GenCon 2010- Day 3

Day 3 was largely recovery from Day 2, with a hell of a lot of Malifaux thrown in for flavor. Slept in until about 2, which would be much more luxurious if I hadn't gone to bed at 7:30AM, and headed over to the convention center for a 4PM Malifaux tournament. Now, I must admit, that with some of the other big releases lately (WHFB8 in particular), I was NOT prepared for this tourney. I hadn't gotten a chance to play lately, and I had just skimmed the new book. The local "scene" (which pretty much consists of 4 of us playing occasionally), which I was dominating pretty handily, is missing a couple of the armies that can really give the Ortegas fits, apparently. Round 1 was against the new Ophelia Special Force, which is a Goblin army with a group of goblins dressed like the Ortegas. It's about as silly as it sounds, but damn if they aren't effective. There's a couple of bizarre things going on there (like an ability that can deal damage through solid brick walls with no save or attack roll), but the hardest for me to deal with was the sheer number of models. Malifaux does not have a system for balancing unequal numbers of activations like Battletech does, so being outnumbered three to one just means that you have to show your hand earlier. I got smoked pretty badly.

Round 2 was against a Leveticus warband. He is a seriously weird dude. His entire warband is designed around him actually dying over and over again, and getting put back on the table at the end of each turn. Unfortunately for my opponent, he drew the Slaughter objective, which requires you to kill more Soulstones worth of models than your opponent, and a Master kill is worth 10ss. One of my Schemes was "Family Justice", which requires me to kill 3 models with Perdita's Execute ability. I managed to achieve it on Leveticus alone, which along with a kill from Nino Ortega put him 40 points behind. Apparently because of our game, the design team is going to look at the rules for Leveticus in that context. Hilarious game, but due to secondary objectives, I lost it 2vp to 1.

Round 3 was against a Ramos warband. Playing against Leveticus showed off a lot of the model replacement shenanigans in the Malifaux rules- Ramos is built entirely around them. Combining Steampunk Arachnids into swarms, creating new ones entirely, summoning electrical constructs, the whole game was about weird mechanical things showing up and slowly crunching away at my army. When time was called, the game was pretty much a draw, but he had me dead to rights- lucky for me it was a slow bleed.

The terrain for the tournament was the prototypes of the new TerraClips terrain. It was, in a word, horrendous. Badly warping, with clips that were difficult to play over and were not holding buildings in place. Given Wyrd's attention to quality and the usual level of polish on WorldWorks's stuff, I was appalled. Rumors were rumbling around the tables of it being cancelled, of the designers being angry, etc. There's a posting up on the Wyrd site here: http://www.wyrd-games.net/node/98 Apparently they are delaying them until they get fixed. Hopefully they'll get it sorted out, since it's also the first time for WorldWorks selling a physical product. The art is pretty decent, but given the quality of the newer stuff in WorldWorks's fantasy line, I'll probably skip TerraClips- for what they're asking, a flat baseboard with a sewer printed on it is pretty weak.

I was impressed with the running of the event. Things proceeded pretty quickly, players were friendly, and Malifaux continues to surprise me with how crazy they can make the rules and still have them interact in convincing ways. I think I'll definitely be looking into the events next year.