First Semi-Official Game

If you have been following this blog you probably know that I have been building a collection of both Arcanists and Resurrectionists. I have been modeling and painting these over the last few weeks and am making slow progress but progress is being made none-the-less.

I have been itching to get some gaming in and talked a life long friend of mine into giving Malifaux a shot and we got together this past Sunday and had a lot of fun. Since neither of us had any experience we didn't even go with an actual box set and simply picked out 9 points each to accompany his master Ramos and mine Nicodem. We added 3 soulstones each against just to practice using them in the game as well. He ended up pushing 3 Steampunk Arachnids and Ramos to begin versus my 2 Canine remains and a Samurai Zombie with Nicodem.

Ramos and 3 proxy single steampunk arachnids

Nico, Punk Zombie and 2 Canine Remains

Things went slow and stead at first. We simply lined up approximately 15 inches from each other on the table. Again this wasn't an official game. We just wanted to go through the motions of the stages and see how things worked. Models were quickly dropped creating scrap counters and corpse counters. Things went fairly well as we got familiar with movement, melee and spells. There were a couple of things we came across that we couldn't find a clear interpretation of the rule so we made a house rule agreement and moved forward to revisit later.

Canine Remains gone and 2 Arachnids gone.

We played for a total of 3 hours and various models were brought back into play time and time again and we had a lot of fun. We wrapped things up as a draw due to prior engagements.

Mindless Zombies already came and went. This is actually Ramos
and a single arachnid. Nico and a Flesh Construct proxy.

I then tossed out a couple of questions to the online Malifaux community, Twitter specifically and of course got almost immediate responses. From my experience the Malifaux Twitter community is still fairly small. If you use Twitter and play Malifaux don't forget to use the #malifaux hashtag from time to time to show your support for that community. I follow that hashtag and am regularly keeping tabs on those discussions and find new gamers to follow as well.

The main thing I learned was make sure you are using the v2 cards. That would have answered some of our questions from our game. We had the v2 cards printed out but I didn't notice they printed wrong and several of the text areas were messed up and eligible.

I want to give a couple of thanks to those that did respond to my questions:

Damian @LordShaper
CerealKiller @CerealK195
Rand @RandEaton

Some of the things I wasn't certain of were the following:

We weren't sure if Ramos' Counterspell ability only worked when he was the initial target or if he could use it when affected by a blast. It turns out we over thought the wording of the ability and it clearly states that it can be used when he is "targeted".

I also had some confusion regarding Nico's Reanimator spell in regards of which models he could summon using it as well as I used too many corpse counters for the Flesh Construct that I reanimated.

The last thing I researched was I found out we were forgetting to pay attention to the difference of duel end results to apply the bonus damage when available.

It was a great learning processes for both of us. Though I read a lot of blogs and listen to a lot of podcasts to pick up information, it doesn't compare to actually playing to get a good feel for things.