen in love with Molly. And with only one game with her under my belt at that. Hopefully after reading this you will begin to understand why.

Let us begin with her card...

Tara visits Croydon

Alas it has been too long since I have had the opportunity to gush about my love for Tara. Work and real life have been getting in the way. That is not to say I have not been getting games in though. After about a year or so of playing with Tara I feel that her and I are starting to click nicely.

Two weeks ago I took Tara along to Crofaux - a 50ss fixed master event at Croydon Gaming club. It was a small event being run by John as a dry run for future events. It was my first time there and it was a great little venue...plus I had a bus that took me basically to the front door so it was super easy. That convenience, the bar and the great crowd mean that I will definitely be back.

So with only 8 players and fixed master it did not take long to find out which masters were there:

• Pandora
• Jakob Lynch (Neverborn) - Andreas, one of my Dark Sphere colleagues
• Gremlins Zoraida
• Perdita (there is always one)
• Mei Feng (Ten Thunders) - read Bad Luck & Blood's post on this very blog for more
• Lucius (Neverborn I think)
• Jakob Lynch (Ten Thunders)
• And lastly my Resurrectionist Tara