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?)

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all our readers! I hope you have enjoyed all the content we have put out this year and we are looking forward to providing you with much more in the new year. We will be breaking for the holidays, but expect to see some 2016 in review posts and some 2017 plans coming up in January (as well as my predictions for how Masters will go). Thank you all for continuing to support us and I hope everyone gets lots of new hobby stuff for Christmas.

Finally a word from our resident Santa Clause:

Santa says "Have a Merry Fauxmas!"

High Fauxdelity

Plenty of you will already have heard that a couple of local players along with myself and fellow Abnormalifaux Conor have started a podcast.

The idea behind the show is for it to be a debate, we each choose our best and worst within a particular category then we argue our case. The main rule is that there can be no agreement, all models have good and bad points our job is to pick these out  and weaponise them to prove our mates wrong.

Welcome (back) to Malifaux

Well after too long an absence, I've finally had a game of Malifaux. I thought I might jot down some reflections on how it felt after a 6 month break. Luckily my good friend Francois stepped in to give me a game. He ran:

Shenlong

Sensai Yu

The Shadow Emissary

The Lone Swordsman

Wandering River Monk

A peasant

A TT Brother.

The strategy was extraction.

The first thing that struck me was how rusty I was at crew selection. I went with Pandora as my go to Master. She is just so good and super fun to play. Plus people get nervous when you activate her because he actually has an impact on the game. Just the threat of know she can activate is worrying for an opponent. 

I took 

Pandora (The Box Opens, Wings of Darkness, and Fears Given Form). I like my girl to be up and hurting people.

Widow Weaver

Waldgeist

Doppleganger

Primordial Magic

Nekima

Terror Tot.

Ho Ho Ho merry fauxmas

So this weekend was my first ever story event. Down to sunny Hockley I went for (another) day at Wayland games.

I was treating the event as a bit of an end of year office party type day, so I loaded up the car with my stupid elf hat and a few Christmas crackers plus an untried or tested crew lead by young Miss Tara.

After a quick breakfast in the cafe (I strongly recommend this a fried food is the key to a long happy life) it was over to Wayland to pull my hat on and stand about talking nonsense for a while.

Game one rolled up and instead of the usual random first round draw this time you had to find someone you've never played and face them.

I ended up playing someone I regularly see at events but never get to play (mainly because we are so far apart in skill, he gets top tables while I get spoons) Mr Joe Wood who shockingly wasn't running Kirai.

The story with this game was that we we're trying to collect parts to build a present. This was

done by picking up randomly placed markers to fit our plans (handed out by TO)

Rush Goalie 3: Finale Event of Season 2

So while the vast majority of Guildball players were over at Steamcon for the weekend, I attended a small (10 person) tournament at one of my favourite venues the Tanelorn Wargaming Club. The last time I attended an event there it was for a Malifaux event which was an absolute blast, and my second ever Malifaux tournament win. Would this day be as successful? Read on to find out!

I took my usual tournament lineup bar subbing in Siren for Fangtooth (Shark, Salt, Sakana, Jac, Greyscales, Angel, Siren, Gutter). The other captains in play were Ox (3 of them!), Fillet, Smoke (2), Midas, Corsair, and Theron. So 7/10 were alchemists or butchers, my two least favourite matchups for Siren... guess she may not get her first tournament action after all...

Game 1 vs Jay (Butchers)

I took my standard lineup for facing Butchers of Shark, Salt, Sakana, Greyscales, Jac, Angel. I don't like Siren into Butchers because they are so fast and she is so easy to kill, and I don't want to get in a fight with Butchers so Gutter was out as well. Jay took Fillet, Princess, Boiler, Meathook, Rage and Tenderizer leaving Shank and Brisket on the sideboard. I think this lineup was a pretty big mistake as the two players I find frustrate me the most in Butchers are Shank (cause he is so hard to escape from with his high speed and 2" reach) and Brisket (cause she is great at keeping a hold on the ball, especially as my team is very male heavy and the two female players I have either have 1" reach, Angel, or no low tackle result, Siren). Tenderizer was a good choice though as I find him very tough to deal with and scoring on a 5+ sucks.