Gertfaux in Bristol 2015 - Part II
Mei Feng and the Arcanists at Gertfaux
Game 1 Mei Feng and the Arcanists vs Molly & The Resurrectionists
Game 2 Mei Feng and the Arcanists vs Rasputina and the Arcanists
Game 3 Mei Feng and the Arcanists vs The Gremlins
Game 4 Mei Feng and the Arcanists vs Ramos and the Arcanists
There is lot's more of this stuff on my Malifaux pages
Game 3 - vs Gremlins
Yet again a new opponent - and yet again a challenge for which I had no preparation other than having a plan for the schemes and strats involved.
The list of Strats and schemes for Game 3 was:
This was a nice simple set of Strats and Schemes for Mei Feng - kill lots of things, and have a couple of Scheme Runners making a bee-line for the enemy half of the table. The ones in bold were those I chose. This also meant a crew with Howard Langston, Killer Spider Robot Man Extraordinaire...!
My 50SS Game 3 List
The Gremlins were a rum old bunch of oddities - but very well painted. Here a fat green man with a roll of carpet under his arm and a stolen hat exchanges pleasantries with a gurning maniac with what appears to be a fairly terminal case of piles, just before the game gets going for real..
The Carpet Fitter raced forwards, but before he could unroll his Gremlin-shaped stair runner two Metal Gamin marched up to him and demanded money with menaces - those menaces being in the form of a nearby mincing Howard Langston. The Big Fat Gremlin started off being surprisingly resistant to the conversational charms of the sleeper-weilding Gamin...
Metal Gamin's Linguistic Primer
But if conversation was not working, the Rail Crew had a much better answer - as the Gamin's attack had depleted the Fat Carpet-fitter's stock of cards, Howard unleashed a torrent of decapitation attacks, and soon the Fat Green Gremlin was removed from play - leaving behind a nasty stain on the tabletop and a very odd set of audible memories (involving scissors, steam train noises and a lot of squelching) for the other swarms of Gremlins who were all deciding that they were definately going to stay hiding under their hats if they could.
Howards attack, decapitating the fattest Gremlin on the table, suddenly shifted the odds, and looking along the line of scrimmage it immediately became apparent that the Arcanists were wheeling out the 400lb Defensive Linemen, whilst the Gremlins were deploying a set of models that would struggle to be classed as a crochet team big enough to successfully undertake the Wyrd Games Official Q3 Tournament Approved new strat of "punch your way out of a wet paper bag".
Various small Gremlins, some with names of their own and some pretending not to have names, or faces, or even any discernable body odor or indeed anything that could get them noticed were trying carefully to avoid gaing the unwantned attentions of the Arcanost mechanical stomping and decapitating crew lined up before them. The little green men shuffled nervously waiting for the next wave of attacks to come in.
The locus of action had swung to the right wing, basically because all of my big hitting models were there (the Gremlins were running a couple of schemes on the left, but my crew really didn't care as they could see a way to kill everyone in front of them and then easily pick up the other scheme points soon afterwards on the right). Burt Jebsen tried his best to do some shooting - but the insufferable and hard-wearing Gamin again stepped up to the plate and engaged him in hand to steam powered appendage combat.
There was a awful lot of Rail Crew firepower now massing against the Gremlins flank - with very few hitters in his crew, Somer himself was inexorably drawn forwards to try and protect his pigs, who were now squealing and joining in the fun.
I'm not sure you can restore wounds using Gremlin Piglets, but if you could...
With Howard having done His Thing With The Scissors, Joss was next up. He walked casulally forwards, swung his massive chopper and soon Somer had a lot more than his appalling case of piles to worry about, but also an unusual opportunity to examine the problem from a totally new angle as Joss separated Gremlin head from Gremlin body, leaving the Gremlins leaderless and already way down on the main point-scoring scheme in the game
Mei wanted to join in, and so she did, battering back another Gremlin with A Name who only moments ago had been stood next to his now deceased Leader.
Mei Feng once Jackhammer Kick'ed Hulk in the face. Now he hides in the forest, and has changed his name to Shrek
With the Gremlins ability to hurt the Rail Crew now all but wiped out by Mei, Joss and Howard the field was open for the Gamin, Soulstone Miner and Emberlin to rush forward and plant Scheme markers everywhere. The game was playing out and it woud again be a win for Mei and her Crew, by dint of winning the main Scheme by some margin
Post Match Summary from the Mei Feng
Political, military, economic and thaumaturgical preparations for defence of our Union have proved necessary for building the platform of armed resistance which will save the MS&U, and none of these Gremlin opponents have delayed it for a moment. The key that has ensured victory for our armed resistance has been deploying models with the ability to win in terms of political democracy, freedom and decapitation which is important when planning an electoral campaign involving the ordered systemic assasination of our foes.
Armed resistance requires domestic peace and unity, but much better to have both multi-armed, and also multi-mechanical-legged resistance in the form of Howard. He above all people knows better than most that the peace already won cannot be consolidated and internal unity cannot be strengthened without absolute erosion of democracy and freedom within the Union and the calming influence of massive scythe-like mechanical hands.
Armed resistance that requires the mobilization of the rest of my people, especially when those arms are surgically removed without anasthetic and replaced by pieces of half-baked machinery, is the future, but there is no way of mobilizing them without steam and soulstones. Taking down a squishy Gremlin army is one thing, but unless soulstones are captured in large numbers, unless the people are mobilized, our armed resistance will meet the same fate as Abyssinia's. And who remembers Abyssinia, huh?
Game 4 - vs Ramos
My 4th game, and 4th different opponent - at least this time I'd played with Ramos myself (even twice!). The schemes and strats involved were.
The list of Strats and schemes for Game 3 was:
Another fun set of Strats and Schemes, which Mei Feng's cew could be optimized for. The deplyment was in the corner as well, so the set of schemes and strats that fitted together nicely for me was to add Breakthrough to the Stake a Claim, and use Willie as an ablative shield as my men (and lady) (and robots) ran forwards American-football-style in a mob, aiming to place more markers more quickly than my opponent.
Best of all, this gave me a chance to get my Willie out on table too!
My 50SS Game 4 List
The enemy crew was quite small - Joss and Miss Step (Lady Emily Howard as we like to call her in Little Britain) making up the cutting edge. Willie had already wheeled his bulging barrow forwards and tossed off a few hand grenades when the big Brass Arachnid weaved a re-activate web around Miss-step, wound her up and set her off towards my crew at a massive pace. Two short snips later and I had no Willie, but at least some points in the bag as he was Framed for Murder by an enemy Henchman (woman) - Miss Emily Howard Langston!
Miss Emily Howard (Langston)
Re-activating, Emily careened wildly into the middle of my crew, leaving carnage in her wake as she attacked a rather surprised Mei Feng. Despite having recruited Emily's brother in a previous game, the Langstonette was in no mood to be friendly, and Mei and a number of her minions were forced to extinguish Emily's brightly burning flame by wrapping several pieces of railway apparatus around her head at high velocity. A scrap marker appeared in front of the bloodied but not yet beaten Mei, and some VP's appeared on my opponents counter as his own Frame for Murder taget, who also happened to be carrying Killswitch, Miss Step was dismembered for scrap.
Mere seconds had transpired in the game, but already several massive game elements were gone - and with both teams now making quicksteps towards each other;s base edges and corners it was already pretty clear that both teams were on for the same schemes. The enemy Brass Arachnid struggled to remain upright on it's ridiculously undersized base as the massed legions of Railway Troublemakers advanced upon it, whilst out of sight on the other side of the board Ramos was struggling to cast well enough to turn scrap into Spiders at anything like a fast enough rate. My crew were almost in marker-pooping territory, and with so many models there would surely be a lot of pooping going on sometime soon..
Ramos stuttered with his casting actions again, and his somewhat threadbare crew, already down the best part of 20 SS (Howard, Brass Arachnid, 2 Upgrades, Toolkit smashed for scrap), looked on in puzzlement as they realised that the 12:26 from Breach City was even now disgorging far more railway hooligans onto their side of the board than they themselves had managed to conjure up in spider-shaped form. The Marker pooping competition was on!
When Mei Feng does a Jackhammer Kick... Somewhere in this world is experiencing a Category 5 Hurricane...
The rail crew spread out and started dropping every type of marker known to man in the enemy deployment area, whilst Mei bounced around joyously, leaping from head to head of her unwilling and sullen crewmembers as she railwalked and marker-pooped her way across the table. There were by now so many markers in play that some of the crew had nothing better to do but go back and cause trouble for the enemy - on the left of shot you can just about see Johan in an enclosed field (a remnant from a previous ruleset one suspects) thinking carefully about which leg of a mechanical spider he will pull off first...
With the rather dangerous combination of a Gamin and a Railworker coming towards them, Ramos and Enemy Joss were forced to react, distracting the Mad Doctor from his real purpose of conjuring spiders out of the detritus of battle. The Emberling was ghosting it's incorporeal way across the table as well, accidentally arriving in a position where it could remove multiple enemy markers with a clever action... which of course it did.
With Ramos otherwise engaged, the Emberling messing up everything the enemy spiders coudl do, and with Mei, the SS Miner, Joss and the other Gamin laying markers faster than they could lay railway tracks even if they were auditioning for a part in Iron Council by China Mielville
The Result is an amazing 5th place finish for Mei feng and the Rail Crew !
Read on for the post match summaries from Mei Feng and Steampunk Hannibal
Post Match Summary from the Mei Feng and the Arcanists Commander
Our enemies -- the Gremlin imperialists, the Frozen Heart traitors, the pro-Mech Spider elements and the Trotskyite Ressers -- have been doing their utmost to wreck every move for peace and unity, democracy and freedom in The Breach to run drugs, flypost iconographic posters and make Willie gags. In the past, while we were fighting strenuously for peace and unity and personal gain, they were doing all they could to foment civil war and splits. But No More! At present and in the near past in the game, we fought strenuously for ourselves, and we fought even more strenuously against the Spider Conjurer, and the result was a wrecking of their plans again.
Their general objective was to thwart us in our task of marker-pooping, but our steam-powered armed resistance and the fact we ended up with more models than them almost from the start of the game meant they had no chance to accomplish their aggressive plan for subjugating The Rail Workers Union (Breach Branch). From now on, in the struggle for Union rights and free coal for all people with artificial limbs, we must further exert ourselves in propaganda, agitation and criticism directed towards the Outcast and Guild die-hards and the backward sections of the people, but we must also fully expose and firmly combat the intrigues of The Resurrectionists imperialists and of the pro-Resser elements and Cute Green Gremlin Trotskyites who serve as their running dogs in the invasion of The Breach.
These pledges are necessary as well as permissible. For only thus can we transform the state of antagonism between the five real regimes, and the rather spurious additional Gremlin faction (pah) as well, within the Breach and achieve unity for common action against all enemies, in line with the changes in the relative political importance of the MS&U's external and internal contradictions. These are principled and conditional concessions, made with the aim of obtaining in return what the whole Union needs -- peace, soulstones, free passage of illegal drugs, democracy and steam powered arms.
Hannibal's Post Match Analysis
Oh what strange ecology is this that sees such beasts, mechanical marvels and green-skinned lightweight comedy passers-by brought together in such a symphony of random card-play and tactical mischief? Whilst it is of course but a distraction from the proper world of Historical Gaming, I must admit to having been amused and diverted by your display, and I must note that as this game depends on the turn of a card, it means that if you have fared well, it is not your gain hard won by skill, it is the gain of a casino where you were not this damp and cold February day, and where monies even now still lie in their vaults unclaimed as you frittered your luck on this War of the Monsters (PS2)
Which is still a great game for anyone out there with a PS2 incidentally.
The first game you clearly came unstuck against that most dangerous of opponents - someone who has both played before and knows what they are doing. For someone of such limited intelligence as you, this was an insurmountable hill to climb, even if there had not been leaves on the line in the form of your own lack of wit and insight - and practice
Game 2 you were fortunate to have a constipated Mech Rider to face, as the steam horse's Gamin-pooping output was fairly paltry and having picked a scheme which required you not to kill off your enemys most potent model you surely deserved a more negative outcome to the game than the one you delivered.
Game 3 against the Green men, I suspect they mush have been missing many points as the tiny scraps of flesh that arrayed themselves before the automated butchers equipment with a migrane that is Howard Langston surely could not be a fully army? Even so it was in the balance and if the game had not made the full 5 turns you late-scoring Metal Gamin and Emberling run into the enemy zone may have been outweighted by the free-scoring minions who scampered down your othe rflank, unnoticed and un-photographed in this matchup but still taking you close to a deserved defeat
Game 4 you also enjoyed ridiculous good fortune, as Ramos was uncharacteristically poor at conjuring the 4-legged-runners who with a better deck would surely have outnumbered and outscored you as the game went on. Miss Langston was also obviously playing the same scheme as your Wille, so why you didn't spot this is a mystery - it is good fortune that meant that you killed her with the Rail Worker and Gamin, when it should have been design.
Overall though, the experience of 4 games in one day is a very different one to the other events where I have seen you lose spectacularly - far more intense, somewhat more draining ... but for your first foray into a world of people who have grown up with giant monster robots and undead nonsense instead of your firm footing in the historical realities of small soldiers on felt hills, I suppose you can feel smug - until the next time when your come-uppance will no doubt be brutal and short.
Finally, even though you yourself lacked the class to do so, I Hannibal must hold out a rare, in fact almost unheard of before hand of thanks to the venue - Bristol Independent Gaming, and the organiser - who is @MunkeyKungFu, so not really a real person because he exists only on Twitter.... which is a medium I can only compare to the Daily Mail, in that I find both to be both utterly abhorrent and utterly incomprensible, whilst also understanding that some people also apprently regard both of them to be sources of "news". BIG is very nice, given that it is basically a shed on an industrial estate on the unromantic edge of the outskirts of a small damp provincial city, but I'm sure I will go again, and most importantly the man who runs it seems a nice chap and he is keen to have more historical gaming in there too (as well as this giant robot rubbish that the kids today like) - he even sells proper historical soldiers in his shop - so all power to his elbow too. If I lived in the area I'd support him, but - thankfully, bearing in mind how little stomach I have for cream tea's and cider - I don't.
That's the end - so why not go back to the Match Reports Index and read some more reports?
Or just cruise the pages on this site that scrape eBay for Malifaux stuff so you can easily look for some more models ? (Mei is Ten Thunders or Arcanist)
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