OK, so a couple of us at the club ran through a game of Malifaux for the first time last night, and i wrote a little 'afer action report' and review for some of the other chaps to let them know how it went.
it struck me that it might be of interest to you hardened veterans here what i thought of the game after the 'first pass'...
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As with many rules they are more complex on paper than they play in reality, and there's no change here.
The basic mechanics are actually very simple and flow pretty well.
OK, there's no dice. A gimmick perhaps? But its not so bad.
All resolution is by card flips and there are two basic types of resolution;
Card flip vs a set target
Card flip vs opponent's card flip
In the card flipping, not only is the card value important (in all cases high numbers are good), but also the 'suit' can be vital to activate certain abilities or effects.
You are not entirely at the mercy of chance however, as you also hold a hand of cards that you can replace the flipped card with.
Additionally your 'master' can use 'soul stones' (a pool of tokens) to flip and add cards to his resolutions.
So there's some tactics involved in ensuring you hold and play the right cards to win the right 'duels'.
Secondly, your 'crews' are small, with perhaps 5-6 fighters each, but each fighter is a little powerhouse with lots of abilities.
Typically a fighter seems to have;
1-2 weapon attacks
1-4 basic abilities
0+ 'triggers' (abilities that react to other actions)
0+ spells.
Each fighter gets 2 Action Points (AP) and can use thes to do basics like moving or attacking, and also to activate abilities or spells.
In addition, many fighters have ' (0) ' abilities and can use one of these for free each turn. So on average, barring special effects, each fighter will do 1-3 things each turn.
Here's where the complexity enters the game, in what is otherwise fairly simple and straightforward.
Each fighter has lots of options and things it can do, and so you have many choices as to what you can do including attacking, healing others, summoning minions, gathering friends for collective actions, search areas for scrap (to summon constructs like mechanical spiders) or corpses/body parts (to summon zombies and the like), etc., etc., etc.
Activation is alternated by fighter so you don't get a whole force moving (although some abilities allow you to activate more than one fighter at a time).
So how does it play?
Surprisingly well actually.
The battles are set up with a scenario objective (which is likely to be different for each crew) and also up to 2 secret objectives each that can add to the victory points.
Turn sequence is basically;
Discard unused cards in your hand you don't want
Draw a new full deck
Initiative each turn is by card flip
Alternate activating your fighters
Each fighter uses his action points to do as much as he can in the turn - and each fighter can do all sorts of different things
That's pretty much it!
Problems?
Well, not many in the gameplay really. The basics are nice and simple and flow very well.
Things i'd note are;
Paperwork.
Each fighter has a roster of abilities and stats that pretty much require you to hold 'character sheets' for each fighter. Battlefield clutter that isn't good. However, these could be reduced down in size and as they are fixed, some nice laminated cards will pretty things up a bit.
Oh and there's a fair bit of wound recording to do...
OptionsOptionsOptions.
The basic mechanics are simple and smoothe, but with each fighter having an array of options, there's a learning curve to remember what they all do - this was the main thing that slowed us down last night - looking up what all our abilities did.
The cards.
Actually, these streamlined play quite well, HOWEVER, they did rather make it feel like you're playing a card game with miniatures, rather than a miniatures game with cards.
Some rules ambiguity
E.g. Line of Sight. Can you shoot through friends?
We decided not but the rules don't say. However i checked the Wyrd forum and this seems to be a 'known issue' that's been fixed in the errata...
Summoning.
This appears to be a game winner, but you can't really tell
from one game! Joe shot my crew to bits, however my master was able to summon mechanical spiders and electrical creations that replaced my losses.
If you can't summon expendable replacements that seems to be a seriousdisadvantage.
Overall?
Pretty good. Well worth you chaps having a go sometime. I'll push on and paint up my figures for it, and put something on in a spare week...
So, how did the battle go?
Joe had a Guild crew (the guys that control Malifaux) who were armed to the teeth with ranged weapons and shooting abilities, led by Perdita Ortega.
I took an Arcanist crew (magic users who are challenging the Guild for control), led by a chap called Ramos and filled mostly with melee specialists and expendables like mechanical spiders and electrical creations.
We both flipped for objective and got 'slaughter' so it was a fight to the death.
Being outranged i 'corner-sat' and proceeded to summon minions for all i was worth.
Meanwhile joe's crew advanced and shot my fighters to bits. However he strayed too close allowing my spiders to gang up and for my crew to get into melee and kill his master (Perdita) as well a few others (although he
did have a tendency to shoot his own men!!)
We finished at about 10.15 with a draw, although with my master still in play summoning like mad i think it was going to be hard for the Guild henchmen to pull off a win...
Although it took 2 hours, with a good grasp of the rules i reckon a scrap that size would be done in an hour...
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