Anyway. Aside from insulting the lovely man around whom the Malifaux scene revolves (no, it’s not another fat joke – this is an ‘all about him’ joke), the point of this entry is to highlight the differences between Malifaux and the other games in the marketplace that you might have played. As a newcomer it’s these differences that have really struck me and contributed to a game with a very unique feel.
First and foremost, there are no dice in Malifaux. You are not trusting your entire game plan to the roll of those cubed little sods, and the hope that enough of them will respond favourably to your pleas. The only use for a dice in Malifaux is as a wound marker.
You generate your numbers with a deck of cards. For every action you flip a certain number of cards from the top of your deck and use the numbers on those cards to work out the results. Better yet, you start each turn with a hand of cards that you can use to replace the cards flipped – this is called ‘cheating’ and, although you can’t use it all the time, it’s a great mechanism for taking out the extreme results. If you look after your hand well enough then you can have a couple of face cards ready for when you really, really have to have a particular action go your way.
Of course there are games where the cards will go against you. Flip a black joker and the result is invariably bad. However, that hand will still give you a fighting chance in all but the very direst of circumstances.
The duel is a fundamental concept in Malifaux. Take for example the act of shooting at an enemy. In the Warhammers, you take into account the skill of the firer to get a number, then have to hit that number with a dice roll. In Malifaux, both the firer and his/her victim flip a card and add their skill level to that flip. This takes into account that it’s easier to thump a cowering peasant over the head with a sword, or harder to shoot a highly trained martial artist diving behind cover all the time.
Beyond the duels is an extra layer – the trigger. Depending on the suits of the cards flipped, both sides can potentially unlock a series of secondary effects. These can range from additional attacks, to out of sequence moves, to creating new demonic babies, to catapulting piglets across the board.
I found triggers quite hard to get my head around at first as there’s nothing remotely similar in the games I grew up with. Now though it feels like second nature, and I’m starting to build plans based around those triggers. This can even give the impression to the casual watcher that I have half a clue what I’m doing…
We’ve all had those games. A game of Warhammer when one player, despite having been comprehensively outplayed from start to finish, wins by massacre by shouting the fateful words “6 dice Purple Sun!”, laying down a template and then removing half his opponent’s army. Hormachine players must know the pain of having spent a couple of hours in complete control, only to lose their Warcaster and therefore the game to a series of lucky dice rolls. How many times have hardened Magic: the Gathering players lost out at tournaments to a spoilt little git who has been able to spend the £100 to buy that card which is guaranteed to ruin your plan entirely?
Having played Malifaux incredibly badly against a series of the top players in the game, I’m yet to find an equivalent to the apocalyptic examples above. There is no killswitch you can throw that will wipe out the enemy in one shot. No scenario has an instant win condition. You can set up for a game pretty much knowing that it will go the distance and without worrying that in one shot your chances will lay in tatters. It takes a very special type of incompetence to be so far behind in a Malifaux game that there’s no point playing the final 3 turns, and if you’ve played really well then the odds are extremely good that you’ll be rewarded for that good play with one in the W column.
Following on from the above, the absolute fundamental thing to bear in mind when actually playing Malifaux is that you can’t win by just pelting hell-for-leather into the middle of the opposing crew and killing them all.
A competitive Warhammer Fantasy game, of which I’ve played (yeah, yeah, and lost – kiss my trophies Spedding) a great many, fundamentally boils down to how many points you get for wiping out chunks of the enemy army.
Malifaux is different again. Both sides have the same strategy, a kind of overarching scenario that they’re both trying to achieve at the same time. But at the same time they each have schemes available to them which score further victory points, and these don’t have to be disclosed to the enemy. You can literally spend an entire game not knowing what your opponent is trying to do until they reveal their schemes at the end of the game to claim the points.
This single factor is probably the one that drew me most into the game. I love nothing more than convincing my opponent for most of the game that I’m trying to hold an area of the board, only to reveal at the end that I was actually just trying to cluster all their models together so I can blow them all up. And that lone model they couldn’t quite finish off wasn’t running away to stay alive. It was running away to plant an objective in their deployment zone. The extra level of strategy that adds is amazing and I can’t speak highly enough of it.
And yes, it is entirely possible to lose a game having wiped out all your opponents’ models. Been there. Done that.
Along similar lines to the likes of Necromunda, Mordheim and Warmahordes, Malifaux is a skirmish game. It’s played on a 3 foot by 3 foot board and you have crews of 6 to 12 models instead of armies of hundreds.
This has a number of knock-on effects. The first and foremost one is cost. Only needing a handful of models makes Malifaux a cheap game to get into by the exacting standards of wargaming. The crew boxes produced by Wyrd are really good value as well which helps – for an outlay of between £25 and £30, a crew box contains a set of plastic models that are all you need to get started and will form the core of your crew as you buy more models. Increase that spend to £70 and you’ll have a crew big enough for competitive play with a ton of options to tailor it to the strategies. Compare that to the cheapest Warhammer armies at £300 to £400 for something to take to an event.
Painters and dedicated hobbyists will also feel the benefits. Being able to lavish all your attentions on a handful of models can result in some spectacular crews. Head out into the Twitter-verse and take a look at Maria’s (@MariFaux) Dr Who crew, Richard’s (@wrkbnchwarriors) Rail crew, Joel’s (@Joel__Henry) Goldilocks Lilith crew, and anything Ben (@ben__halford) has ever taken a brush to. Even the ham-fisted amongst us (*raises hand*) have enough time to focus on a model and do a decent job rather than having to rush. But if painting isn’t your thing, in most cases the minimum standard is undercoated.
Although by no means an exhaustive list, I hope this does give an insight into what makes Malifaux such an interesting game to play. It offers a lot to even a casual player and if you take the time to get into it there’s a depth there that a lot of other games can’t match. I haven't even touched on the incredibly deep fluff that underpins the whole game world - maybe another time!
Cheers
Ben
- From the PanzerPad
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