M&SU Workbench - Nicodem

Thanks to my Twitter buddy across the pond James, I have been inspired to start getting some models painted up. I started and finished Nicodem today. I've always thought he looked like the vulture toting pimp of Malifaux so I just had to paint him up in pimp purple. I also added some blood stains to the vulture's beak. I changed how I did my floor boards too and am much more pleased with this out come. If you have any questions on how I did anything or what colors I used, feel free to ask.

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.

What's in the soulstone bag? #1

I have decided to make my first reoccuring topic today. What's in the soulstone bag is going to be an update of purchases as I continue to build my crews, my collection and my most recent addiction of Malifaux.

I don't currently have a set gaming budget but I may need to establish one after this week. What I am about to share are only the purchases that I made at the local shop or that have arrived in the mail at the time of posting. I still have a couple of things in transit.

As I am building my first two factions of Arcanists and Resurrectionist I picked up the Rasputina and Nicodem boxes. These will be nice additions to the Ramos and Seamus boxes that I purches back in January. I also picked up a copy of the newest rulebook Twisted Fate to round out my set which already consisted of the original and the Rising Powers books. I plan on doing a personal review on the original rulebook some time soon. I realize this won't be recent news for the system or hobby but I just want to voice my opinions on the books layout and content. Look for that in the next week or two.

The next purchase made this week was towards obtaining some counters. After surfing the web for various gaming counters I stumbled upon the Chessex brand gaming counters/tokens which were nice looking glass beads. The down side is they are fairly pricey at $5 and up for 25 to 40 counters. I knew I had seen similar items somewhere. I thought for sure I could find something similar to use at craft stores using some type of glass or plastic bead but then I saw a picture of aquarium gems and they looked almost identical to the gaming counters I had previously seen. I did some shopping online and at local stores and found the ones pictured above for less than $2 per bag at a local pet supply store. I haven't counted the number of them in the bags yet but I would say they are easily 40 or more which is less than half the cost of similar count name brand gaming counters. I wanted the dark blue and green so I could have a color to represent both of the factions I am building but they didn't have green. Of the colors currently available I ended up with the teal, cobalt and ruby colors pictured above. These will represent soulstones, tokens and counters until I figure out how I plan to print out and use the awesome looking ones that Ratty has come up with. I am thinking of printing them on regular paper or card stock and mounting the cutouts onto foamcore. I just haven't quite decided yet.

The only other notable topic is the fact that I am beginning to grow a nice relationship with a brand new local gaming store in my area named Gaming Grounds which has only been open about a month now. I like the fact that it is only a 5 minute drive from where I work and they open at noon. I can go in there a couple of times a week on my lunch hour and just see whats new, talk gaming with the owner and discuss product orders and new releases. I think that concludes this What's in the soulstone bag for today. I have some resin bases and clam shell packs yet to arrive but once they get here I will share!