dafruk

Grumhelden, is basically the man behind the Glasgow Malifaux scene. If you listen to Tartan Skirmish Radio you can hear him talking about what he's doing to establish Malifaux in the city. The other active henchman in Scotland is David Kerr Smith, who's been running events pretty much every month in Livingston ~30mins drive from Glasgow, he's actually the voice behind Tartan Skirmish radio (well one of them). I'm set to attend my first of his events on Saturday so will feedback on the store etc after that, but definitely seems to be the most organised playscene I've heard of in Scotland. My gaming club in Edinburgh has dabbled with Malifaux but it's not really caught on yet, there's a big H&WM league running right now so once that dies off I'm gonna have another go at dragging a few more people into it, currently only 4-5 of us that play semi regularly. And I've heard of folk playing in Dundee too but not idea how many or how often.

Current Rulebooks available Rules Manual £10 (ish) - Does what it says on the tin, contains the rules and just the rules, no model stats, no background story. The rules are not updated for the most recent errata and FAQs released but they work well as a self contained book with only minor tweaks made through the errata. Book 1 - Out of print, was the first release by Wyrd for the rules & background of malifaux, this has been superceded by the recent release of book 1.5 Book 1.5 - contains the rules, original background story and stats for the original models released in book 1 (3 masters for each faction and minions). Don't need this to play as all stat cards come with models but a nice intro to the game and great backstory. This contains the most up to date rules including the latest errata. Book 2 - First update released, contains 1 henchman & 1 new master for each faction plus more minions, some minor rules tweaks which are superceded by the rules manual and book 1.5. - Again book is unnecessary as all rules are included on the models stat cards but contains a lot of additional backstory/artwork and helpful for seeing models prior to purchase. Book 3 - More minions and the new Avatar upgrades for each master, don't worry the avatars are not a power increase, they mostly just add more complex ways of playing the game including in many instances in game changes to playstyle. Again you don't need to buy this book as rules all on the stat cards and again contains great artwork and backstory. So to play the game all you need to buy are the models (which come with stat cards) and either the rules manual or book 1.5. The crews you've listed are all reasonable starting points, Rasputina and Lady J are original book 1 masters and Ophelia a book 2 henchman (henchgremlin?). But all 3 are straightforwards enough to play. The book 2 masters (Hoffman, Kirai, Collette, Dreamer and Haemlin) are generally considered more complex to learn but I wouldn't let that put you off picking them if you liked the models.

Hmm, these guys just changed my purchasing path for the next few months. I was about to pick up the lilith box and some nephalim to expand my Neverborn, instead with these guys appearing I'm now getting Lucius to add to my guild and will pick up these guys too.

Brilliant, love the dark and moody feel to them.

Group shot of my guild to date.

Done some more work on the Neverborn and now finished pretty much everything I've bought. Here's the group shot.

Ok, received approval from the boss (mrs) so add me to the list.

Looks like I might be able to make this one. I don't overly fancy using 2 masters given how clueless I am half the time anyway! Brawls allow you to only take 1 master and just get some more stones if memory serves is that correct?

Great looking crew, Seamus is one of the very few masters who I like the alt sculpt as much, if not more, than the original. Like the green undead skin tone, not seen many people go with that.

Looking good, nice scheme for the gunsmiths.

Been a bit of a break since I've done any work on tehse guys but an afternoon off work before going on holiday tomorrow turned in to a great painting session. Convict Gunslinger Doppelganger

Ok it's been a while since I painted a Guild model but had this guy sat and I'd promised myself I'd paint up everything I've got before buying any more Malifaux figs so need to get cracking on them. First up was a Guild Guard.

That's maybe an optimum buying schedule for gaming purposes but seriously the executioner is such an amazingly fun model to paint there is no way it should be your second last purchase. My sequence so far has been: Sonnia Criid's box (witchling stalkers are fantastic figs and drew me to malifaux) Lady J's Box (Death Marshalls are not far behind the stalkers) Executioner (such fun painting him) Austringer (crouching with hat I like, bald not so much) Then I bought a couple of guild guards and another Austringer but haven't gotten round to painting them yet, so my guild have stalled (they don't add that much to my crews so got distracted by neverborn instead). So depends on why you are buying things as well!

Thanks, enjoyed the read. I'm surprised you were able to get the DA into Zoraida/voodoo doll after he'd made it charge rusty, seems silly to leave Z that close to such a combat beast.

Just wanted to put this up here to point out to Wyrd that they were rather lucky with this one. When I saw the pictures online of the female Desperate Merc I thought it looked rather poor, the pose just looked wrong. But their saving grace was a 25% off sale and the male merc being out of stock, so I picked her up as I'll no doubt end up using 2 of these eventually so wanted the variety. Well it turns out that in person the pose actually makes some sense and the model looks pretty nice, so I had a great time painting her up. I still have the base to do on the model as not decided which crew to theme her with, I think it might well be my Neverborn Zoraida crew as I've wanted to try Copellius with her for a while but wanted a quick way to get an eye or two on him before coming close to the enemy. So started layering water effect on it now for my swampy look.

Got a bit more work done over the last couple of days. Added the rest of collodi's crew to my painting table. Just basecoat & wash on the dolls at the moment but think the scheme should look ok.

So it's been a while but I finally found my way back to painting some more malifaux stuff.

Where are the details for the tourney, I'll drag myself over from Edinburgh if it doesn't clash for me. Safe to say I'm still garbage at the game so would be good to learn some more!

Surely the counter to it is how you set up. If your opponent is activating all his models to go after one of yours, it leaves him open to you then going afterwards and picking off his models. He can only avoid that if you allow a model to become isolated to get picked on. I played a game vs the Friedcorps who have a similar abilty to activate them all at once. My solution was to keep my crew bunched up and in cover to limit the impact of ranged strikes setting me up for the counter charges if he committed everything. As a result he ended up not being able to use the alpha strike very effectively. Also anything which allows you pushes on opposing models can be used to cause them to move in such a way it can break the activation chains. Multiple blast attacks can force them to spread out further (no use versus Friedcorps). Or just sacrifice a model to keep them away, any high defense, hard to wound model is likely requiring 2-3 ortegas to take it down so you're then able to focus the rest of your crew elsewhere.

Well that was a frustrating evening. Ended up playing with 4 players in 1 game because 2 of them wanted refreshers on the rules having only played a couple of games and rather than doing new vs experienced wanted a 2 vs 2 game. 4 hrs later only 3 turns played... I just want to play a normal game! I don't mind doing intro games at all, they're good fun and I'll do anything to expand the player base (2 new people now want intro games after seeing what we were doing last night). But the confusion of a 4 player game did nothing to help with the learning process and the player who'd played the least games was using Kirai and I suspect missed a few of the requirements for the casting (I checked the card once and noticed that summon thingmy is a double crow, that wasn't being applied until I checked). On Zoraida, she had good fun flapping around the board, a bit of obey action and some voodoo doll fun. I'm off to read my rules manual now to tighten up on a few rules, a frustrating but mostly enjoyable evening had. I did like the silurids though, 9" leap on a 7 and 5" move means they can really shift round the table

I've seen a few people on the forum who seem to be able to bash out a game in next to no time. But my experience has been it still takes a few hours to get through a game. Partly this is down to all the players in the group I'm playing with (including me) are fairly new, so we spend a lot of time refering to rules and abilities to try and make sure we play things right. I'm probably the most experience of the lot and I still don't know how most of the figures work, and because my opponents are new I tend to spend a while reading their cards to try and make sure we get it right rather than playing some varient of the game that nobody else does! To date I've stuck with the guild crews (Sonnia and J) both of which feel pretty straight forward so it's ususally been working out my opponents tricks for them that has slowed me down, but tonight I'm planning on trying out Zoraida as I've finally got my voodoo doll painted so expect to slow myself down a bit.

Realise if you don't listen to his podcast what I wrote might appear offensive, it's a joke based off the latest episode.

You mean skill-less?

Goodness that sounds rather impressive, what manner of beast is that? How would one choose such Masters and how are the invires determined? (those sufficiently leading questions?)

I'm doing mine in divisions, so Witch hunters 1 scheme, death marshals another, guild guards a third. Not decided what Hoff will get and perdita's lot are a bit different. The guild guard I wanted to look like normal people and went for basically a generic cowboy style to the clothing.