Snow in September II

Just a very quick odds and ends post to close out my Snow in September challenge, which is probably as well, given it's now over a week into October.

I've had a lot of fun painting up the crew, choosing to paint a Snow Storm rather than an Ice Golem at this stage. I also chose to use the M1.5 Wendigo over the M2e version, just because I like the little fellow;

My new Cult of December crew

A few weekends back, painted crew in hand, I made a run up to the North East for four rounds of ‘Faux in Middlesbrough.

I had a great time playing them on the day, they're quite different to the crews I normally use.  Had I not previously committed myself to using Rasputina in three of the four rounds I’m fairly confident I could have made the podium, as it is I finished seventh of twenty-four on two wins and two draws.

I’ve still a lot to learn about the Cult of December. I made a couple of key errors without which I could have won at least one if not both of my two draws. I definitely need more table time with them. That said I did complete my challenge, winning my third round game with the cult.

My cult crew also won me a VASSAL game which was uploaded to YouTube by my opponent, you can watch it here. (It's not in English but you can enable subtitles.)

Overall I'm starting to feel more competent at the table again, my instincts are coming back and my scheme selection has been much more on point recently.  I'll be getting some more practice in this weekend as I drive the team South to Norfolk tonight for the Malifolk event tomorrow.

Wish me luck,  I'll need it. :)

Announcing Schemes Before Events

I mentioned in a previous post that I favour announcing schemes in advance of an event, and following recent discussions on social media I thought I'd expand on why.

The current default for events in the UK is to only provide strategy and deployment in advance and scheme pool on the day of the event.  I'd like to see this change, so that the default is to announce the entire scenario in advance (barring terrain and opposing faction for obvious reasons).

To my mind there are three advantages to doing this;

Time Saving
Tournaments are often pushed for time and fitting enough rounds of Malifaux into a day is a tricky thing.  Providing; strategy, schemes and deployment ahead of time would allow players to be better prepared, and shave some time off crew selection each round. It will help more games get to turn five.

Fewer non-Games
Malifaux is at times a game of mistakes. I've lost count of the number of games my opponents have lost during scheme selection. I always think this is a bit of a shame, and it's certainly not fun for either player. By giving players the opportunity to think about games in advance and avoid auto-lose pitfalls it means we'll have more games where one player hasn't lost before the deployment flip.

More interesting crews
Discussing the tactics with friends and tinkering with lists is fun in itself. Right now thinking on the fly players more often than not play it safe and stick to the same options every time. Giving objective sets in advance gives players more opportunity to play with ideas and come up with more interesting builds.  This will make games more diverse and raise the standard of play.


So what're the arguments against announcing schemes in advance? Two are commonly deployed;

Crew selection 'on the fly' is an important skill
Tournament games are time limited as a practicality, not because the game itself demands they be timed. Where possible the game should be about players making the best decisions they can, not testing their reaction times.

That said even with this proposal in place players will still need to react to the terrain and opposing faction. So even if this is a skill we want in the game, it's not invalidated by this change. Skilled players can still use their experience to react and build to take advantage of terrain and opposition.

Time to prepare makes it too easy for experienced players
The truth is with ten minutes or ten days to prepare experienced players are far more likely to build a better crew and pick the right schemes than a new player.  I suspect any advantage veterans did gain will be more than offset by the games they won't auto-win in early rounds because a new player didn't see how a particular scheme interaction would work given five minutes prep time.


TLDR:  I think this change would enable more tournament games to play the full five turns, raise the standard of play at all levels of the game, and lead to more interesting and fun games overall.

I'm aware a number of prominent people disagree with me on this. I want to be clear that I very much respect these people and their opinions. I'm perfectly capable of getting along with people I disagree with.

Corner Case: Gunsmiths and Acolytes

I'm looking at shelving some of the models I have in my case as I think I'm carrying a little too much dead weight at the moment. With many crew selection options available to us I've always held that it's better to play fewer models you're more familiar with than to hire marginally better choices you don't know how to use.

So I'll be penning a few short articles like this to look quickly at a couple of models, summarise my thoughts on them, and ultimately decide if they'll be staying in my case or not.

December Acolyte
The Acolyte is a 7ss ranged hitting minion. It's harpoon gun has a respectable damage track which also automatically both hands out Slow and forces the opponent to discard a card. Your opponent doesn't want to get harpooned too often.

This would probably be enough to guarantee it a spot in a lot of crews, but there's more! It has From the Shadows, making it's deployment more flexible, and it has a (1) action (no flips required) to put up an aura which strips Armour and Hard to Wound.  This pushes it up to the point where it's right to the top of the power curve.


Gunsmith

The Gunsmith is also a 7ss hitting minion, with both ranged and melee capabilities. It has a plethora of interesting traits; it can ignore most common defensive abilities and gain Fast.

All of its abilities require suits or other conditions to enable them, making it resource intensive to utilize for more than just it's base damage flip. This brings it's damage track sharply into focus, and at 2/3/4 makes it look very lacklustre. For a damage dealer it doesn't actually do much damage on average.

Verdict

Malifaux is primarily a game of resource management, so always evaluate what models asks for in terms of resources to work effectively. The above are expensive minions, and given this I'd expect them to do work in my crews without significant additional investment.

You can invest resources in buffing any model to the point it'll do something, but it's normally much better to just hire a model that works effectively out of the gate. There are also plenty of good 7ss choices I haven't talked about here; trapper, Johan, and The Firestarter.

With that in mind the resource hungry Gunsmith is out, the self sufficient Acolyte stays in.

Tournament Time Management: So it is written

The M&SU approach Pandora with care.

Last Saturday I got to my first tournament in a few months. Having been out of the game for a while I expected to be rusty and so made the trek north to the 'So it is Written' event in Sunderland with mindset that this was essentially three practice games.

To be honest I was a little apprehensive the night before the event, would I still enjoy the tournament game after so long away?

By the morning this had evaporated though and I was genuinely excited to catch up with people and push my toys around again.

On the table I avoided major blunders, but I didn't manage my time as well as I needed to. Time management in tournament games is a critical skill, and one I clearly need to work on, as it cost me at least 5 VP diff during the day.

With that in mind here are my top tournament time management tips;

The timer I use at events

Know what time it is:  Most TO's don't make regular enough time calls. Get a app on your phone, wristwatch, or a countdown timer for your tournament bag. Set it at the start of each round and check it regularly, That way you'll always know how you're doing for time.

Practice Timed Games:  The week before a big event it's worth getting one or two games in using the timing rules on the day, so you get the feel for them.

Plan for four turns:  You can't rely on getting all five turns into a tournament game, even if you play quickly enough you may have a slow opponent. Plan to be winning at the end of turn four and five.

Think about lists in advance:  Most events give the strategy and deployment for each round in advance, It's often helpful to make 'dummy' lists in advance of the event to use as starting points once you see; terrain, opponent, and schemes. This speeds up crew selection and helps you think about how you want to approach the game in advance. 

This is also the main reason I'm keen for more events to publish scheme pools in advance, but that's a topic for another time.

Had I put these tips into practice at the event as well as I used to do  I would have done better at the event overall.  As it was I ended the event with on; a win, a draw, and a loss with zero diff.

Still that's what I expected and I had a great time; free tea, good company, and three games of Malifaux. What more you could you want from a day?

If you've any time management tips when you're at events, please share them in the comments!

Snow In September

It's time for me to pick up a new master, I've been torn between Colette and Rasputina for a little while. At a deadlock I did the only sensible thing I could do...

I asked twitter to decide for me.

I'm a dumb-ass.

Twitter has spoken and December help me my next project is a Rasputina crew, mostly because there will be more than enough Colette players out there as soon as the plastics hit.  My 'thanks' to everyone who gave me their thoughts on which I should choose and why.

Fortunately I own almost all of the models already, except maybe one model I'll get gouged for on ebay. That said most of them are untouched and unassembled somewhere in the crates for Malifaux toys I have in my study.

Whoever dies with the most toys wins.

Currently the only frozen heart in model in my case is the December Acolyte, because he's really fun filthy.

This makes it more a question of maintaining the hobby stamina to do the necessary work and get her on the table and freezing my enemies to death before actual December rolls around again. I am not the quickest of painters after all.

To this end I'm going to set myself a challenge;

I'll win at least one game with a fully painted Cult of December crew before the end of September. 

Doesn't sound like a lot but with other hobby commitments, work and family commitments, I may have bitten off more than a Wendigo can chew. That said what're blogs for if not publicly overcommitting to things?

Right I'm off to play with a big tub of scenic snow and some glitter to see what kind of cool snow effects I can make.

Back on the Horse

I've been playing Malifaux as my main game for over five years now.  Since almost the beginning of the game and the UK scene.  Playing as long as I have from time to time I need to take a break.  The mood will come upon me suddenly and I'll have no motivation to play for a while.

In my experience trying to play through this loss of motivation is counter-productive so I use these breaks to mess about with other games.  Then after finding these games inferior to Malifaux my desire to play resets. That's how it was this time, after a few months inactivity I woke up one morning a week back refreshed and raring to go.

The only problem with not playing Malifaux for any extended period is how quickly your skills degrade.  I've been playing less an eighth of the rate of games I need to be sharp, so right now I'm slow and my moves are clumsy.  I'm in the process of sharpening back up and aiming to be more than competent again soon. 

For the main topic of this post I wanted to very briefly overview some of the games I've messed about with while I've been taking a break and what I think of them;

Dropzone Commander;  This is a really fun game. If you were looking for a 10mm SciFi version of Malifaux this would be it. My only criticism is it's one of those games where you roll low numbers of D6s, and as a result the variance is higher than I'd like.  If you can cope with that though give it a whirl. The minis are a dream to paint.

Alien vs Predator: The Hunt Begins;  I love me some Space Hulk, and this game shares a lot of DNA with that seminal title. It's also got some great ideas of its own, a cool board, and stunning minis.  The deal breaker though is the rule book, which has the quality of writing you'd expect from a free PDF home brew rule set.

It's so bad that I'm actually offended Prodos Games had the nerve to ship the game with the rules in this state.  When I grumbled about this on twitter they tweeted me asking what rules I was confused by, when I politely told them they chose not respond. That's the last time they'll receive my custom.

Hearthstone; As a reformed cardboard crack addict (read MtG player) this one hooked me pretty quickly and suspect I'll keep playing it. It's a fantastically fun and tactical digital CCG. It has some truly elegant game design and a monetisation model I could appreciate even while it emptied my bank account.

That's it for this post. I'm lining up a few more blog posts at the moment, aiming for shorter three to five hundred word posts quickly covering a key topic. So check back soon for some more gaming ramblings...

Obligatory end of year post

2014 is drawing to an end and I'm looking ahead to 2015. Updating the event calendar for my team mates there are already as many tournaments as there are weeks in Q1. Which is fairly amazing when you think about it.

The next major event in the is the masters in mid-January which promises to be both the toughest and most fun event of the year. I'm not expecting to do overly well at the masters, I'm off form and I don't think I have the right tools in my box for that field. That being said I'll give it a shot. 

Priority wise though I'm going to focus on the 2015 season rather than the Masters. I always view masters as a prize rather than a contest and with the 2015 season looking to be the most competitive yet I think that's where my focus needs to be.

I've a rare week off work over the Christmas break so I'm planning hobby to get my new Marcus crew properly off the ground and the practice games to make it worth playing at events.

I know a lot of players look to switch to a new faction with the new year but I feel I've so much left to explore in the Arcanists that I'm going to stay put and give those a try.  Plus the more Kaeris I play the more I want to play, she's one of the most fun masters I've ever taken.

My new years gaming resolution is to keep more of a record of my games, more on that soon, and also to qualify for the masters again next season.

That's it from me, have a happy new year and I'll see y'all breach side!