Casual Match - Lynch vs Ophelia

Has it really been four months since I last played? Wowee.

Sometimes life throws a curveball or... twenty, I guess. But! After an extremely taxing few months, I was able to get some time off and decided to ask in the discord server of my local friendly gaming store - Element Games in Birmingham - whether anyone would like to get a game of Malifaux! I'd been meaning to get a game in there basically since the store opened so... I was very happy when Finch agreed to take me up on the offer.

My main thought going into the game was: Holy hell I am rusty, how do I play this game again? With that in mind I left my Rezzers and my Explorers sitting sadly on the shelf, and decided to dust off the crew I've played the most: Kin!

I really enjoy the Kin. The Internet tells me that they are not a very competitive crew, and... honestly that's fine. I'm not a very competitive player. What they are is surprisingly sturdy, with the ability to both drop scheme markers and burn your opponent's scheme markers. In Ophelia2 they have good card quality through multiple vectors (Sammy, Raiders, Raiding Operation) and theoretically that lets me concentrate on scoring my own points. In Ophelia1 she brings all the bang you could possibly ask for and doesn't need her own keyword much so you can threaten two very different styles of list.

After a long break from the game, that was more or less my hope: Play my own game, deny my opponent where I can, try not to die.

The game was Cloak and Dagger on Flank deployment with the following scheme pool:

Outflank, Ensnare, Hold Up Their Forces, Espionage and Protected Territory.

Finch brought Honeypot - specifically Lynch2. Whilst I haven't played Lynch before I did know that generally speaking you want to avoid getting Brilliance tokens, the Hungering Darkness can come back to life, and card quality would be high. 

My list was:

Ophelia LaCroix (Overloaded) + Twelve Cups of Coffee
Young LaCroix x3
LaCroix Raiders x2
Swine Twirler
Sammy LaCroix + Inferiority Complex
McTavish
Bo Peep

7 Soul Stones remaining.

My thinking here was that with 3 Henchmen a deep stone pool would be valuable.

I was excited to put the new McTavish on the table - new to me, anyway, he's been out for ages now. I've found that the Overloaded crew can be surprisingly pillow fisted if you are forced to use their upgrades defensively, and a very mobile gun that can shoot three times, has a strong demise and brings his own concealing just seems solid.

I went with Twelve Cups on Ophelia rather than Inferiority Complex in this game to see how that felt. In retrospect, this may have been a mistake; she wound up taking a few walk actions even with all the help ferrying her around the Young, Twirler and Bo Peep provide. She also took a couple of shots into things with Terrifying, and I didn't wind up using the Mark Territory bonus at all (the opportunity didn't arise). However, the diversion aura was still relevant throughout the game, so it is tough to say which would have been the better choice.

I also wanted to try a game without Beau. He's very good, but the Bo + Beau combo costs a lot of points, and I'd need to give up something else. The Swine Twirler is just an excellent piece for Kin - burning to help up the tar bomb threat, the ability to move through models (including your opponent's models!) a second diversion aura ... he's excellent. Is he as good as Beau? No. But Beau costs an extra 2 points.

Finch brought:

Hungering Darkness + Endless Hunger
Jakob Lynch, Dark Bet + Silent Protector
Gwyneth Maddox
Kitty Dumont
Miss Guided
Illuminated
Mr. Tannen + Silent Protector

7 Soul Stones remaining.

I didn't know what to expect from this beyond knowing that the Hungering Darkness hits hard (so does Lynch, it turns out!), Miss Guided is a monster at range, and Gwyneth can draw cards. Which she did, a lot.

Not really knowing the crew, I didn't know which schemes were most likely on Finch's end - except that I was pretty confident he wouldn't take Hold Up Their Forces because almost everything in my crew has ways to get out of engagement and a lot of ways to help get other parts of the crew out of engagement too.

I took Hold Up Their Forces and Protected Territory. Hold Up has generally been pretty reliable, and Protected Territory is nice and easy with Bo Peep.

I was attacker, so I deployed half my crew (Bo Peep, Sammy, a Raider and McTavish) toward the top of one of the flanks. Finch deployed his crew all together, so I put a Raider and a Young to run off and gather cloak and dagger tokens and deployed the rest together.

Turn One - I started in the traditional manner: Bo Peep got everyone running, gave Sammy fast and a glowy token, drew a card, and ran up behind a building at the top corner of the board where Miss Guided couldn't blow her off the table. I had Ophelia, a Young and the Twirler move centrally towards the middle cloak markers, Sammy move up behind cover with a Young and a Raider nearby ready to Risky Maneuver and draw another card. McTavish stayed in a forest but had a good sight line to cover Sammy.

On Finch's side, Miss Guided moved into position covering the central lane of the board, near a cloak and dagger marker. Lynch moved up. And before Sammy could do her trash cannon trick, she had an angry Hungering Darkness in her face.

Keeping her alive took a lot of stones. Somewhat as expected, the Honeypot crew had the card quality to push through those attacks, and she came out with 2 health remaining after sacrificing her trash cannon. A lucky Jinx on the Hungering Darkness back managed to get her up to 3 thanks to Bo Peep's aura (she was just, barely, in range) and I was pretty confident I would lose her at the top of turn 2 which... is not an uncommon occurrence. I was honestly worried she would die before activating once, which is really painful, but my girl managed to hang in there.

I also threw a lot of attacks into the Hungering Darkness sat in the middle of my crew. He ended the turn on 1 health. Ophelia also stunned both him and Lynch whilst freeing herself to move up the board.

Turn Two - I drew a ridiculous hand. Nothing lower than a 10, with a couple of high tomes in there. Finch had initiative, and used it to heal the Hungering Darkness back up to 7 health with Lynch. Welp. On the plus side, he didn't kill Sammy, so I got to activate her a second time - which she used to summon a flying piglet, and push two Jinxes through on the Hungering Darkness engaging her, both with the Glimpse the Void trigger. Finch was able to pass those checks, but Huggy began his second activation with a large amount of Distracted (from a heroic Raider's shotgun), injured and stunned. He was able to put 5 damage into McTavish but couldn't finish the deal.

Scheme marker removal from the Firecracker Flingshot upgrade meant I was able to prevent schemes being scored, whilst Bo Peep and the raider off doing his own thing were able to get me Protected Territory, and the Swine Twirler ran back in to engage Lynch with Sammy engaging Kitty for Hold Up Their Forces.

Score - Ophelia 3 / Lynch 1

Turn 3 - This was the round where losses started to mount up. I forget the exact sequence of events, but Sammy died along with the piglet she had summoned before it was able to do anything, and the Raider with her was left very low. Miss Guided did most of this damage with a blast off a nearby Young LaCroix, she sure did shoot a lot of kids throughout the course of this game.

This was the main area where I felt like Beau would have been a big help - he could have topped Sammy back up pretty easily. On the other hand, the Swine Twirler helped a lot with movement in the crowded middle of the board. Both Take by the Hand and I Need an Adult become a lot more versatile when they can have Ophelia run through the person she is being engaged by to get where she needs to be.

Seeing the amount of healing that Finch was able to put into Huggy and Lynch, though, I pivoted pretty hard away from trying to kill either of them and instead accepted that they were going to do what they wanted. My priority became trying to score my strategy points and getting in position for the end game points.

One hilarious misplay my end was watching Kitty put two scheme markers next to Bo Peep, thinking 'ah yes, ensnare, I need a way to remove that... how can I do that... oh right, pork roast rodeo' activating her and then immediately scoring it for Finch. That's the kind of big brain play we love in the Bayou. Definitely shaking off the rust here!

I also had to choose between using Ophelia to delete scheme markers or try to keep loading her up with strategy markers as she's pretty difficult to kill and I'd need a lot of them if I was going to try and max points on the strat. I chose to load her up on the basis that Huggy, Lynch and Kitty were running around my deployment pretty much at will at this point so any effort to delay them would only be that - a delay, whilst if I stocked up tokens for future rounds I could keep the dream alive. Unlike the first Raider near Huggy, who got very eaten.

Score - Ophelia 4 / Lynch 4

Turn 4 - Lynch opened up by killing the Twirler at last, poor guy. Huggy also tried to chase down the remaining Raider, but between Shielded and sacrificing an upgrade he couldn't quite manage it, leaving the Raider to Risky Maneuver and then flee 10 inches - running away, truly the most risky maneuver of all.

McTavish downed the Illuminated in two shots, scoring me my one and only kill of the game, and Bo Peep engaged Miss Guided. He also began work on Kitty, but did not have what it took to finish her.

Turn 5 - Again I had ridiculous cards to start the round. With my crew finally thinned to a reasonable degree, Finch also did not have +3 to the initiative flip! Ophelia began engaged with Gwyneth but with two cloak and dagger markers near her, so the plan was simple: win the initiative flip, move Gwyneth away, and then interact twice to secure my 4th strategy point.

I cheated a 12 to secure initiative and, when that worked, shot Gwyneth. I would've missed but I had the Red Joker in hand so, that worked perfectly right?

Nope! Cheating meant that Gwyneth gave Ophelia a Brilliance token, which in turn meant that Tannen could push her 2 inches, meaning that she had to spend a second action to get back into range of the strategy markers and could only get one additional intel token.

After that I made a series of poor life choices. Rather than engaging Lynch, McTavish tried to kill Kitty - literally pointless. Had he run up on Lynch there's a chance I could've denied Finch's fourth strategy point and scored the final point of Hold Up. Even getting lucky with Huggy unable to finish the job on the fleeing Raider (which would have given me half that point), Miss Guided was able to disengage from Bo Peep after I was forced to activate her, and she couldn't do anything to keep her there.

Lynch wound up with all the intel tokens he needed, and Kitty was able to drop the scheme markers to get the final point of Ensnare. Not quite enough scheme markers left to get the final point of Espionage though.

Final score: 7-5 to Honeypot.

Overall I had an absolute blast with this game. Finch was a great opponent and helped me understand what was going on with his crew, definitely very patient as I was trying to remember how the game actually... works, again, too.

I think in retrospect, I could've stood to try and push through some more aggression in turn 2. I left Tannen alone entirely throughout the course of the game, and he was free to trade intel markers with Ophelia for a decent amount of it. Silent Protector meant he had Hard to Kill, but we could've tried to mitigate that with some burning. I've often come away from my Ophelia2 games feeling like I let myself be put on the defensive too much and should have tried to bring the heat more - that's maybe something to work on next time.

And hopefully that next time won't be another 4 months away