City Aghast as Goose Runs Amock!

Long-time Goose fans will know that the first miniatures game I started honking about on the internet with any serious thoughts was Marvel Crisis Protocol way back in the heady days of 2021. I had a lot of fun with that game, though the pace of releases eventually overwhelmed my ability to keep up – and I had a number of frustrations both with the game and with the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which honestly soured me on superheroes in general for a bit. There was a level of fatigue, there, and I was ready to spend some time painting and obsessing over bizarre gremlins in the Bayou rather than capes for a bit.

MCP at its best for me was about finding ways to make niche characters shine, and force my opponent to play the kind of game that those characters excel at – that was the subject of my ‘The Dreaded…’ series on Across the Bifrost (which, sadly, seems to have died whilst I was paying attention to Malifaux. Maybe I’ll rehost those articles here, just for old time’s sake, even if the meta has likely moved on far past them). I liked the variety a lot.

As I remember it, I’d already started to drift away from the game and the release of the refreshed core box was the final straw. I did not (… and do not, really …) want to paint my third Captain America and Black Widow, and second version of most of those other characters. Throw in that high level MCP often seemed to revolve around 1-3 big bad models of the moment, and you can see that the shine was wearing off on multiple levels.

However, at Salute this year, I was finally lured to pick up some boxes again. Elsa Bloodstone, the Marvel Monsters (Dracula, Adam, Werewolf by Night and N’Kantu), Mephisto… Gwenom. I’d vaguely been aware of Gwenom as a miniature that I definitely wanted to pick up just to paint at some point, to replace my terrible Carnage conversion of many years ago, but when I started looking at the rest I was hit by a wave of nostalgia.

It also caused me to reflect a little. I’ve been playing Malifaux for over two years at this point (admittedly, not terribly regularly – I’ve probably managed just over 20 or so games total) and I still barely feel like I have a grasp of what I’m doing. The recently announced 4^th Edition also means that I am shelving it for at least a few months – there is limited point in attempting to keep learning a game that is going to change, likely in fairly significant ways.

I’ll need to scrape the rust off, but I do know MCP. And from touching base with the old community, it seems like there have been some attempts to address the Big Bad Mini problem lately – with several big models having been nerfed and a new set of crises just released.

This time around I have no intention of trying to buy everything and keep every character and interaction in my head. It does look like the pace of releases slowed significantly when I got out of the game, which is probably a good thing, but what stood out to me when I started catching up on ‘what I missed’ was how many of the same models are still being discussed. Thanos, Hulk, Cosmic Ghost Rider, Red Skull: Master of Hydra, Emma Frost… all of those names are familiar and whilst some of them have been adjusted, they still fundamentally do (mostly) the same job. There are new characters, a lot of them, but I probably don’t need to know all of them. I can catch up at my own pace.

I don’t know, yet, whether MCP will once again become ‘the’ game that I am playing. I’ve fallen off it once before, after all! But I’m looking forward to painting up my Legion of Monsters, and we’ll see whether this is a triumphant return for A Goose, or an ill-conceived sequel that needed more time in the can.