First Game of Malifaux

This weekend I managed to get in a game of Malifaux with Jester. I had seen this game around on the web for about a year and I kept brushing it off. Capnwoodrow from the forums had talked about it a bit here and there, but no one really took much interest in it. This year when he came back from Gen Con he was still talking it up quite a bit, and a few of us decided to bite the bullet and order in a rulebook and a couple boxes of minis.



After pretty much everyone else decided on what gang they were going to run, I decided to run the Ortega gang. This gang focuses heavily on ranged superiority, but have a few models that can dish it out in hand to hand.


This box comes with Perdita (the leader, crazy stout at ranged), Nino (sniper, can chain his shots to hit you multiple times), Francisco and Santiago (one gets tougher the more he gets hurt, the other can intimidate models), and Papa Loco (batshit crazy, fights with dynamite, when he dies he explodes - lots of fun!)

 For our game Jester and I were playing in an abandoned alchemists lab. We set up some cities of death terrain to make out rooms and got to it. What is really neat about the terrain in this system is that it is destructible. I was on the wrong side of a wall at one point so I just shot at it a few times and brought it down. This then gave me line of site to the models on the other side so I could light them up.

What has really made this game stand out for us is that it is such a departure from Games Workshop games. You have a very small model count, each model has a ton of special abilities, the models are very characterful, and you don't use dice - everything is card driven.

Another way this game stands out is the victory conditions. At the start of the game each player draws for a public objective - in this game mine was to deliver a message (I had to move within 2" of an opposing master and spend two action points to tell him something) and Jesters was to distract me (keep me from getting into his deployment zone.) Each player also has two secret objectives that depend on their faction - most of the undead players involve collecting corpse counters (these drop when someone dies.)

These objectives make each game unique and offers up a ton of re playability. So far we are having a lot of fun with this system. Tonight there are a few people stopping by the shop to get games in so we should get a better taste for the system.