Why Malifaux?

There are plenty of games out there, what is it that has attracted me to Malifaux in particular?

Well, firstly there's the miniatures. Malifaux minis are notorious for being hard to assemble and that is certainly true; I have struggled to assemble mine without some vary obvious gaps at times, the instructions are often unclear or straight up bad, and some of them are genuinely mind-boggling to make.

HOWEVER.

They are also some of the most fun and dynamic miniatures I've had the pleasure of painting. They aren't all wins, but Malifaux minis are often dripping with character and even the relatively boring standard human characters wind up having something to enjoy in them. Even if I don't manage to get regular games, I've enjoyed my time painting the miniatures a lot - and I am very definitely not a pro level painter. (I've always seen my painting as 'fancy colouring in' and I am comfortable with the level I get to for something I do primarily as relaxation).

There's also the lore. The Breachside Broadcast is a fantastic intro, and the way the game translates this lore onto the table is some of the most fun I've seen in wargaming. Rules like 'He's starting to make sense' which damages characters who try to concentrate around babbling madmen are great.

But in terms of actual gameplay, Malifaux as a game is extremely complex, offers a wide range of ways to get obliterated by crews and mechanics you know nothing about, and can take upwards of three hours per game to play - especially when starting out. That's a significant time and brainpower investment, so what makes it worth that?

Well. I don't know that it is, honestly! I haven't played enough to be one hundred per cent sure in my opinion of the game, and there may well be hurdles I find insurmountable. However, I enjoyed my first game and there are a number of elements I think are intriguing enough to be worth the effort.

1) The Fate Deck

Rather than using dice, Malifaux uses cards, including a hand of cards you can 'cheat' from under most circumstances in order to replace your random flip with a card you have drawn earlier. 

This maintains a level of variance whilst giving some control to the player in a much more meaningful way than rerolls. It also turns the cards themselves into an interesting resource; some mechanics only work if you use cards of a certain suit, some require that cards be discarded, then you face a question of whether your card is more valuable for the number on it, the suit on it, or if it is still the right choice to sacrifice it. Trying to manage your hand and guess what your opponent is holding too adds an interesting and unique strategic layer to the game.

Because you know the contents of the deck in advance you also know roughly the distribution of cards you have seen and can expect coming up. Whilst games of 'lucky' and 'unlucky' flips are definitely still a thing - I imagine that there is less of that than the number of games I've played where hot or cold dice luck resulted in a complete blowout regardless of tactical choices made.

2) Schemes and Strategies

Malifaux - as with most wargames these days - doesn't run to a strict 'just kill your opponent' objective system. Instead, points are earned by achieving certain objectives over the course of a game - one shared, called the strategy, and two more that are hidden information picked from a pre-agreed pool of available 'schemes'.

Most games of Malifaux seem to run to the current Gaining Grounds season where Wyrd Games choose 4 strategies and 13 schemes to make up the overall selection and then each game is 1 strategy and a pool of 5 schemes from which you pick 2.

This means that there's a good amount of variation between each game even before we account for different methods of deployment and different crews. Hidden information is something I both loved and hated in Infinity, where I felt like sometimes the game became about 'gotchaing' your opponent with models they weren't expecting. This seems like a good balance to me, where you know what the options were and you can make an educated guess about what your opponent is trying to do, but you don't know until they reveal the first point of their scheme and then you still have an opportunity to stop the second.

The other thing I really like about this is the variation between seasons. When I started paying attention to Malifaux it was Gaining Ground 3, which I understand was a much more kill-focused season. One of the first Masters I picked up was Molly Squidpiddge (did I mention I love the names in this setting? Because I really do) because her stories were some of the ones I loved the most in the Breachside Broadcast.

Common Internet Opinion was that Molly really sucked in Gaining Grounds 3 and that was fine by me; I was preparing to learn the game with my friends who also have never played it. They had gone for Kaeris and Youko, both also seen as weak, so I figured we'd have a pretty evenly matched time and... we did! More or less.

Now Gaining Grounds 4 has shaken things up and Molly is one of the more highly regarded options out there because her mechanics play much better into this set of strategies and schemes than they did the last one.

That shift is exciting! It makes me very hopeful for the viability of all the various options, just not necessarily all at the same time.

3) Crew Construction

The sequence for setting up a game of Malifaux means seeing the board, knowing deployment, schemes and strategies, knowing the faction your are playing into - and then declaring your Master, who determined your main hiring pool. You then build your crew, knowing your opponent's Master, and get into the game proper.

However, you can still bring in miniatures from outside your keywords at a small additional cost, and you only know the name of the Master - you don't know which variant of that Master (there are two for each) is being used, which can sometimes change the approach taken dramatically.

This opens up a lot of room for mind games, and then on top of that any points you don't use - up to 10 of a standard 50 - are kept for use during the rest of the game, allowing you to count as having used those different suits I mentioned earlier, apply negative modifiers to opponent's attacks, absorb damage for some of your miniatures, draw more cards and probably some other things I am forgetting.

That's a fun number of considerations to have at list building, needing to build out your crew's ability to play the game, take into account what your opponent is probably trying to do, and have the resources you need to fuel your miniatures, mitigate the impact of poor card flips and survive.

 

So those are the things which have drawn me into Malifaux as something I'd like to try and figure out. We'll see if I am still as up on all these elements when I've got a few more games under my belt. 

HONK

- A Goose