Okay gents! Just got “done” playing my first game of Malifaux… Here are my first impressions as well as things involving getting into Malifaux (will post a battle report later).
Rulebooks and Errata/Faq: Malifaux currently has 3 rulebooks (1 of which is currently ‘out of print’)
Malifaux 1: This is the core standard rulebook. It is currently out of print (though if someone really wanted it, I know my local gaming store in Cleveland has a copy, and I’d be willing to pick you up one and ship it 
). This rulebook covers all of the basics of the game, but does not include the Errata or FAQs (This is remedied as they are easy to find on the website, and are really in-depth and organized). The book contains ALL of the statistics of the models released before Rising Powers (Malifaux 2). Throughout the book are full color examples, expanations of the rules, and background of named characters and their stories in the city of Malifaux (think of this as the story line from M31 to M41 in 40k, but a lot more personal). There is background on all of the factions, and why they do things in the city of Malifaux (and the surrounding area). Examples of this include The Guild who are Earthers that have ‘settled’ into the city and offer “protection” to the citizens while they hunt for sorcerers, necromancers, outcasts, and the dreaded neverborn (think nightmares in your head), or the Resurrectionists that spend their days in graveyards and morgues, raising things from the dead. So this book offers EVERYTHING (up to the point of the second book) about how to play, setting up the game etc, and even how you win…Cost: 35 dollars when it was in print, but this book comes in a FREE PDF form on their website, but it does not contain errata, new rules, or any background and model information (its just the rules).
Malifaux 2: Rising Powers: This book I haven’t delved too much into, but what I do know is that it contains more information, as well as additional background information and plenty of new models and crews. (This review kinda sucks cause I don’t know much about it). Cost: 35 dollars.
Malifaux Rules Manual: This is the little 15 dollar rulebook, it contains NONE of the background information, and none of the stats of any model (you can infer things from examples, but not enough). This does contain all of the rules to play the game (as well as the first round of Errata… there is a second round though lol). I love this book, though sometimes I wish I had the big book in a non pdf form. Cost: 15 dollars
Malifaux 4: NOT OUT YET… But this book is the next book of the core rules, its going to be updated with the background, model, and rules information… Expected to be August (which is why Malifaux 1 is out of print).
No Dice? Lol wut This game does not use dice for ANYTHING important, instead it uses the almight Fate Deck… This game revolves around the idea that fate is fickle, fate is caring, fate is cruel, and fate… can be manipulated 
. Each player has a deck of cards (it can be as simple as a 1 dollar deck of cards, but I have the fancy looking fate deck from Wyrd. The difference is that Ace is a low card, the suits are different (Mask, Ram, Crow, Tome, instead of the normal suits… but they have a conversion chart ). There are also the two joker cards… the Red Joker and the Black Joker… The red joker is when fate shines down upon you, it is considered a 14 when a value is needed, it is almost always an auto-success (your opponent has to try hard to beat your stat + the Red Joker + any other modifier). The Black Joker is when you lose the good graces of fate. It has a value of 0, you cannot cheat fate to get out of using it, and when it is revealed you HAVE to use it… best case scenario that I saw was getting it in your initiative flip, because even though you go second in the turn, you know its gone for the turn.
Pricing: 1 dollar or so for a standard deck of cards, or 6-8 dollars for the Fate Deck (comes in ‘faction specific colors’)
The Models: The models are really cool. It uses 30, 40, 50, and 60mm bases (even for things like tokens and counters). Out of the two boxes I have, nothing seemed OTT or Cartoonish (sorry WG, I got 1 of my boxes chosen for me, and the other I picked so nothing cartoonish)… BUT he is correct, some are OTT or silly looking… Mostly I’ve seen these from some of the models in the Neverborn line, and some of the elementals found in the Arcanists line. Everything is proportional when it comes to body parts, so nothing really out there when it comes to big bodies, and little heads (you might see big boobs though… but these are gamers).
Pricing: The starter boxes are as low as 28 dollars and as high as almost 50. Single model blisters range from 5-7 bucks, to almost 20… depends on size of the model only from what I can see. The two starter boxes I bought were 28USD Nicodem’s Undertaker’s Lot and 37USD for Lady Justice’s Death Marshals.
Terrain: The game is played on a 3×3 board, and terrain is important and it can have some really cool in game effects. Every model in the game has a height (not always determined by it’s base size) and terrain has height as well, like a height 1 model can’t be seen behind a height 1 tombstone, etc… Also elevated terrain helps and hinders, you can see certain things while on elevated terrain, but if you’re right up against it, unless someone is on the edge of the terrain, they can’t shoot you… We forgot to add in a Location Feature. When setting up your board, you can flip cards to decide if you fight inside, outside, where you’re fighting (like a mine or a forest, etc…) and then you can flip another card to see what special terrain is being added to the location. My favorite is Drink Up! Where you spend an action point to interact with the location feature, and you heal damage, but you’re slowed and unable to use free actions till after your next activation.
What ever you have can be added in, I’m planning on using DnD tiles to create terrain pieces/set up my board, but if you want “Malifaux” Terrain they don’t have any… yet… Wyrd has been working with World Work Games to create full color terrain on heavy card stock called Terraclips, which features enough ’tiles’to create a multi-leveled 2.5ft by 2ft board, fully modular, and can be combined with any of the Terraclips products (There are only 3, the Streets of Malifauc, the Sewers of Malifaux, and the Buildings of Malifaux)… Since its all modular and interchangeable, you could create a 2.5ft by 2ft board that spans from the sewers on the bottom of the board to the buildings on the top, and have your encounter take place on ALL of those levels (about 2-4 per box of Terrain)… The only problem is (besides not being released yet) the Terraclips is going to be 50 dollars before you buy the 18 dollars of plastic clips to hold everything together… But you can go to the warstore, since they’re taking pre-orders right now .
Pricing:Free… or you can use what you have, buy terrain from anywhere, or spend 68 dollars on Terraclips
Getting Started: There are several steps you take before you even flip for initiative… The first thing you do is decide on your Soulstone count. Each Master or Henchman (think named hqs as Masters and generic hqs as Henchmen, even though most of these are still named) has their one Soulstone Cache, this adds to the number of soulstones you have to spend. Based upon your soulstone count you are fighting a brawl or a scrap. Starter battles will almost always be scraps, they range from a 1 point battle to a 55 point battle, your maximum hand size (your hand has the cards that you can use to cheat fate with) is 6 cards, and you can only have 1 Master running your crew. A brawl is 30 points minimum to 80 points maximum, you have 7 cards in your hand, and you can have 1 or 2 Masters running the show, provided they can work together (i.e. Lady Justice cannot work with Nicodem as they would be fighting each other).
Choose Faction: You simply decide if you’re going to play a faction… You choose from The Guild, the Resurrectionists, Arcanists, Neverborn, or Outcasts. That is all you do at this point.
Encounter Setup: Once you’ve determined your soulstone count, you flip to see what the deployment is. They have several different kinds of deployment from your standard pitched battle, to diagonal, to small boxes in opposite corners. Then you place terrain (but don’t choose location features yet).
Choose Strategies: Strategies are your basic mission objectives, they range from kill points, to seize ground, or as my friend and I got (like we always get in 40k) Capture and Control (though its called Claim Jump in this)… So instead of roll dice and tie, it was flip cards and tie 
. There are 3 ways to choose your strategies, you have your core strategies, your expanded strategies, and your individual strategies. You and your opponent decide how you want to do it (my buddy and I just did core though).
Hire Crew: Wait? You’re letting me bring tailored lists to this? wtf? Yes, you read it right, we’ve done all of this, and we’re just now getting to our crews… I like this about Malifaux, if you have a lot of models you can tailor your lists to the mission or the opponent, but your opponent gets to see what you’re choosing at the same time. The only thing you’ve locked into before this step was which faction to play. So you’re already limiting yourself to a specific creed, its like rolling up to an ork army with space marines, and no knowing what you’re going to face, and not telling your opponent what he’s going to face… Though you both have ideas.
Choose Schemes: MOAR OBJECTIVES!But seriously, you can choose to take 0-2 in scraps or 0-3 in brawls. Each scheme adds another objective to the mission. In tonight’s game I (playing Lady Justice and the Death Marshals) chose the Guild specific scheme of Round Up! and my buddy chose Death after Death. The schemes tell you if you have to announce them to your opponent, keep it secret (and when to reveal it) or if you want to announce it you can (generally get a +1 Victory Point for when you achieve the objective). They can be simple things like place objectives in each quarter of the board, if at the end of the game you have a majority of those on the board, then you gain x VP or you gain non if your opponent manages to remove them… Round Up was a killy scheme. I would gain 1 VP if I killed all of my opponents minions and gain a +1 if I announced it (which I did). My friend’s objective was to create more models for his crew, and if he had more models at the end of the game than when he started, he gained 2 victory points (he had to announce this). Any scheme you do not choose gives you 2 more soulstones (You can’t hire more crew with these, but soulstones will be discussed down below).
Deployment: Then you deploy as per your deployment type, flipping a card to see who chooses to deploy first (winner can deploy, or give deployment to his opponent)… We got Diagonal which made us deploy at least 12.5 inches from a line traveling corner to corner through the center of the board (leaving a 25 inch dead zone).
Initiative Flip: You then flip a card to determine who goes first. If at first you don’t succeed, cheat… You can cheat fate by using a soulstone to reflip your init.
Soulstones: Soulstones are these powerful minerals. They let you manipulate fate in such a way that it turns out in your favor. In the background, after the Breach and Earth and Malifaux collided, everyone started to become reliant on these powerful stones. In game terms, you spend soulstones to hire henchmen and minions. Any left over soulstones from hiring crew enter into your Soulstone Pool. This pool is any EXTRA soulstones you have, up to a maximum of 8. Each soulstone can be spent to add value to a flip (rather than replacing it as in a cheat fate), steal initiative, or even heal and prevent wounds. So in our encounter tonight, we settled on a 20 soulstone encounter leaving me with 6 stones due to only taking a single scheme, and 4 from having 4 left over. (We may have done this part wrong, but it made sense to us). So there is some bonus for not filling out your Soulstone count… LJ’s box was 19 soulstones before you include her cache, so effectively I only spent 16 soulstones, leaving me with the ability to start the game with 4 stones.
Action Points:In Malifaux, a model can only perform within its basic skill… There are no movement, shooting, or assaulting phase, everything is based upon the tactics of the almighty Action point. Every model has 2 General Action Points it can spend on anything it wants, movement, casting spells, attacking, shooting, etc… Everything has a cost, somethings have a cost of (0), (1), (2), or (all) (All means that a model literally cannot do anything not even spend a (0) action. So a model spends these points and when its done, it has stopped its activation. Some models have the ability to do something so second nature that it requires no effort at all. Lady Justice is so skilled with her Greatsword that she has a move called (0)Sword Stance. Which is a spell that lets her give her melee abilities with her sword a boost. Nicodem can bolster his undead minions, etc.. Other abilities grant you more action points. Nicodem has an ability called (+1) Casting Expert meaning that if he wanted to, Nicodem can cast 3 spells a turn (Spends 2 general action points to cast spells, and 1 Casting action point to cast an addtional spell).
Turns: After you determine who goes first, you shuffle the init cards back into the deck, and draw your maximum hand size (6 cards in a scrap). Then you activate a SINGLE model on the table, and run through it’s activation spending its action points, once it has finished doing what it wants to do, you hand the activation over to your opponent who then in turn activates a model and uses it. You continue this until ALL models have been activated (so if you have 8 models and your opponent has 4, you will be able to activate those final models without interruption from your opponent)
Closing Phase: You enter this phase once all models have been activated, once in this stage, you finish any effects that end in this stage, you shuffle all of your discard pile into your deck (plus any cards in your hand you don’t want) and then you draw enough to reach your maximum hand size and then you flip for initiative again. (So the person who won turn one won’t always go first… because if they did, using a soulstone to win INIT would be overpowered).
Impressions: Its a cheap game money wise. If I bought LJ’s box, the rules and the fate deck it would have cost me 61 dollars… Add Nicodem’s box price and you’re reaching the price of AOBR… BUT you can play most game sizes with those models, so you get a lot of bang for your buck (If we stretched it, we could easily have gone up to a 25 Soulstone Scrap).
The rules were very simplistic*. I only add the asterisk because we did have a lot of rules questions, but most of those were answered quickly in the rules, or by the Errata and FAQ (BTW the FAQ is a little more official than the GW ones as they actually explain stuff). Rules were very hard to exploit for additional damage/wounds/whatever. Whenever we found something exploitable it was tactics wise. Like my buddy was wondering if he could target Nicodem with a spell Nicodem was casting. We found out you can’t, because ranged attack spells (which this was) are considered to be ranged attacks, ranged attacks do what are called ranged strikes (because you enter into a strike duel to see if you damage anything) And Strikes cannot target the attack i.e. the one casting the spell. He wanted to see if he could heal Nicodem (who had 2 of his 12 wounds left, and in the process see if he could injure an already paralyzed Lady Justice (since she was engaged in combat with him the turn before he wouldn’t normally have been able to do so, but since her melee range was 0 and he could disengage from combat, he was able to cast spells). The rules exploit on my end was similar to a rule in Warmahordes, where I can attack another enemy without leaving the opponent’s melee range (yay for having a 2 inch melee range).
We didn’t finish the game, as we only entered turn 3, and there was no clear winner (though I was down a minion and Lady Justice, and my buddy was down Nicodem… his main powerhouse)… and yes, you heard it right… Our masters were killed and the game still went on (yay for objectives).
I like this game, I like the models, I like everything about it with the exception of the community… its such an unknown game (in comparison to 40k) I only know 2 other people that have played this game, its really small, but it is growing.
So even though Dimwit and I couldn’t game there if we wanted, it seemed like a colossal waste of space. The terrain for wargames seemed to be supplied by the people running the event. A good example was the Warmachine/Hordes Tournament being run by a guy we used to game with (We hadn’t seen him in a few weeks, apparently he moved from the Ashland/Mansfield and he’s a Press Ganger!). The tournament had a few tables to its name, and had really good terrain (even though it was still just a bare table underneath it, but I certainly don’t expect themed boards for any game system especially when you need to tear down quickly after the event. So it was cool to see the different tables for the different games (even with the unused space). I didn’t get to visit the RPG or Larp Rooms, but they were simple conference rooms with plenty of tables to play.
