I woke up at 6am after going to bed at 3am. I tried to sleep until around 7am, when I said fuckit and got up to take a shower. I opened up WhatsApp and found some folks who were at Sam’s Deli just up the street. The great thing about bringing all of your friends to a con is that you can find new people, if you don’t want to see the old ones for an hour or so! 🙂
I also took a wander through the vendor hall. Lots of great stuff to see and buy! Airsoft, the medieval recreationists, MMA, leather stuff, Magic, board games, miniature games, glass creations, chainmail, video games, terrain – if it involves nerdery, you can find it! I ended up buying 2 items of leather goods for my costume, but left the rest of it alone.
Malifaux started at 9:30am, and it was a jam packed day! So packed, that while the schedule originally called for 5 games, we only played 4 and still went 2 hours over time! All games were at 50ss, and here I really slacked off on noting the Scheme Pool.
Game 1
Stake a Claim with a Standard Deployment vs Tao. Tao was the organizer of the event, so I drew “the ringer” for this game. Tao was playing a brutal, brutal, brutal Von Schill crew with Lazarus. He had more fun than I’ve seen in a while shooting his big guns at my models and me taking them off! However, he wasn’t playing to win, just to take models off, so I ended up winning this 7-1. This was a really fun game – Tao is a hard player, but has a great attitude. I look forward to playing him in the future when he’s actually trying to win…
Game 2
Turf War with a Flank Deployment vs Mark. I love playing Mark – a fantastic fellow, who plays a challenging game. He was playing Pandora mostly this weekend, and had a brutal list with 3 Sorrows so that whenever you failed a WP duel you took a ton of wounds, with no ability to damage prevent and armour did nothing. He out played me and the game ended 9-7 for him. At one point I could have taken 2VPs for Plant Explosives, but I got greedy and thought I could get 3VPs for it and he managed to ensure I got nothing.
Game 3
Reckoning with a Standard Deployment vs Niko. Niko was playing with Lynch still, and here he just dismantled my crew. I took a fairly high-point cost crew, with Kang, Rail Golem, and Sue and unfortunately I separated my crew and his Teddy and Huggy and such were more than capable of killing my models one-on-one. I learned a lesson here, which I applied in my game on Sunday – more on that later. He destroyed me 0-8, and this was actually my worst game all weekend. Not because of Niko, he was fine. But I’ve always said that one significant benefit of Malifaux is that at any time, no matter whether you’re winning or losing, you can affect the game. You have agency, and that’s what I want from my games. In this game I could do nothing but take my models off the table.
Game 4
Reconnoiter with a Corner Deployment vs Erik. Erik was playing Rasputina with a couple Ice Gamin, an Ice Golem and a Cereberus. Apparently he had been doing quite poorly earlier in the day, but he pulled it together a bit here. We had a stand-off with the Ice Golem vs my Rail Golem, but I managed to out-activate him such that I got the drop on his Golem. I also learned, once again – don’t take Assassinate vs Rasputina. Her Sub-zero trigger means you have maybe 1-2 attacks to kill her, unless you get many models on her. Not worth it. I used my Emberling fairly well here, sending him flying off with his 5Wk and only 3SS cost to hold onto a table quarter for the entire game. I won this 6-5.
We had lunch in the middle, which was nice because apparently the Warhammer Fantasy guys didn’t get a lunch break. Afterwards while talking with them, I got to brag that our event was small enough that at the break the TO asked “So where does everyone want to go?” When your TO eats lunch with you, you know you’ll be back at the tournament on time. 🙂
I won Best Painted here, and was the last person to select a prize so I took come a box of Terraclips “Buildings of Malifaux”, a set that I’m looking forward to finding space for in my terrain box. May have to sell off something to make that space…we shall see.
We finished around 9pm, which was worrying me. I had made plans to meet up with a good friend of mine whom I hadn’t gamed with for a while. We used to play RPGs weekly, but he’s recently moved to Sooke and it’s been a while. I quickly grabbed food and found him playing a board game with another friend I tend to only see at gaming conventions. 🙂 They finished that game and started another, a 4-player game with 5 people. I said I was happy to sit and watch, which surprisingly was the truth – my brain was exhausted after 3 hours of sleep and a day of Malifaux. So I watched and helped with Galaxy Trucker for a bit. When they finished that, we took the game back and went for another. A brilliant idea came upon Adrian – someone in the room was about to start teaching Russian Railroads, a new train-themed worker-placement game, and we could grab a second copy and get in on the explanation. This was a great game! We played until 2am, at which point I was about to pass out in the con. I was super glad I stayed out though – it’s always awesome to see Jer, and Adrian is fun to hang out with.
Back at the hotel room, I lay down and worried about when my roommates were going to come back and wake me up. The night before I had thought about getting my own room, but didn’t enact the plan. 45 minutes later around 3am they came in…as silent as mice. Apparently, I had made an impression the night before and while I woke up when they entered, I managed to get back to sleep ok.
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