I’ve long been searching to fill the void that Guild Ball left, and for me Malifaux is as close as I’ve gotten. In fact, it maybe would’ve even beaten Guild Ball as my favorite game if it wasn’t so dang long. That being said, I think it is mechanically the best game I play, I absolutely love it, and I own most of the models in the game, don’t tell my fiancee….
There is one person in our community that has been basically holding up the shambles of the Malifaux community on his shoulders for like the last 6 months. This guy is a Malifaux fiend. He is getting in like 2-3 games a week and it seems like he’s always running teaching games. He also got me into the game and I’d like to consider him a close friend. He even gave Yams a metric boat-load of yarn for her crocheting a while back. Anyway, he finally drummed up enough excitement in the community that the local store decided to host a game day. Even with a game day on the books, though, we very much have a community that would rather talk about games than play games. In fact, everyone in the discord very much seems like old grandpas that just want to talk about the glory days of their first community and how great it was, but never wants to build a new great community to get new great games in. That was basically a long way to say even with a very active and excited discord, there were four of us… There was the Malifaux fiend playing against someone getting their first game in since GG2, and me facing a person with two games under their belt. Keep in mind I’m pretty new as well with a solid 14 games under my belt. I also jump around a lot and mostly have one game in with each master I’ve played, with a few exceptions.
I decided to go with Perdita 2. I’ve run Perdita 1, twice and I wanted to stick with a crew I know, but still try something new. Plus, I was so excited to try her summoning shenanigans.
I was facing Damian 1, which I have played once and honestly he’s so freaking good. I didn’t go into it overly afraid but honestly I should have. It was my opponent’s third game but every game was with Damian and he was getting good with the crew.
We had flank deployment and the strat here was just bubble up as close as possible to start shooting early and often. Nino deployed in shooting distance of Lohith on the right side. I figured I needed to start chipping away at him for let them bleed.
We were playing plant explosives and I took let them bleed and sweating bullets. My opponent took outflank and sweating bullets.
Round one in a nutshell. Went first with Nino who shot into lohith and did next to nothing. Then lohith charged into Nino and didn’t do much in return. Next I went with the enslaved nephilim and frightening remindered Francisco towards lohith. He then concentrated and went for his obey and obviously whiffed. Don’t remember too many other specifics. One of his dabblers made a beeline for the right corner and I was like yeah he has outflank so I started moving abuela and sly to the left corner to try and deal with the dabbler that was going to have to go there. After lots of out of activation movement Francisco got into charge range of lohith and dealt some decent damage to him on his turn. My opponent then proceeded to get his entire crew up the board out of nowhere and slam into Francisco leaving him on death’s door. This was pretty bad because Francisco was my guy for sweating bullets and maybe have already been in 6 inches for it too. The guild steward tried to get close enough for some heals but couldn’t get there. Perdita just moved up and took some shots into Thorpe. Damian taxed me HARD this game. I was constantly having to ditch cards to double shoot.
In round two the high points I remember are Francisco dying, which denies me the reveal on sweating bullets. However, lohith is below half, now all I have to do is get Thorpe below half to score let them bleed. When Francisco died he also gave up an explosive. Nino did plant my explosive for the turn so I’m good there but the dabblers road the aetheric currents and got to both plant an explosive ill never get AND put out a scheme marker for outflank. I wouldn’t be able to deny outflank scoring this turn. I did get Thorpe below half this turn, by shooting through her shields but she healed a ton during her turn. Both Santiago and the pistolero would die this turn .
Things were pretty bleak going into this round. I was down quite a few bodies. During this round I killed the dabbler with Abuela, denying the last outflank. She then rolled over to his side of the board and with a por el from sly she dropped her explosive. Sly moved to the corner of the board and was literally millimeters too close to Abuelas marker to plant his explosives. Lohith would kill Nino this turn and unbury his explosives, denying me any chance at the main strategy this round. For the first time this game perdita made a pistolero who killed the puzzle box and graduated to a monster hunter…. Then immediately died. Miya killed the guild steward and then died herself to his reprisal.
We decided to call it after this round. Perdita couldn’t get far enough away from things to plant explosives so she decided to damage Thorpe instead and couldn’t manage to get her below half either. Perdita then died to the collective forces of Thorpe, Damian, and Inky boi.
Final score was 7-2 Damian over Perdita. The game was rough for me but honestly I had a blast. Mid game I accidentally called my opponent bud and had to explain I’ve just been watching a lot of letterkenny. Turns out he’s a huge fan and we just kept ripping letterkenny references the entire game. Hope to play him again in the future, however, grad school is getting hectic and guild ball is coming back so who knows.