Views and Surprises from Gencon regarding Malifaux / M2E

What an long title this blog post has, but I am a bit lazy to change it and it is fitting for my article. Yup, I am delving back into some views and thoughts on Malifaux and M2E, so if your already bored with those then move along. At this point I am picking up new games but still very interested in watching the whole Malifaux spectacle unfold as well. Apparently I am not the only one as there are reports from Gencon that I (little ol' me) was still a primary topic of conversation originating from the Wyrd employees. I find that both flattering and a little surprising, as I was not even there and yet there are people who still enjoy discussing the topic of me. Strike that, I find it very flattering....

Anyway, this is not an article to talk about me, but instead some of the other news and discoveries that came back from Gencon. Let's start by talking about Malifaux Terrain. There was a fair amount of talk about the "increase" in terrain requirement in M2E from Malifaux over the past couple months. Most people felt this was a good move, although there has been some concern from and about LGS's having enough appropriate terrain for the new requirements. Malifaux has always been a fairly terrain intensive game, especially when compared to the "typical" tournament set-ups for WM/H and some of the GW games. Terrain plays an important role in the game and as a TO for a variety of large events I have been on the recieving end of "Not enough Terrain" complaints.

I was very excited when I heard that this year Wyrd had tasked Mack and Justin with building the boards that would be used at the Gencon events. I am confident that it was the whole office who spent time building out the boards, as even 16 boards is a lot for 2 people to build in a couple weeks. This was great news because the Malifaux Community could be confident that the boards would be built to specifications for the appropriate amount of terrain on a tournament board, as viewed by the developers of M2E. Even more exciting for event organizers, there would be some definitive answers for what the appropriate amount of terrain would be for future tournaments. The past 2 years Gencon has always been a scramble to build out as much scatter terrain as possible from Terraclips sets provided to volunteers and employees the day before the convention.

This is a picture of one of the Gencon boards, described as typical for the Malifaux tables at Gencon 2013.  It's not a bad looking board, keeping with both some terraclips and having a Malifaux feel to it with the train tracks and some scattered trees. Overall I am a fair bit surprised that this is the typical board for a Malifaux game however. I truly expected more coverage on the board overall, and more terrain provided to block line of sight and firing lanes across the board.

On comparison to previous years Gencon boards, I think this strikes somewhere in the middle of what was built in 2011 and 2012. In 2011 the Gencon boards were pretty sparse in coverage overall, which drew some fairly critical comments from the players and the spectators of the events. I grabbed one of my pictures from 2011 for comparison, this being a board I actually played on during the Masters of Malifaux tournament. You can see that some effort was put into creating interesting terrain from the terraclips but there was no where near enough to really meet the requirements for Malifaux.

The boards at Gencon 2012 are on the other side of the spectrum from what we have at 2013. There is more scatter terrain and a couple of larger pieces that blog LOS across the board. The concerted effort to increase and improve the terrain coverage from Gencon 2011 can be seen here, although these tables still drew some criticism overall as being too sparse in places and providing a few too many firing lanes for ranged crews. The criticism was more of a mixed bag from the participants, down to a couple boards where players in earlier events had moved terrain and the judges had not caught it. In the picture you can get a look at two of the boards, one with a bit more terrain on it constructed from a large center piece and then smaller scatter terrain, and then the second board with a greater number of individual pieces.

The boards this year (Gencon 2013) are a further surprise to me when I compare them to what we use at Adepticon. To be fair, Adpeticon is regularly complimented as an event with generally spectacular terrain, and Adepticon 2013 continued to strive to improve the Malifaux terrain year over year. The picture to the left is one of the "typical" tables of terrain at Adepticon this year, specifically one using more scatter terrain and less themed board. Compared to the new "official" Malifaux boards, Adepticon appears to use approximately twice the amount of terrain that the developers feel should be in the game.

There is certainly the consideration of travel required for Gencon, which may have impacted the types of boards that Wyrd provided. I have considered this, but have to discard that as a limitation that may have influenced the boards at Gencon toward less terrain. Over a third of the boards at Adepticon were brought to the convention from half way across the country (similar distance as Wyrd offices to Gencon) so the distance constraints are similar. I think the more important consideration is the Gencon boards compared to the "typical" board in a LGS, as thats where most players will be playing. I can only provide my own boards or pictures from other LGS hosted tournaments as comparison. I grabbed a "typical" board from one of the Victory Comic's events as comparison here.  That also appears to have more terrain than the recommended amount.

Overall, I expect that this change in the expected terrain will impact the game in a couple ways. First, I expect that overall players will just ignore the Gencon 2013 set-ups and continue to set-up the boards they want to play on. The second impact is a bit more insubstantial overall, as it will impact the development and balance of the game going forward. I think the most important aspect for future Malifaux players is that we (the community) now have a glimpse into how the developers feel the tables should be set-up, so we can gain some more understanding on how that terrain should/will impact the game and model balance. The board I see above has distinct advantages for ranged crews while minimizing some of the impact of both "swarm" crews and melee centric crews.

Gencon 2013... WOOO HOOO

Well, Gencon 2013 has arrived and the family and I did not make it out this year. There were a number of reasons for this, not the least of which was delays in specific work payments (bonus's and such) and increased expenses overall this year. This year ends up with us sitting at home and not joining into the fun. I would have enjoyed going and meeting up with people, and would have even dipped my toes into one of the Malifaux Avatar's qualifiers since they will be some of the last Malifaux Classic tournaments run. I would have enjoyed taking a crack at going out at the top of the official wyrd tournaments.

That said, several companies provide their product's released at gencon as an early order online through their website. I was only really interested in two of those companies this year, as much of the stuff I will just pick up at my local store over the coming year. I did want to grab some stuff from Wyrd and from Outlaw Miniatures though.

Wyrd Miniatures

Wyrd had several new releases this year at gencon, including a small card game and a new board game plus some type of party game that just does not look like my "cup of tea". There was also the hallowed release of the official Malifaux V2 rules and several of the new plastic kits. Included in those kits were the annual Nightmare Special edition release models and the annual limited edition Miss model. I decided against the nightmare crew this year (Nightmare Tara) as it just did not seem overly impressive after I took a look at the models themselves. The Nightmare beast model just did not have the same impressive quality of Nightmare Chompy and the crew seemed to be missing the unique fluid nature of the Nightmare Justice box. Additionally it makes no real sense for me to grab the crew since it will be M2E only, so its not something I would be playing.

Then we come to the miss model. The only way to get the limited edition miss models is to purchase over $100 worth of product during Gencon. I have collected all the previous miss models, including the gremlenette that was released early on in Wyrd's gencon run. I like the looks of the miss models, well... I liked the look of the miss models. This years Miss Step is very appropriately named in my opinion. Simply put I do not feel it fits the overall model line nor does it fit my preference for models. Take a look at this picture I put together of the Miss models all together.

 

So, with my consideration that I was not interested in the Miss model this year, I had no pressure to try and get to $100 to get it. This was good as I am not sure I would have gotten there anyways. I would have been over had I added in the Rulebook and Rasputina plastic box set, but I am in no rush to get those and can wait for my LGS (Huzzah Hobbies) to get those in to pick them up. That said, I had a voucher from my last event as a Henchman and wanted to grab a couple things that I could get early. First I picked up the Ronin box set, as I really want to paint these girls up. The new models really remind me of the look in the movie Sucker Punch, and overall I am hoping the models match the renders fairly closely. 

I also decided to pick up the Death Marshal box set, as my coupon was valued higher than the Ronin box. I have a fairly large collection of Death Marshals currently, and I thought the new box would be a good addition. I really dislike the look of the "Dance a Jig" death marshal and am not very fond of the "Hop over the coffin" marshal, but I do like the look of the crouching marshal with the coffin on his back. I may even use the flaming head for him (if there are multiple heads in the box). To be fair, I am very much hoping for multiple heads, as I am not a fan of the flaming head motif, but I think it could look cool on one Marshal. This box will bring my DM collection to 12 Marshals including 3 original box, 1 extra "Coffin Opening", 2 Miss Terious's, 3 Dead Justice box, and now 3 Flaming Head marshals. Not bad overall.

 So, after tossing in a EBO Tin as a gift for some family friends, I was all ready to check out and get into the delivery queue of Gencon orders. I dug up the email with the SS Code and entered it in and then I had to sit back and laugh. The code did not work. This means that the code was either 1. Never activated, 2. Issued to someone else as well, or 3. Activated then deactivated since the beginning of June. I shot a quick email off to Wyrd to ask them to fix it for a future transaction, but the irony is amusing. I assume this is just some type of system mistake, but it would be truly amusing if after everything the Wyrd folk have dropped to the level of personal pettiness that they deactivated my last Henchman code as well. We will see!

Outlaw Miniatures

That brings me to my only other Gencon purchase in 2013. Outlaw Miniatures is the company behind Wild West Exodous which I supported on kick-starter and is due to ship later this year (September/October I believe). I have had the privileged of getting my hands on one of their limited edition models already (Outlaw Lady of the West to the left) and just received my second pre-release model, Sheriff Mick Ironclad. I will be getting Sheriff Mick painted up soon and am looking forward to it.  When the Outlaw Miniature folks announced that they would be releasing two new models for the line during Gencon, with limited amounts at Gencon and also available through the website, I was excited. I am not sure how much I will enjoy WWX, but I like what I have seen so far on the model aspect and hope the game holds up to the models when played in a skirmish setting.

So, WWX released two models during Gencon, Kyle the Black being one of them. Kyle the Black is part of the Enlightened faction and works as a "sidekick", one of the more powerful named models that would be used in the skirmish portion of the game. He has a very 40K look to me, which I feel is fitting as he is heavily based and modeled around the likeness of one of the 40K Radio hosts. Kyle the podcast host is one of the employees of Battle Foam and works closely with the Outlaw Miniatures folks as well. I really like the way the model looks and it makes me chuckle to recognize his likeness in the model. I can only hope I do the model justice when I paint it up.

The second model that was released strikes me as heavily inspired by the Lone Ranger. Knowing that Romeo has previously grabbed ideas from other movies as inspiration for models in WWX, this does not surprise me with the proximity to the Lone Ranger movie recently in theaters. US Marshall McClain will be able to be played in both the Outlaw and the Lawmen factions within the game. This type of Dual Faction strategy worked well for Malifaux when it was introduced and I like that it is being used here. I think that picking up a small set of models (he is the only one currently) to give the ability to can provide some nice flavor to specific models in the game. I am very excited to get him and paint him up, as I really like the overall look of the model.

Final Thoughts on 2013 purchases

So, that's it for my Gencon 2013 spending. Some people know of the fairly extravagant spending on product I have done in the past, specifically over the past 2 years with Wyrd Miniatures at Gencon.I believe that after totaling up the combined purchases I made in 2011 it was somewhere above $2100 total. Keep in mind this was a combined total for me and 4 different people I was shopping for so that truly ticked up the totals and that was not all my money. In 2012 when you combined what I spent plus what my daughter and I earned (and spent) in booth credit through volunteering, we were easily in the neighborhood of $1000. Much of that was earned credit but it still means I brought home a great deal of product from Wyrd, plus the stuff I picked up both years from other game companys.

I was expecting to spend far less this year. Overall I have less disposable income this year and the family is in a very different economic situation that we have been in past years. That said, I was surprised to see how much less I spent. All told, my spending was almost equal between the LE WWX models and the two sets of models from Wyrd, combined coming in below $100. I am eerily reminiscent of when I stopped spending money on GW years ago. GW was certainly not hurt by my personal spending, as I am just a drop in the bucket overall, but it was interesting to see the impact on the hobby I was involved in. I am fairly confident that Malifaux V2 will continue to have traction for a while in the area, but I will be sending my hobby budget in other directions in the future. It is gratifying, and also a bit intriguing for me, to "vote with my wallet".