CannibalBob

I don't mind if Mah is not as good at obliterating things as Ophelia as long as she and her crew offer a different playstyle and are not downright terrible. I don't have any experience with using her on the table yet, but just reading her abilities and theory-crafting she does seem to have a pretty unique playstyle for Gremlins. The Gremlin masters are all generally either based around some form of ranged combat or crew support. Even the Gremlins that can play closer to the front line and that can be respectable in melee when needed, such as Ulix (with the right upgrades), tend to not want to spend much time there. Mah is quite different in this regard as she really wants to be charging into combat and beating people with that giant spoon. I am not going to say that she is better than the other masters, but I think as an opponent you have to respect what she and her crew can do and as a gremlin player I appreciate that she brings a unique experience to the faction.

The two crew boxes for Gremlins that have the most cross-over with other crews are the Som'er and Ophelia box sets. Other than the masters and the totems there is nothing in either of those boxes that are not useful to many other crews. And some of the main staple models of the faction are in those two boxes (Bayou Gremlins, Francois, Lenny, etc). I would not ignore the Som'er box so quickly. I think it is one of the two best starting points in the gremlin faction for new players - with the other box being Ophelia. In addition, while Som'er can play a very strong summoning game using a lot of Bayou Gremlins (one extra box is often enough) he has a number of abilities that are very strong no matter what models are in his crew. He can really get good use out of just about anything in the faction. You don't need to run him with a ton of Bayou Gremlin. He just happens to be able to make Bayou Gremlins work better than most other gremlin masters and with the right upgrade he can continually summon more each turn. Ophelia's crew is very nice because for the most part she is pretty self-sufficient and so anything else that is self-sufficient works well in her crew. Her crew box also comes with a big bunch of great enforcer models and one of the deadliest henchmen in the game.

No, I tend to summon the Gremlins and then send them off into the wild to do stuff. I also tend to start with a number of Bayou Gremlins in the crew from the start and those spread out to do stuff while a couple stay close for summoning. But even if you clump up you can always send the skeeters off to act as harassment models - which they are very very good at.

Are we posting our chosen faction in this thread, or is it in another? Gremlins!

I could be swayed for many masters, although I prefer the pig manuevering abilities that Penelope has for Ulix, but I don't think I could ever drop the skeeters for Som'er. I find that Som'er really does not need many soulstones and I could care less about getting more. He does not really need any extra card abilities beyond what his crew can already get for Bayou Two Card and Survival of the Fittest. Skeeters are simply so amazingly versatile and can have a much larger area that they can effect on the board than Cranky has. They can provide buffs (such as willpower), add control of the enemy via suppressing all triggers, can give you control over your own forces by guaranteeing suits or suppressing triggers, and they are good at providing harassment and pinning down enemies through engagement. They can even allow you to fire into a melee where they are distracting the enemy without hitting them by accident. And they do all of this over a huge effective area and for little cost. I really like Old Cranky and the abilities that he has, but I just don't find that they come close to the effective use that Skeeter's have in a Som'er crew. And I also see very little point in clumping up Bayou Gremlins and trying to make them more durable. They are cheap and expendable. You sacrifice them to achieve your goals and care little if they die. Som'er can usually make more. I would consider Old Cranky more in a Som'er list if he was trying to run enforcer heavy and bring all the Kin along with him.

Gremlins do have a box like that and it is Opheila's box. Her box contains a master, henchman, 3 totems, and 3 enforcer models. There are no minions in her box, since every Kin model is at least an enforcer. They just all happen to be on small or medium bases.

I like them. I was on the fence about whether I would get these models since I have the original metals and I like the sculpts, but I like these more. I would prefer if they had not duplicated the sculpt of the one leaning on the umbrella from the metal model, but this plastic render looks like a more detailed version than the metal one so I still like it.

Most crew box sets only have one large model or one high point cost model in them. Usually the model is a henchman that fits with the crew, or else it will be a large enforcer model. Ulix's crew has Old Major as a henchman and so he takes up that spot in the box set. That means you don't get either the Warpig or the Sow in the box and those need to be purchased separately. Currently there have been no announcements for the Sow, McTavish, or the Bayou Gator model release dates. Wyrd has their release schedule published up through December, so I would expect to see those models probably some time in the 1st quarter of 2016.

Armor is not hard to deal with if you go for volume of shots. Remember that an attack that inflicts damage cannot be reduced below 1 by armor. So if you have a lot of Bayou Gremlins that are shooting a ton of 1 damage attacks anyways then armor does not matter. I would be careful about how you use Dumb Luck triggers against armored models though. Unless you are getting a whole lot of damage from the attack it can often not inflict as much as you thought it would. Just make sure to weight the risk vs reward of the dumb luck damage versus enemy armor before you declare the trigger. For instance, if you declare dumb luck and flip poor for damage and end up doing 2 damage total, then any amount of armor will reduce that to 1 inflicted and you will take 1 to your model via the dumb luck rule. That is pointless as you would have inflicted 1 point of damage to the enemy without declaring dumb luck. This really starts to come into play when the enemy gets their armor value up to +2 or greater.

I really like the rules for Old Cranky, but I think he suffers a bit along with most of the generic faction totems in that Wyrd did an extremely good job at remaking the totems in 2nd edition. There was a lot of totems in 1st edition that simply did not work too well since all the totems were basically the same and generally had one ability to distinguish them. In 2nd edition they changed each totem so that they were a model with specific themed synergy with their master. The end result is that most of the totems are pretty good. This makes the generic faction totems a hard sell in a lot of cases since the themed master totem is often really good. I think this issue is very pronouced in the Gremlin faction as well, since I cannot think of a single Gremlin totem that is not highly useful for their master. If Old Crankly was in any other faction then I would probably snap him up for a variety of masters, but the gremlin masters usually get a lot from their totems. I cannot imagine playing Som'er without his skeeters. Ulix gets a lot of benefit from Penelope. Wong's assistant gives him cheap access to crackerjack timing which helps bunch enemies up so that Wong can blow them apart with blast makers. The Little Lass is quite a terror in melee with her wooden spoon. Apprentice Wesley gives your Brewmaster a second lease on life. And the Young Lacroix are quite good shooting minions for very cheap, and they can both fire and reload Ophelia's various upgrade guns. I can see a few places where you could get good use from Old Cranky (probably Ophelia and Mah Tucket), but in general I think you will want the themed totems.

The shipping invoice said to send an email to office.assistant@wyrd-games.net. I sent an email explaining the issue and containing the tracking information & order numbers. Should I use the damaged/mispacked form instead? Nothing was damaged, I simply got the order that was intended for someone else and I think they got mine.

I seem to have gotten someone elses order. The shipping label on the box is to me, but the Wyrd invoice is to them and the contents are not what should have been in my last order. I split my order into 3 orders and 2 of them arrived. The last one seems to be mixed up. So I opened a box and found the 2 player starter set and Colette's crew box, and I am guessing someone else is going to open their box and find Shen Long, Wong, and a Gremlin T-shirt. Going to be quite the surprise for them. Sadly there is no phone number on the box for the other guy or I could sort it out. Instead I guess I am going to have to contact Wyrd directly. Hopefully this is not too confusing to solve, but one of my other boxes had the wrong tracking information so I think my order on the whole just got muddled.

I just picked up the new album from The Sword. It is quite a departure from their other stuff. While they usually play throw-back doom style metal with a bit of thin-lizzy & ZZ top rock influence mixed in this new album is pretty much just straight 70s rock. On the whole I like the album, but it seems inconsistent. Some songs seem a bit too short and end right when I think they are getting good. Some other songs do not seem to fit the flow of the album. So far I think that the album is quite awesome at times, but they do not seem to have been able to sustain a consistent quality across the whole thing like the usually do. I have also been listening to some of the new Trivium stuff that they have been previewing and it has gotten me to go listen to some of their older stuff again.

Yeah, that is something I do not like either. While I love their sculpts, I think they need to work a bit more to find a balance between assembly, durability in game, and dynamic poses. I think a sweet spot can be found, they just need to do it.

They are better than what I have seen in most games.

If Neverborn manage to win the event I think the Nightmare or special edition model should be another Teddy. I think it is a tradition now?

Except for when it is not, which would be all the time.

I think the breakage is partly due to how the sprues are laid out and how many of them they need to jam into the box. I think it is an issue with the pegs on the smaller set of sprues. When I tried to put them back into the box I was not able to find a way to line up the smaller sprue so that the pegs would fit into empty space in the large sprue - so it sticks up a bit and you sorta have to jam it into the box. In the end I just took the smaller sprue out and put it on the shelf next to the main box until I get a chance to work on it so that nothing ends up broken.

Do you mean in melee? Because the line of sight rules are fairly clear about height and elevation.

I like Mercury being large, it fits with the Strongman theme and I think it is pretty funny that he is still a showgirl. The one that surprised me though is how big Mr Cooper himself is. I expected Mercury to be large, but I did not think Mr Cooper would be so large as well. His hip seems to be right around Miss Ann's shoulder.

I just checked the models and all the ones in my box are intact. I checked one pack of cards and they do seem to be cut odd. I have not tried to sleeve them yet so I don't know if that is going to be an issue or not.

That is only because she is not a Hog. The emphasis in that sentence is on Gremlin.

Malifaux is a lot like Infinity where you want a lot of terrain by default. My personal opinion is that you want a lot and the terrain guideline is generally the minimum that you want. The other cool thing is that Malifaux also works very well with interior spaces and 3-dimensions. As you mentioned, Warmachine does not really function well with much terrain and it absolutely does not function with 3-dimensional terrain such as roof-tops, catwalks, walk-ways, or other raised areas. A Malifaux board tends to get better with that sort of terrain and the rules do a good job of explaining how models and movement interacts with that sort of terrain.

I did not check the card quality, but I ended up with 2 packs of cards in my Dark Carnival set. Mr. Cooper also seems like a very large fellow - or else Miss Anne Thrope is very tiny. I don't mind either of those being the case, but it was what I initially noticed when glancing at the plastics.