New Year's Update

Well, it’s 2012 now.  Generic calendar based greetings to you all.

After the standard Christmas and Terran Orbit Completion celebrations, I went on a bit of an inventory of some of my 40k in preparation for an Apocalypse game that, sadly, was not to happen.  But, in doing such a thing (and doubtless slightly high on glue fumes after assembling all my presents) I found that I had a surprisingly large force of Necrons loitering around my room.  About 3,000 points, in fact.  Which was quite a surprise as I never really intended to go into this army in a big way.  I started off setting myself the goal of assembling a 1,000 point force for under £100 (which I managed quite nicely due to Triple Helix and some cut’n’shut conversion work).  Then I got an old box of Necron Warriors cheap thanks to one of the regulars at the club, which I used as organ donors (mainly donated legs and chests) to make Deathmarks and Immortals using the left over bits in their boxes.  Which meant I need another box of Immortals and so on and so on.

I haven’t exactly broken the bank with Necrons (whatever the other podcast crew say, I am most assuredly not rolling in cash) but I’ve planned various bits and pieces and have made the most with the kits I’ve bought.  Tail end of this monologue though, is that I now have about 3,000 points of first wave Necrons (provided I’m generous with the wargear).  I was very eager to get these guys on the field for a big and silly game (especially as the entire list can fit in a single Force Org Chart and, handily, a single KR case), so I was a bit disappointed to find that game vanished in a bout of food poisoning.  I’d also dug out and salvaged my old Imperial Guard (the Boilerplates) for the event, designing a new list for them.

I’d normally run those guys in Grenade and Flamer heavy Vet squads, but recently the idea of Platoon blob squads had been forming in my mind and I managed to work them into the Boilerplates version 2.0, but I’m unlikely to find out how they’d fair any time soon.  I have too many other armies that I’d prefer to play.  Anyway, this post is beginning to sound ungracious, so I’ll move on to another topic.

Malifaux. 

On the 2nd, I visited a gaming day at a not-at-all local club in Finchley.  Whilst there, I got a training game in for this system.  It’s one I’ve been interested in for a while now.  I own the core rulebook, a couple of crews (unassembled, of course: I am very lazy).  However, I’d never got a game in until now.  It’s daunting to try a figure out a whole new game system on your tod and no-one in my local club plays it, so I’d just left the stuff to gather dust after the initial novelty wore off.  It was, in fact one of the main reasons I travelled all the way to this club (North London IMPS, if you’re curious), as the possibility of playing a game of Malifaux was raised beforehand.

For those who don’t know (and I don’t blame you on that score), Malifaux is a skirmish game (about 5-8 models a side) that runs on cards instead of dice.  The setting is odd, quirky and quite dark (putting it mildly), delving into fairytales, steampunk, magic, the Wild West and Victorian aesthetics.  As such, there is, quite frankly, a tonne of weird shit going on.  Despite the fact that the game is far smaller in size than 40k, it will take probably the same amount of time to play.  This is because every model you have has its own special abilities, spells, statline and weirdness to bring to bear and requires a lot of attention to individual actions than 40k does.  It also brings wildly divergent mission objectives for each side to achieve and extra schemes for bonus victory points and so on, to the point that both dies could probably achieve all they wanted with even going near each other.  But that wouldn’t make a good skirmish game, would it?  Naturally both players will try to achieve their schemes and objectives whilst preventing their opponent from doing the same (preferably whilst knocking the shit out of one another).  Suffice to say, I enjoyed the game and do plan on playing more, but it is still a bit of a daunting prospect.  At least it’s not going to be as expensive as 40k.

Well, that’s my start-of-the-year update.  I can’t imagine it’ll be of much interest to many (nothing else has been so far), but for the few…

Even then, probably not.  See you (figuratively speaking) later.