50 Soulstone Fixed Faction Action at Spring Showdown 2015

Game 1 Arcanists vs Lilith and the Neverborn

Game 2 Arcanists vs Jacob Lynch and the Ten Thunders

Game 3 Arcanists vs Leviticus and the Filthy Outcasts

Game 4 Arcanists vs The Viktorias of the Outcasts

Match Reports Index

This was Spring Showdown, or, to be more accurate, a Malifaux competition for grown-ups with no training wheels allowed. Yes, the full 4-games-in-one-day experience, complete with no pre-published schemes and strategies. This meant picking your army in the brief moments before each game - something which in the previous event I had been able to enjoy the luxury of planning the week before.

There is lot's more of this stuff on my Malifaux pages

The event was also held at the glamorous location of Wayland Games, a big cold old shed on an industrial estate in Essex, with it's own liquour license and a surprisingly adequate array of mostly clean toilets.

This was venturing into the unknown in a big way - Essex is a long way from West London, and this fact was rammed home most forcibly as when driving out East we passed a Little Chef - clearly so isolated was this region that no-one had told the locals that Little Chef's era ended in the mid 80's. As we sped past the red and white logo, looming large over the Essex countryside we entertained visions of renegade serving staff, still bringing forth plates of toast with real butter (80p for 2 slices, sachets of jam an extra 15p), a virtual tribe akin to those Japanese soldiers on remote Pacific Islands not realising the war (or in this case, the 1980's) was now long since a distant memory for the rest of the world, but for them in their tattered striped uniforms the refrain of "would you like another pot of tea?" still rings out clear and true...

Game 1 vs Lilith and the Neverborn

The first game was against a Master that I'd never played against before, and a faction that I'd also never seen - the Neverborn and Lilith. According to the clever wiki thing at Pull My Finger Lilith is a high-speed, melee-focused Master Mother of Monsters, and one of the fastest, most evasive and powerful opponents anyone would ever dread to face. That all sounds pretty easy then...

Being rather panicked by the whole "work out what schemes you are playing and then pick an army in 10 minutes" shenanigans, I just picked the Master I'd played most with before, Mei Feng, and picked Breakthrough and Plant Evidence from the pool along with Reckoning.

This on paper seemed the simplest option - Mei and her team are good at killing stuff so that might be OK for Reckoning, and Breakthrough and Plant Evidence both need scheme-runner models just to sneak through the enemy lines and dabble around in the back part of the table so are similar, and easy to remember as well. I picked the following list for Mei

The table was fairly nude, with just some scattered trees and fences, and a range of buildings which, if they had had heads, would have been furiously scratching them wondering if they were supposed to be from a Wild West idiom or just a generic Farmyard scene.

Disturbingly, a number of isolated stand-alone thunderbox toilets were also placed randomly around, clearly no-where near any obvious sources of underground sanitary pipework.

Mei's crew held their noses and got ready to barrel forwards, protected by the steam-venting abilities of Mei and Howard, and being ready to be restored by Dutch Johan's special healing hands (or Hans maybe). The enemy had two majorly huge bad-ass models, a Waldgeist to bung up the middle and some Silurids which I had heard were rather quick and good at scheme running on most every podcast I had ever listened to - so I decided to ignore them for the time being and think about running Howard over to kill them later in the game.

Proxy Joss, Proxy Johan and an actual real Malifaux Metal Gamin's camping trip through the rural mid-western countryside was going well, but in the distance something that seemed a little altogether too pink and nappy-wearing to technically be a Mature Nephilim was lurking in the bushes...

The brave Arcanists attempts to form a flying wedge of destruction were being hampered by Lilith and the Waldgeist, who were dropping rather unexciting looking 50mm markers on table in front of every avenue of advance for the overly unionized mechanicals. Despite the very definite absence of actual foliage, Mei's crew decided to play fair and agree to pretend that each round disc on the floor was in fact a fast-growing magical forest.

With the Waldgeist protecting itself and engaging pretty much everything on the table with its massive 4" engagement range, Howard was struggling to disengage and get hold of something actually dangerous - after wasting far too many card flips to escape the Waldgeist's clutches, he raced towards Lilith... only coming up short when he was reminded that he had been hit with Slow earlier on that turn...

The Silurids and something that looked like a refugee from an episode of "Bear Grylls Extreme STD Clinic" were by now bounding down the edge of the table, their 7" (O) activation leap + 2 moves was taking them forwards at such a rate of knots that it would soon be time for my Soulstone Miner to appear behind them and start pooping it's own markers in their deplyment zone.

The other Scheme Runner on my team - the Incorporeal Emberling had already been killed, squished by the magical re-animating flying Big Pink Baby with Wings and a Bad Attitude that was the Mature Neph. As the Emberling had been a bit of a banker in the points department in my previous games, this was a setback indeed and so Mei wandered across to the back edge of the table to think about denying the Silurid Leaping Army a chance to score freely.

No-one was quite sure whether the Silurids were real, or were just a strange accident resulting from too much cheap scotch and the Dr Who wardrobe department's 1976 Christmas party - but either way, none of them wanted to get too close to the blue thing....

Howard raced onwards, or tried to through the miasma of slowing pain that the Ne'erborn poured onto him. Seeing that he was in trouble, a friendly Gamin came up to offer some Metal Protection...

Bad Ju-Ju was lined up behind the Mature Nephilim, but was saving his strength for the painting competition after the first game (which we missed due to eating a dreadful lunch) - time welll spent as I believe he was part of the winning crew

Howard and Lilith had been doing bad things to each other for some time, and now it was all about the first activation in the next turn - which card would come up highest?

Lilith's 13 nailed it... and Howard was removed swiftly from play. The Neverborn breathed a sight of relief, and the Gamin pooped its pants as it realised that it was the clear target for Reckoning this turn.

But with 2 enormous models, the Neverborn were happy to try things the old fashioned hard way and waded into Joss. None of his special abilities seemed to make any difference as the big pink winged wall of well-moisturised baby-flesh bore down on him...

Joss however is an effective killing machine himself - the Nephilim fell victim to a well swung Arc Axe attack, allowing Mei to then also remove the increasingly disturbing blue wobbling thing from the table as well in the same turn - ratcheting up a Reckoning point of her own. Joss, exhausted by his exhertions and now no longer supported himself fell under a reign of blows from Lilith. Reckoning points swapped hands under the table for small amounts of cash

The table was now almost entirely bereft of Arcanist models, with only Mei, Johan and the Soulstone Miner left - the Neverborn were free to roam around and drop markers as they pleased, and the only hope was for Johan to pin down the last Silurid and prevent him from leaping away and dropping yet more markers in the bottom right hand corner