Statistic Updates and 100 Games of Malifaux in 2012

I really enjoy playing Malifaux, as should be no surprise to anyone who listens to my podcast or reads this blog. In addition to that, I really love glancing over the statistics that are generated with the fantastic (and slightly edited) spreadsheet that Rushputin originally created and that I use to track my hobby. The link is over there on the left hand side for those who want to poke around. I originally used that spreadsheet to track just my painting. Then I used an update to track painting and modeling. Rush was tracking his games as well, and I figured what the hell.

A point I think is important to make is that tracking my games has not been about wins and losses. Yes, I track those aspects to a very granular level, but the real fun for me is in other data that can be mined from the spreadsheet. I track my games based on a me-focus. What armies am I taking. In Malifaux, what faction/master/strategy/scheme did I play. I also track the players I play against and their faction and master. Then I track scores for each of those areas. Specifically I do not track how much I win by, only how my own score breaks out and what I was successful at along with if the game was a win/loss/draw.

I hit a milestone recently (yesterday as of the writing of this article) that I found interesting. I played my 100th game of Malifaux in 2012 on July 25th. When I think about it, that's a lot of games. Last year I reached the 100 mark near the end of August, so I guess this is not a huge deal but it felt somehow significant. It came up for me while talking with another player about learning the game. He had mentioned that he needed to play more games to get better, and was feeling pretty satisfied with his skill after a total of 20 games. That made me ponder how many games I had played this year, thus the comparison.

In any miniature game, playing a lot gives you some perspective on the game that is different than those who play far less. I have experienced a large number of different events/players/skills/combo's/etc in the game. I have seen a wide breadth of crew builds and play styles in Malifaux. These are things that can only be picked up after playing a large number of games.

Its interesting to me.

With that, here are a couple charts from my spreadsheet. Call it fun, interesting, or just boring. Stats are like that.

We start with looking at what "Armies" I have played through the year. This year has been entirely Malifaux, and the split is pretty heavy on the Guild side. This makes sense as I played Guild heavily through the end of Adepticon. Neverborn is catching up and the Arcanists still have a showing, albeit a small showing comparatively.

Logically, that would bring us to looking at how I have done per faction. Neverborn have a higher win rate than the other factions for me. With that said, I find it interesting that I have won more games with Guild than I have even played Arcanists. That probably has a lot to do with tournaments, as both Guild and Neverborn make tournament appearances while Arcanists do not. I have only 3 crews for Arcanists, with 1 being a henchman leader. I do not play Rasputina much and when I do play her its only in fun games. That makes Arcanists not as great of a choice for higher level tournaments over my other two factions where I have complete factions.

Going to the next level of granularity, we look at my records with individual masters. This is just kind of interesting overall. With my tracking of Avatars as separate from masters, it makes this a different kind of chart since each of the avatars has to start out as the master as well. Adding that complexity into the game can certainly make the game go differently from playing the master straight up.

One of the things I find most interesting in tracking my game stats are charts like this one. Strategies (Primary objectives) in Malifaux are randomly generated from 13 possibilities, and then can also be shared or individual. Tournaments usually assign specific strategies to a round. With that in mind, this is a great chart to see what I tend to play most and least. Since this is mostly random, you can see where some of my luck sits.

I hope that was an interesting read for folks, I know the stats are fun to look at for me. There are some more that I do not track in charts, but just as calculated data. Some examples are games vs specific opponents and such. Those stats can make for fun rivalries, such as my 1/11/2 record vs Mike and my 2/4 record against Dan.