Initial Impressions: Malifaux pt 1

I’ve mentioned my love of skirmish games in the past – games usually involving only a handful of models, where each is significant, where each matters. Prime examples would be GW’s Necromunda and Mordheim games, both of which were pretty bloody awesome, even if they’re currently not in general production and you have to get your bits and bobs from their online store.

Well, until Privateer makes me squeal with glee by releasing an Iron Kingdoms squad-based skirmish game, preferably with a character development system of some sort, I have to look at other options.

Enter Malifaux.

A game still very much in its early days, it’s a squad-based skirmish level game set in a gothic/horror/steampunk/wild west kinda setting. Okay, I’m not into horror stuff as a general rule, but I do dig steampunk (I blame Privateer entirely for that), and I can get into a Western setting, so my curiosity was piqued enough to do some further research.

After staring at the models for a while, I chose a crew and ordered the rulebook. Yes, this contravenes the directive to actually know what models do before choosing a faction and investing, but I’m nothing if not a creature of whimsy, and dammit, I liked what I saw. Rules be damned, I have difficulty enjoying a faction if I don’t like the way it looks, so choosing based purely on the model aesthetic wasn’t *too* far off my normal procedures anyway.

I read the book, I played a test game against uberpainter Hank Raab and skinny Khadoran Rich “Orcasaurus” Godwaldt (Moonova had to skedaddle, unfortunately). I fully assembled my models, cleaned ‘em up and hit ‘em with some Privateer white primer. Let’s take a look at some initial impressions.

The System

Here’s some significant in miniatures gaming: No dice. Everything’s based on a deck of cards… and yes, you can use a regular household deck of cards if you don’t want to fork out for an official Malifaux deck. 52 cards in four suits + 2 jokers and you’re good to go.

This takes some real mental adjustment, and I’m thinking will be one of the hardest initial hurdles to getting people interested in the game, but even after a single game of say, at least half a dozen turns so you have time to try things out, players will be comfortable enough with the card mechanic.

It works thus:

Everything you want to do – cast a spell, shoot an opponent, poke ‘em with a stick, whatever – has a target number, and in some cases a target suit. You check the appropriate stat on your model, then flip the top card of your deck. Add your stat to the number, compare to the target, and right there you know whether you succeeded or not. For the record, many interactions are duels – My stat+card against a target number of Your stat+card.

Now that’s pretty similar to a dice-based mechanic – my stat+roll vs your stat+roll… but here’s where it gets funky.

You can cheat fate, or spend soulstones.

Cheating Fate: As well as having your deck, every turn you have a hand of cards. Once in each interaction, you can replace the card you flipped with a card from your hand. You might want to do this to increase your total, or to change the card to a suit you need , since some spells and abilities require both a target number and a specific suit.

Soulstones: In Warmachine terms, these are your Mk II Warjack points, and whatever points you had left over in your list. Say you were building a 25 pt Malifaux Crew, but only bought 22pts worth of models. You’d get 3 soulstones right there, plus whatever was listed as your Master’s cache value. So if that cache was 4, you’d get 7 soulstones to use during the game. The way these affect the game is, you can expend one (as long as the character you’re activating has the ability to use soulstones) to flip a second card from the top of your deck, and add it to the existing card, giving you a higher total and potentially two different suits if your action required them.

Example: My dude, Bob, wants to shoot your dude, Jim.

• My combat stat is 3, I flip a 9 of Masks, for a total of 12. Your defense stat is 4, you flip an 11 of Crows, for a total of 15.

• Right now it looks like I’m going to miss, so I Cheat Fate with a 12 of Tomes I had in my hand, bringing my total to 15, equaling your defense total – I’m hitting.

• You don’t have any cards higher than an 11 in your hand, so you can’t Cheat Fate to make your total higher, but Jim is your Master, so you spend a soulstone and get to flip another card – a 7 of Rams – and add it to your total, so now you have a combined total of 22, and both the Rams and Crows suits.

• I’m gonna miss, but Bob doesn’t have the soulstone ability, so I can’t raise my total any further. I miss.

• If it turns out your Jim had a passive ability that triggered whenever he defended with a Rams card, you could fire it off now too.

It all sounds a bit complicated, and there’s always abilities which will affect the values further, but one or two tries and you’ll have it down pat.

The neat trick here is that by cheating fate, you’ve got the option to (in Warmachine terms) boost the attack roll after seeing whether or not you miss – you can counteract a low number – but your resources are limited. Much like your Warcaster with his focus, you’ve only got so many cards and so many soulstones to ‘boost’ with. Do you use them now, on this attack, or do you camp them to boost your armour?

Additionally, you can keep whatever cards you want in your hand each turn, while the rest cycle back into the deck. Do you keep high number cards in your hand for next turn, knowing that that leaves a higher proportion of low number cards in the deck, or do you keep the lower number cards in your hand, increasing the chances of your flipping a higher value card initially or when you use a soulstone?

Then, there’s the additional scope for buff and debuff effects. Not only might you be able to increase or decrease a stat value, you can pull a Vlad/Calandra. In terms of a buff this means flip an extra card and use the highest value. In terms of a debuff, flip an extra card and use the lowest. There are abilities that can put out a two cards buff or debuff, meaning you’re flipping a total of three cards and using the highest or lowest accordingly.

And of course, the red joker is essentially a critical hit, and the black joker is a critical miss.

Another variation from what we WarmaHordesers are used to is the activation order. Each turn, initiative is determined by a card flip (which you can cheat fate or use a soulstone on if you want), and then the winner gets to activate a single model. Not his entire crew, a single model.

Players then alternate activating models until everyone’s activated.

This can be freakin’ critical, because by and large most effects don’t carry over from activation to activation – they end at the end of the turn.

Case in point, in our test game Rich was able to activate his master, Pandora, first. He then slapped a handful of debuff effects on my master, Rasputina, before I could set up a single defensive measure. Nothing.

I then had to pass a willpower test to do an action at all, a second one to attack Pandora, and then – only after I passed both – was I able to flip for an attack. These willpower tests were debuffed so I was flipping two cards and taking the lowest, and if I didn’t cheat fate or use a soulstone to make sure I passed the test, I took damage. It was freakin’ brutal.

In activating that one model to try to get the last minute win with her three actions, I used something like 6 soulstones, every card in my hand, and approximately half of my deck with flips and cheats and soulstone use et al. I don’t care that it didn’t work in the end, we were playing to learn the game and it was freakin’ epic as Rasputina tried to fight through everything Pandora had thrown at her. Much fun.

Now, if I’d been able to activate Rasputina first, I could have summoned ice collumns, a defensive windwall/snowstorm, whatever. Or, I could have activated one of my other models, and simply walked it over to block line of sight. There were options, but since Rich had initiative, he got to get his assault in first while my defenses were down.

So yeah, the card system looks awkward and confusing at first, but lo and behold, it’s actually viable, and potentially gives you a lot more control over the game then dice do. It’s worth at least sitting in on a demo to get a feel for it before you balk and thumb your nose at it.

To be continued…