Campaign Trial Run

While I was in Omaha on Sunday, I sat down with my friend Jon Goulbourne for a quick run-through game to get an idea of how the Misaki crew I'm planning on using for the upcoming campaign will operate. We cobbled something vaguely resembling terrain onto a board, lined up, and went after it.

My Crew:
Misaki
Shang
Torekage
Yamaziko
Archer
8SS

Opponent's Crew
Sonia Criid
3x Witchling Stalker
Samael Hopkins
Watcher
6SS (I think)

My strategies and schemes: Supply Wagon, Stake a Claim, Kill Protege (Sam Hopkins)

Opponent's Strategies and Schemes: Treasure Hunt (Old version), Stake a Claim, Frame for Murder (Sam Hopkins)

Well, that's annoying.

I decided not to get silly about this and just throw into the opponent's crew while leaving Yamaziko to protect the wagon, as her big threat range makes protecting the thing pretty straight forward. Shang would circle around the board to go claim the terrain towards the back of my opponent's half. I mused that our two crews might just wave at each other as they walk past each other. That didn't end up happening...

Early on, I moved forward with the Torekage and swapped him with Misaki for the free 5 inch move. The archer and Shang moved towards the left flank. Jon split his crew up a bit, with one stalker moving towards my right to eventually head towards the claim, the Watcher flying up to go get the treasure from on top of a building in the middle of the board, and Sonnia, Sam, and the remaining stalkers going to my left to go mix it up. Misaki then went, bounced up the board, and proceeded to gut Sam Hopkins and get Sonia and the stalkers into melee with her as well. Sonia puts up inferno, swings at me a few times with her sword, and (this ends up being critical) blocks me off from the crew by dropping flamewalls behind Misaki. Second turn ends with the Torekage unburying on top of the middle terrain, in prime "swap with the archer so he can shoot the treasure counter" position.

Jon wins initiative on the third turn and picks up the counter and high-tails it with his Watcher. I forget that he loses fly and the increased movement, but don't care because putting the treasure counter on top of a building was kind of harsh anyways. The torekage swaps the archer up to the roof, and I reflect on how neat it would be to have companion to make it so the archer could fire now. Also, I remember that Sonia put up Inferno last turn, and ask how many wounds Misaki took from that because I'm a nice guy. Jon says 3, spends another turn not hitting me, recasting inferno, and blocking Yamaziko from healing Misaki. I then gleefully murder Sonia, at which point Jon says "That's fine, I'm good with mutually assured destruction."

I give him a confused puppy dog look.

He then informs me that Inferno goes off and does 6 to everything around Sonia. So that's a dead Misaki, a dead Stalker, and a dead Witchling.

Whoops.

Then one of the remaining witchlings climbs the building and puts the archer into melee. This also annoys me, but I manage to succeed at disengaging despite having a negative twist and plunked the witchling for 3. Later on, Yamaziko climbs to the top of the building and drops that witchling, freeing up the archer to chase down the fleeing watcher and shoot him full o' holes. Given that my Torekage was running to my claim and Jon's was well hidden behind his, we decided the game was pretty well sorted at that point. So, 8-4 victory for me.

My concern was that we were flipping for the injuries as the game went on, and the Misaki and Sonia both flipped a 10+. We didn't see what injury we were going to end up with when we were finished, but we were slightly concerned at the fact that both our masters are pretty combat intensive.

Lessons Learned: Misaki will kill things dead. Then she will die. This is the way of things, unless one plays smarter than me and doesn't throw her at the enemy's whole stupid crew.

Archers kill things dead. This is not news.

When I can get companion Ten Thunders on my Torekage as an upgrade, it will be very useful.

Don't kill Sonia when she has cast Inferno, unless you plan on getting exploded for 6.

Some previous posts

Here are a couple posts from my old blog that had to do with Malifaux.

Battle Reports from 3 Games

Report from a tournament I ran a while back

Inaugural Post: Thoughts On The Wyrd Chronicles 5 Campaign System

One of the things my lovely fiancee pointed out is that my other blog, Geekland, probably loses readers based on how niche my thoughts on Malifaux ultimately are, given that it's not a game tons of people play. I occasionally forget that this is still a bit of a sub-pocket game, given the amount of brain power I typically expend on it. As such, I thought I would organize my Malifaux stuff into it's own blogger feed, so those who look for my bi-annual thoughts that just have to get posted to Geekland don't have to slog through Malifaux info. 

A gentlemen at our FLGS (Gauntlet Games) is going to run a Malifaux Campaign using the campaign rules printed in the most recent issue of Wyrd Chronicles, allowing for your crew members to acquire injuries and upgrades as the game moves along. He's planning on running it as a one-game-per-week campaign, much like is suggested in the article, and pair us up to have us play individually and see how this thing turns out. Now, I entered the Miniatures gaming world thanks to a little game called Blood Bowl (thanks, Jon Goulbourne) and one of the hallmarks of Blood Bowl is the League system where your players grow and change as you play games and eventually your team modifies itself to become quite different than what you start. The new Malifaux campaign system contains a very similar style of game, and I love the idea of that. My concern with this system is the notion that, should things go horrifically wrong in a particular game, you can easily get left with, like, 2 models alive in your crew, no master, and a 6 SS minion to lead you the rest of the way. Now, that would take some horrifically poor luck, but it's not impossible, and the fact that a 25 SS crew is going to have a pretty low model count means you can be pretty vulnerable to things going that way in a hurry. There is, however, a mechanism built in to correct for this by giving you a refund in "Guild Scrip" or the cash to buy new minions, based on the relative sizes of your crews. I would feel better if there was a way to buy a new Master if you lose yours, but cest la vi, it's a game and we'll see what happens.

So, since this thing is firing up, it's time for me to think about who I'm going to use for this campaign. As a henchman I generally try to do what I can to improve diversity in leagues, so I tried to get a feel for what others were going to bring out for this shin dig. Two players were running a practice/warm-up game for it and were playing Neverborn on Neverborn, so that crossed my most familiar faction off of the list (drat.) Another player was leaning towards running McCabe as Guild, so there went my first love, Perdita (double drat.) No one is currently planning on playing Resurrectionists, but my biggest crew in the Ressers is Kirai and some folks pointed out to me (rightly so) that your typical Kirai crew is going to behave rather strangely in this format, since you're only going to have Kirai and the Lost Love survive most games, and boosting them up would be moderately pointless (relic hammer for Kirai! Woo!) So this leaves me with Collette, an interesting crew that I don't know that well, and....Ten Thunders.

A bit of back story. When Storm of Shadows (Malifaux Book 4) came out, I was excited by the new models but not over the moon about the Asian faction. I don't know why, exactly. It's just not one of the themes that has ever really tripped my trigger, despite the fact that I've developed (what I think is) a relatively good method of creating bamboo bases on the cheap using spaghetti. As such, early purchases for me in the book 4 era involved getting Lynch (woo Neverborn) and McCabe. Then, during the Winter organized play event, I needed to play a game with a different faction and picked up the Ten Thunders with McCabe as master to play against a Misaki led crew. And...Misaki gutted McCabe turn one, and then I spent the game playing movement tricks and blowing things right the hell up with my TT Archer...and discovered how sick the crew can be. Then, shrouded in secrecy, I went out to go purchase the Misaki boxed set and assembled it. 

If you look closely at the painted crew, you can actually see the drops of shame mixed in with the paint. 

As such, I'm going to give the 10T a run (I'm trying out all the abbreviations to see which one I like. It isn't that one.) If nothing else, I'll want to get some practice and learn all I can to prep for Gencon tournaments and what-not. My initial list will look like this:

Ten Thunders Campaign Crew 

Misaki

Shang

Torekage

Ten Thunders Archer

Yamaziko

8SS

My rationalization is that, if you're playing a TT crew, you are doing so to include Torekages and do the Tore-flop, so you need at least one ninja-guy. The Archers are maybe one of my favorite parts of this crew, as they flat-out kill things dead, so one of them is going in. I want to test Shang to know whether I feel he's worth the points, so in he goes, and Yamaziko adds some much-needed healing and area-denial to the crew that should help out in missions and preventing loss to attrition during the course of the campaign. My concern is that, typically, a crew will include a hitter minion to back up Misaki, but at 25 SS you have to make some cuts, and I think this is the best way to go for a crew in a campaign format. Misaki will just have to carry the water on her own. 

I'll be updating this as the campaign moves along, to allow for reflection and analysis on my strategy and campaigns in general.