I had a game...

On Sunday I got the chance to play against my good mate Duncan in a game of Malifaux. Because Duncan is a filthy bugger he chose Neverborn. I was planning on using my Ressers (Seamus wanted to add a Beckoner to his Belles.) But as I had left my Ressers at home the Korps came out to play.

So, here are some musings on how my Sunday went down.

Strategy; Turf War [4 points]

My Schemes; Protect Territory [2 points], Line in The Sand [announced- 3 points]

Crew; Von Schill [Oath of the korps, Nytheria aftermath, Hard and Relentless]. Steam Trunk. 4 Korpsmen, Librarian, Anna Lovelace. 2 stones.

His Crew; The Dreamer [Growing Pains and two other upgrades], The Mysterious Emissary, 1 Grootslang [this guy is biiiiiiiiig], 1 Depleted, 1 Bandersnatch, Coppelius, Stichedtogether, 1 Daydream and a butt load of soul stones.

His Schemes; Outflank [Announced - 3 points] and Plant Explosives [1]. He scored 4 points from Turf War.

Learning points;

The trapper managed to net two points on Protect Territory. I admittedly made a mistake early on – I thought the trapper was dropping markets for Line in the Sand but I was mistaken about the position of the centre line. This was game winning; without it I would have been swinging in the wind and lost by a point. The trapper has a long enough range to keep affecting the battle and score from this scheme. Very repeatable.

Von Schill and the Librarian scored full points from Line in the Sand late in the game. Schill had the actions to manage this and the librarian was able to stay inside the turf marker aura to keep gaining points whilst dropping a scheme marker.

The Korpsmen netted me almost all the points for turf war.

The Oath of the Freikorps worked well; on the first turn Schill activated mid turn and put Oath Keeper on Anna Lovelace, The librarian and on himself. Anna never used it and the librarian chucked it to reposition later for a good showing of Furious Casting. Schill killed Lord Chompy Bits, the Mysterious Emissary, a Daydream and tossed around the bandersnatch like it was a tin can. When he hit something with his clockwork arm he automatically maked it a priority target and this gave him a double plus on the Clockwork Seeker attack that follows. Against the emissary he was able to hit his reposition trigger and move into base contact with it to use Finish the Cur to kill it off.

Very solid take – would defiantly use again.

Reference the Fieldguide

I thought that - as this blog has been rather silent for a while I would post a little bit about Malifaux. Yesterdays game made me a little introspective and I figured that some reflection would do me good.

General Thoughts

Stones

Schill is ok at mitigating a bad Fate Hand - both the Librarian, Freikorpsman and the Steam trunk can throw cards to get extra abilities. He can actually do quite well with low cards in his hand. I do however tend to bring a few stones to grab cards during the important turns 2,3 and 4 as this is when high cards matter the most.
Other than those three I don't tend to bring more - I need my points for models.

Strategies and Schemes
Generally speaking you want to pick ones that reward you for staying alive and killing stuff.

Turf War - Probably the best one for Schill. Here the combat takes places in the centre where he can use the Freikorps bubble to put up a tough resistance.

Reconnoiter – You’ll get it for the first few turns but after that don’t bother with it; play your schemes instead.

Reckoning - Having good ranged threat and tough Enforcers to choose from, Schill is very good at this. Kill and survive could be the motto of the Freikorps.

Squatter's Rights – pick two, take them and then form a defensive cordon around them. Defend your opponent to death after that.

Stake a Claim - don’t bother with it. Play your schemes instead.


A word on the crew...

Card hungry.  Reference the field guide and the trunks healing, plus your cheating drains your hand very quickly. You find yourself relying on a larger hand – not for good cards, just for cards that you can toss. Because of this you’ll find you limit yourself to a small elite crew, resulting in being out activated almost all of the time.

Because you’ll end up with a small crew you won’t want anything killed, meaning that you’ll be bringing at least one librarian and the box. That’s a ten point investment at the least.
Schill works best with survive and kill schemes. He especially loves a few ones that need aggression or resilience like Entourage, Vendetta, Make Them Suffer or Murder Protégé.
What follows is a general list of the things I take in my games. It is by no means exhaustive and each model, no doubt, has more that it can do, but below are what I consider to be the salient points.

Von Schill
Needs to do most of the heavy lifting –

• Charges stuff and knock its armour down a notch with his trigger
• Keeps the freikorps bubble up to protect his people.
• Takes down big beaters with armour
• Uses his upgrade (clockwork arm) to throw around utility models to remove their buffs or debuffs
• Gives out oath keeper for his first turn (three actions for a free upgrade) and then tag a bunch of models with his stand and shoot attack and have the specialist, the librarian and the strongarm smash face against the ones that got hurt.
• Gives himself oath keeper (ignore all restrictions) and go smash face – he will gain a plus on all duels vs priority targets.
• Charges something, tossing it away from its crew, shooting it, hitting the mask trigger to push into base contact, tossing it again and shooting it again. You can so this a max of three times (four with oath keeper) and do somewhere in the range of 12-27 damage, burning 9 – 15 cards from your hand and deck and moving a maximum of 15 inches (depending on base size).

Henchmen
Hannah

• Armour, Freikorps Suit, Counterspell deny, or make it much harder to pull off, Ca Attacks and Nether Flux that strips Suits from the enemy’s' Characteristics. This makes hitting triggers much harder.
• 50mm base and has Ht3 so she can block LoS to friendly models
• 3" Ml reach she can lock down a large territory.
• Can steal any (1) cast action or a (0) from a friekorps model. So you can steal Zorrida’s obey or the librarian’s bag of tricks.
• Might block line of sight to the enemy so run in the back
• Big target – might benefit from schemes like frame for murder

Anna Lovelace

• board control - prevents any enemy pushing and placing in an 8" bubble. She shuts down certain models' game plans entirely (such as Lilith), drastically hampers many others (such as Jack Daw and many Gremlins)
• summons chaff
• merc tax
• very solid for Turf War and Spring the Trap.

Enforcers
Hans

• Gets rid of upgrades
• kills chaff/scheme runners
• removes utility pieces (eg; Mr Tannen)
• Gives people slow
• Ignores armour 

Specialist

• slow and his Flammenwerfen has a short(ish) range but it can ignore Cover.
• Trigger gets rid of scheme markers
• Alongside the engineers his ‘you’re flammable’ will cause a max of 4 burning.
• Auto discards corpse and scraps at the end of his activation
• On an action he gets rid of slow or paralyzed
• Blows up when he dies – frame for murder target

Librarian

• Healing Energy – you will get a lot of work out of this.
• Can shoot or melee three times with a discarded card.
• Stick behind the front rank to heal stuff and blast things that come too close.
• Can draw a card or blast on a trigger – makes pitching a tome very important.
• Important model in the crew – frame for murder

Lazarus

• 10 Wd and Armour +2. Free heal.
• Can fire three times with a discarded card that can target anything.
• Can copy a constructs action as a free – abominations card draw, puppets tricks, etc.
• Slow

Strongarm Suit

• Problem solver – get this to go kill the big beaters or the far back buffing models. Better to hunt chaff as there is almost no fear of reprisal.
• Big target – frame for murder target
• Can tank – throw him into a big group with his shielding on.

Minions
Trapper

• Cheap (for the korps)
• From the Shadows – stick them on a high building and drop a scheme for protect territory.
• Automatically gets [+] Flip on his rifle – hits big things consistently - good way of draining opponents hand vs their beaters
• Choose a mode for it; 1) either it scheme runs, 2) it targets leaders/beaters to ping them for damage, 3) it hunts chaff.

Freikorpsmann

• Cheap (for the korps)
• Tanky if in the bubble or when they hit their knife trigger
• Unimpeded - perhaps it is just my meta but I find this very useful
• Good way to mitigate a bad hand – discard low rams, tomes or masks for added suits – upping the knife damage to 2,4,5 and his gun to 2,3,6 or building in an auto reposition to the gun, or +2 df with the knife trigger. If you have a high ram you can add that to a duel total for 3,5,6 on the knife and 3,4,7 on the gun. This can turn them into surprise assassins.

Freikorps Engineer

• Adds rams to fellow Freikorps. Can boost the damage of the korman to 5,6,10 with the gun and 5,8,9 with the knife – might be better with the knife.
• Cut and crush is great – drops df of target. You’ll want to support a charge with something else like the strongarm.
• Adds extra armour to stuff with armour already – this makes any and all friekorps a nightmare to shift with damage.
• Good force multiplier.
• Good gun with a possible minimum damage of 3.

Big Jake

• Don’t mind me allows him to drop scheme markers – helps with plant explosives
• Consult the ancestors’ lets you look at the top cards in the deck in any order.
• Comes back on turn 5 – brilliant for frame for murder

Johan

• Relic Hammer – can protect a model like a librarian by pushing a model away with his trigger
• Can heal himself
• Can lock down an area with his 3” melee
• Gets rid of conditions

Sue

• Built in critical strike on his pistols which also has a positive twist making his damage track 3/4/5. Flip a high ram and this becomes 4/5/6
• Auto kill totem trigger – goodbye Huggy and Banasuva.
• Hurt allows you to draw a card
• Hard to kill
• Relentless
• Can pick a model to drop a marker on death
• (0) ring of fire – burning on everyone within 3”
• (0) The man in black – negative to enemy casting to models within 3”

Building a Crew
Here are just a few examples of possible lists. I've used a lot of inspiration from places like Schemes and Stones as well as Pull My Finger added in with my own experience.

Balanced, versatile
Von Schill -- 3 Pool -- 7 models
+Oath of the Freikorps [1]
+Survivalist [1]
+The Shirt Comes Off [1]
Spends a turn passing out oath keeper before spending a turn running forward and shooting something you want to die. Then the crew dogpiles it. After that he hits things with his cracked trigger to drop their df and runs fire support for the rest of the crew – occasionally rushing a weak model.
Hannah [10]
+Ancient Tomes [2]
+I pay better [1]
Picks a model to bury each turn. This could be your bodyguard to protect it until the end of the activation or it could be an enemy beater. Then she steals a cast action from someone. Tosses cheap cards to get focus of friendlies.
Student of Conflict [4]
Makes stuff fast so it can either run schemes or shoot stuff. Pick a model to follow to keep making fast – the trapper to keep shooting stuff, the Strongarm to keep punching stuff or the korpsmann to run schemes.
Freikorps Librarian [7]
Stays in the back and heals stuff, occasionally blasting something. Needs to stay within 8” of Hannah.
Strongarm [10]
Pick something to kill each turn either with shooting or melee. Hunt riders. Works in tandem quite often with the trapper.
Freikorps Trapper [6]
Annoy leaders. Pick off chaff. Hurt beaters so the rest of the crew can finish them off.
Freikorpsmann [5]
Extra shots at a master – don’t worry about burning cards for it – you just want to worry them to discard cards – or run schemes.

Sniper squad
Von Schill -- 2 Pool
+Oath of the friekorps [1]
+Survivalist [1]
+The Shirt Comes Off [1]
Steam Trunk [3]
Put all your naff cards on it so you know what to use for heals. Mostly this will be a cheap activation and a corpse marker remover.
Freikorps Librarian [7]
Furious casting. Try to toss in a few tomes to trigger surge or resonance.
Hans [8]
Knock off upgrades. Don’t bother with damaging stuff. It’s pointless – just knock off upgrades off masters, enforcers and henchmen.
Freikorps Trapper [6]
Freikorps Trapper [6]
These guys are going to do the damage/card drain. They will target masters and do damage/force opponent to waste cards from their hands. THEN Hans hits them to discard their upgrades.
Lazarus [10]
Boom. Gatling cannon stuff, even to things in combat [you can low cheat against your own models to get the blasts off if it means you can kill something as it will do 2 damage to your models and 3 to theirs].
Korpsman [5]
Extra Activation. Hits things that need plinking. Charges things that need removing – either in combat or shooting (with Lazarus).

The Beater Brigade
Find stuff and smash it. Get close and hammer the enemy into bits.
Von Schill -- 3 Pool
+Oath of the Friekorps [1]
+Nytheria Aftermath [1]
+The Shirt Comes off [1]
First turn he puts Oath Keeper on himself and Strongarm and walks forward with the rest of the crew. Next he tags two things. Turn three he and the Strongarm kill them. Repeat.
Steam Trunk [3]
Put all your naff cards on it so you know what to use for heals. Mostly this will be a cheap activation and a corpse marker remover.
Strongarm [10]
See above.
Librarian [7]
Furious casting. Put a card on it so you know what resources you can afford. If you can’t them just double heal with both of them.
Librarian [7]
Healing energy.
Korpsman [5]
Korpsman [5]
Both do as the situation dictates – either as scheme runner or as a supporter.
Engineer [6]
Passes out extra damage with its rams and buffs the armour of your troops. You’ll be putting a korpsman on min damage 4 if you can discard a card for RtFG, get a high ram cheat and add one with the engineer.

So that's my 2 cents on the korps. I love them and even though I still lose more often than not I do enjoy playing them.

Starting again.

Mordheim, Frostgrave and generally not having enough time for everything.

So. It has been a very long time since I wrote anything on this blog. The original intention was to try and record the event that transpired during our forays into the City of the Damned and how our warbands developed over the course of the campaign.

Unfortunately life has a way of getting in the way of things like this and a couple of job changes requiring longer journeys or longer hours has meant that there has been little drive left to record anything for posterity. However, with a new (academic) year and getting to a point where I feel comfortable enough with my time management means I will be reviving this blog.

In general we found that the campaign structure of Mordheim led to its ultimate demise; the map whilst adding plenty of flavour meant that actual encounters between warbands were very difficult to organise. This interest dwindled until a short time ago when we discovered the Felstad, the Frozen City (thankfully no angsty teens with frost powers singing about their lives in sight!).

Thanks to Christian's enthusiasm we had a new campaign and several participants. Sadly my own warband has fallen so far behind that I had lost interest due to absences and being unable to organise games. However I still aim to stand triumphant over their charred corpses and transcend the physical realms to become a being of pure power mwahahahahaha!

Ahem. Anyway, this means that I will be creating a new warband and participating in a few npc skirmishes to gain enough experience to challenge their designs on the hidden power within Felstad. This means sitting down and assembling a new warband and working out which disciplines will work best for me and my playstyle. Hopefully future posts will show the development and painting of these characters.

Prolonged Absence

Absence (makes the heart grow fonder?)

Wow! It seems like forever since I wrote anything on this blog. Safe to say that the Mordheim campaign ran out of steam and died (thanks largely in part to the discovery of a myriad of games in the meantime and also my shoddy recordkeeping).

In the intervening time I have somehow accumulated enough scenery to two 6'x4' boards! I could really do with a bigger car (or a TARDIS, that would be handy) and the club has grown to encompass many more game systems. We now regularly play Dropzone Commander, Guild Ball, Malifaux, Secret Hitler and a variety of board games alongside the 40k and WHFB that the club started with.

On the plus side the games we play every fortnight have become really diverse, especially with such a small group, but the flip side of this is that arranging games and getting everyone co-ordinated is problematic. Not good for campaigns methinks.....

This evening I am going to attempt to revive the campaign elements at the club by introducing Frostgrave.

What is Frostgrave?

Frostgrave is a skirmish game set in the frozen city of Felstad. Players create a Wizard and use 500 gold crowns to hire a band of looters/explorers/thugs with which to explore the ruined city. So far, so Mordheim-y.

The main way in which it differs is the tracking and development of the warbands. The maximum size of a warband is 9 members (10 including the Wizard) which makes it extremely accessible to those beginning table-top gaming. The rulebook cost around £14 and encompasses everything needed to begin playing (bar the minis).

Compared to Mordheim, the focus is on your Wizard, with everyone else being a supporting character. What this means in practice is that tracking experience and stat gains is streamlined to a single character; much simpler and easier to remember. Since the focus is on this character, every henchman available for hire has fixed stats and wargear with a single slot for any additional gear. In comparison a Wizard has 5 slots allowing for a greater degree of freedom.

Whilst the Wizard can just hire non-magical underlings, there is the option to hire an apprentice (an option which I have taken). Apprentices allow you to take another magic user in your party, but since they are learning all spells are harder to cast. This addition allows you more tactics to employ as you can now split the warband and have two effective units. The apprentices stats are all based upon the Wizard's; if the Wizard is good at something, the apprentice will be as well.

With regards to henchmen the choices are really varied, and additionally all variations can be made from a single soldier box from North Star games (except the dog). This really brings value for money, especially since there are 20 potential soldiers in the box and the warband can only have 9 max.

If all goes well I will hopefully be posting more often with updates on how the campaign has been going and the big wins/losses we incur. If it works I could even begin a school club....

Until next time (when I will hopefully have a painted warband)

Fields of Blood: Gaming Table - The Finished Item

Fields of Blood: Gaming Table - The Finished Item: Over the holiday break I have been building a new gaming tabletop for my gaming table in the Dunn-geon. This will be my permanent table and...

Third meet

Unfortunately last meet I failed miserably as score keeper and as such there was no update. Since then Nurgle has been particularly generous to me causing me to miss tonight's meet. Attempts will be made to catch up, but I am fairly confident that this first mini-campaign will see me in last place as I have a massive 2 points over three meets now. Christian and his dwarfs are on a solid 4 following a stoic defence of their find, especially since newcomer Jack and his Middenheimers made a surprise appearance!
Thankfully my Carnies are looking stronger, slowly eking out the exp each game by surviving while nurgling waves break upon the enemy. I really should post pics of all our warbands soon.

Unrelated side note: I have gotten back into SBG and am slogging my way through painting around 30 Uruk hai troops.

Round 2!

This Friday is the second night of our Mordheim campaign! This week sees Chris's Middenheimers facing off against Jake's warband (sadly missing from the last batrep). Sky's dirty Skaven face Tom's Dwarf Treasure Hunters, rat-burgers are on the menu hopefully! And last but not least my Carnival of Chaos jangle their bells at Christian's Dwarves.

Playing the long game I fully expect to lose the match, but hopefully we will be able to fit a second. Pics of the warbands in all their glory to follow...