After hearing the whisperings around the ‘net about this game, and then having a couple of my regular wargaming podcasts do Malifaux focused episodes I finally decided to take a look and see what all the fuss was about. Before taking the plunge I did my research into it and watched some youtube videos to see the mechanics in action to make sure it was something I could agree with. After then getting the opportunity to read a bit of the rulebook (including the lovely short fluff stories interspersed throughout) I went and ordered everything I would need to host a starter game between me and a brother. This was the Rulebook, 2 starter boxes (Lady Justice and Lilith) and 2 fate decks (slightly modified and Malifaux branded, but otherwise just normal decks of cards). I then ordered another starter box (Nicodem), as I got a freebie model in the Lilith box that I could not use without a Resurrectionist force. Darn. :P

But first some background: Malifaux is a 30mm skirmish game, most famous for its lack of dice. Instead of the usual handfuls of polyhedrons that wargamers are used to, Malifaux arms the players with a hand of cards and a deck to draw from.

Both players have a hand of cards (6 for the size of game we were playing), and everything is resolved in this game by flipping over the next card in the deck. There are positive and negative twists that affect how many cards you draw (negative twists mean you draw extra and have to pick the lowest, positive twists mean you draw extra and can choose which card to use). Players can also Cheat Fate by replacing the card flipped from the deck by one in their hand.

Each model gets a stat card, similar to Warmachine, which lists everything you need to know about that particular model. These also work for wound tracking, and I found it useful to rotate these cards 90 degress to help remind me which models had already activated each turn, which leads to…

Turns in Malifaux are integrated. Not in the way that Infinity uses the constant “overwatch” ability, but one player activates and uses one model, then the other player, back and forth until all models have been activated. If one player has more models, this can give a slight advantage as the last few models will be activating back to back with no fear of reprisal from the opponent’s activations.

I don’t want to go too in depth to the rules in this blog post, just enough to convey my thoughts on the game, but I am happy to attempt to answer specific questions in the comments afterwards.

The game requires more terrain than 40k, but less than Infinity and does not go for true LoS, but defined model heights (in whole inches) which corresponds to terrain heights. For example, a height 1 Terror Tot is invisible behind terrain that is 1” or more high. If the model is taller than the terrain, cover comes in to play, but only if the model is not more than twice the height of the terrain (a height 3 Mature Nephilim gets no cover from the same 1” piece of terrain that hides the Terror Tot). All that being said, here is the table that we played on:

Malifaux Starter Table

It should also be mentioned that Malifaux is typically played on a 3’ x 3’ board for this size of game. The table we played on was slightly less than 3’ across and the string near the tape measure marks the 3’ wide boundary. In between each game we moved some of the barricades and scenery features around.

There is a rather decent mission / setting / deployment generation system included with Malifaux, but as this was our first few games we decided to just go for opposite sides deployment, and we would play until annihilation (which we realised afterwards, is not actually any of the Malifaux standard missions!).

Me and Liam ended up playing three games in a round-robin fashion so that no two match-ups were the same given the factions available; Guild vs Neverborn, Neverborn vs Resurrectionists, Resurrectionists vs Guild.

In the first game I played the side of the Guild vs Liam’s Neverborn. This was our slowest most stilted game while we got the hang of the different mechanics and felt our way through the rules. A lot of our decisions on the table were based on assumptions from other tabletop games and it showed. A high man-of-the-match moment was when one of my Death Marshals was finally killed, it triggered an ability called Slow to Die which gives a free ability to use immediately at the point of death. With this ability I chose to shoot one of Liam’s models that he had just used a not insignificant number of cards to grow from a Terror Tot to a Young Nephilim. The shot hit, it wounded triggering the critical damage modifier, and then dealt severe damage which killed the model outright from full health. Awesome (for me, Liam was less than impressed at that particular string of luck). That game was won by me.

The second game, Neverborn (me) vs Resurrectionists (Liam), proceeded a lot smoother than the first. More game than rules checking (although it did still happen frequently). There wasn’t a huge amount noteworthy about this game except my wonderful ability to resist any and all spells Liam was trying to cast (mostly without having to Cheat Fate either!). Having seen the capabilities of the Neverborn in the previous game, I had some idea of the do’s and don’ts and ended up playing them rather differently to Liam including a critical moment when I saved the life of my Master when I realised she had a spell that allowed me to swap the places of any two models in range and LoS (including herself!). Again, the game was won by me.

The third game, Resurrectionist (me) vs Guild (Liam), was our fastest game of the three, however it was not down to our increasing grasp of the mechanics, and definitely the biggest downside I have found to Malifaux so far. The problem being that the Lady Justice starter box is geared very much so towards the complete annihilation of Undead, which is what the Nicodem box is all about! The game was going rather nicely until Liam discovered all the spells and abilities that did double damage against Undead, or even worse Lady Justice’s ability to remove all corpse counters / mindless zombies (which count as corpse counters) within a 6” radius. This combination left me very quickly with barely any models to stand up to the advancing opposition. This game was won by Liam.

My overall thought on Malifaux from these games is that it is rather nice and very different from many other tabletop games. A definite fourth pillar to my wargame hobby (the other three being 40K, Infinity and Warmachine in case you had missed that :P ), but not anywhere near the hype I had heard from others who have found it to replace their other tabletop ventures. The very clear imbalance between the Lady Justice and Nicodem boxes was a rather large disappointment to both me and Liam. When chatting after the game, neither of us could see how that matchup could be seen to be balanced by anyone.

The card based game mechanic goes a long way to making this game as unique as it is. If this game was based around dice, I don’t know how it would fare against others. As it is, I find that the use of cards can help smooth over the “random factor”. By this I mean that in dice based games, you can roll 1’s till the cows come home some days. In Malifaux, there are limits to the number of 1’s you can draw (4 in fact….). As the cards are all shuffled together after each turn, you can still suffer from runs of horrendous luck, but this is further tempered by the ability to Cheat Fate for those moments when you *need* something to work.

At first glance, the number of stats and different numbers involved on each of the character cards does seem very intimidating, but after a game or two it does all fall into place nicely. The cards themselves though are a bit of an annoyance. They come folded in half and fit nicely into card pockets (for use with dry-wipe markers for wound counting), but the spell descriptions and text is all on the inside, requiring the players to be constantly removing and replacing the card through the course of the game. Me and Liam quickly ditched the card pockets and just tracked wounds on a separate piece of paper. For the long term I think I will be laminating the cards.

One final thing I liked about the game system is that you don’t loose points for coming under the game size. For example if you are playing a 25 point game and your roster comes in at 22 points, you get an additional 3 Soul Stones to use to bring the total up to 25. Soul Stones can be used by your Master to stack the odds with you by drawing additional cards as well as other benefits. Despite being a rather core mechanic, they didn’t come hugely into play in the games we played (mainly because we forgot about them 90% of the time).

I hope this post has been useful, I feel I might have let it ramble on a bit too much in some places, but if you have any questions or want any clarifications, leave a comment or catch me on twitter and I’ll do my best to answer!

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