ToMB Month One Roundup

So month one of ToMB is coming to an end (I think it actually ends on the 16th) so it seems like a sensible time to do a round up of where I have got to with Collodi so far.

Well painting wise I haven't made any more progress since I did a couple of prototype models a few weeks ago.  Basically I got distracted by finishing stuff up for Adepticon and a couple of other games that I have been playing (Dead Mans Hand & Fists of Kung Fu) so painting hasn't been high up my list of priorities.

I have played several games with my 40ss crew and have only lost once so far - that was to Lee with his Hoffman crew - though I got my revenge against him when he used Lynch.  Obeying Mr Graves to beat the crap out of his own crew was excellent fun :)

I've learnt some interesting lessons as well to take into month 2

• Vasalisa, whilst important isn't the be all and end all, so be careful of the resources you use to keep her alive
• If I am using the fated upgrade having Collodi gain either Focus or Defensive is a great way to give it out to the rest of the crew for a single AP
• Wicked Dolls work best in pairs, so from now on I will only be taking 2 in my initial crew
• Don't forget Strum the Strings, Fast would have won me the game against the Hoffball

The other thing I have done is juggle my spend around for month 2 slightly so that I get an extra effigy (Brutal)

This means I now have

Collodi, Vasalisa, 4 Marionettes, 3 Wicked Dolls, 2 Stitched, Brutal Effigy and Arcane Effigy

which is very solid indeed,

Malifaux Rankings

Rankings have become a way of life within various gaming communities and Malifaux is no different so with the recent demise of Rankings HQ it was obvious that something would step into the breach (pun certainly intended) and fill that void.  It wasn't so obvious that I would end up doing it but there you go!

What this has meant is that over the last couple of weeks I have been working on and off on the replacement and its now ready to go.  Its not very pretty, as I am an engineer, not a UI specialist but its functional.  Take a look for yourself at http://www.malifauxrankings.com 

The point of this blog post isn't to just say look at the new shiny though but more to talk about the underlying functionality that hopefully folks will be able to build on.  What this means is that there are a series of API functions that I have built the UI on top of, that are freely accessible by any other developer who wants to build something on top.  For instance I am working with a friend on building an iOS application.

So what APIs are available - note all responses are in JSON and if you send an invalid request you should get a 404

Rankings -You can get the current list of ranked players with positions etc.  The endpoint for this is http://www.malifauxrankings.com/api/rankings

Player Record - This returns all of the requested players events (current and older).  Endpoint is http://www.malifauxrankings.com/api/player/<playernamewithnospaces>  e.g. http://www.malifauxrankings.com/api/player/mikemarshall

Event Record - This returns all of the players who where at an event.  Endpoint is http://www.malifauxrankings.com/api/event/<year>/<eventnamewithnospaces>   e.g. http://www.malifauxrankings.com/api/event/2014/vappafaux


You'll notice that everything is in a nice REST format - I had to go and learn mod_rewrite for this so that was fun.

I'm sure I will be adding more to this as I go - makes sense to me to add an API to handle the scheme generation that @malifauxschemes uses but if you have any requests just let me know in the comments.

MCC - Picking your crew

As we enter March the Malifools annual campaign event (this year called Malifools Campaign of Carnage) is heading towards us faster than I really want to think about. This week I put early bird tickets on sale for folks that supported 4M last year and next week the general tickets will go on sale.

So because of this I thought I should let folks know about crews are going to work.  At last years 4M event you picked a faction and commited to that for the whole weekend.  The problem with that system is that it made balancing forces very difficult as you needed equal numbers per faction.  This all became a bit much work and because I am a lazy so and so I decided that I needed to do something much more simple this year.

One of the things that I have noticed in M2e is that there are a lot more people playing a particular master rather than a particular faction (something that I've personally always done but which didn't work out so well in 1.5) and I thought that I would run with that idea for MCC.

What this means is that each player will commit to up to 3 Masters that they will play over the weekend (you can choose less if you want to but duel faction masters will have to declare a faction as well) and will have free reign over which master they are using per game.  This of course means that we can end up with mirror matches (no I am the true Viktoria) and multiple people using the same master at the same time.

The problem will come if one of those players gets the master that they are using killed or captured (more on that in another blog post) because not only will it remove the master from play for the person who had the misfortune but all other players using the same master as well!  Fisticuffs behind the bike sheds if that happens I guess.

I'm sure it will be very rare for a master to die :) but it might be a good idea to have some masters that aren't so popular in your toolbox.


Next time I will talk about how the whole event is going to function overall and some insight into the how the teams are going to be picked.

ToMB - A little colour in your cheeks

So the ToMB challenge is officially underway and now that Smogcon is over I've been able to get my paint brushes out again and play about with some colour schemes for the Collodi crew.

Just from my reading of the background and the looks of the models I knew that I wanted them to be nice and bright (none of the darkness that you often see in Malifaux paint schemes) with bold contrasting colours.  This means that they should have some of that mythical pop on the tabletop which always helps garner the odd vote in painting contests.  I also know that whilst I was going to do a decent job on them, I wasn't going to end up painting them better than a decent table top standard for two reasons

1. Time constraints of getting them all painted within the month just meant that I wouldn't have the time I wanted to spend on them
2. They are the old metal models, whilst very nice I know that I am going to be painting a plastic Collodi crew at some point in the future so I didn't want to blow my whole wad at the first time of asking (phnar phnar)

 My original colour scheme thoughts had centred around me painting the whole crew like 40k Harlequins which would be a real test for my painting skills - though if I could pull it off the whole crew could look stunning - but in the end I decided to go for something that would still look good but could be completed in a far quicker time.
So I present my first two teaser models.  Both are still WIP but they give you a good idea where I am going with the crew and how the colours are going to work together.

@malifauxschemes

So a while back I wrote a simple little Twitter Bot that, if you sent it a tweet, would respond to you with a random Strategy and set of Schemes.  The bot proved pretty sucessful with several tweets a day being aimed at it.

Over the past few months I have continued to make improvements to it here and there and today rolled out another couple.

However it occured to me that we now have Malifaux players that weren't around when I first created the bot so I thought I should put together a simple set of instructions on how to get the best out of it.

In all cases there is no need to actually follow the bot.

Case 1

Just send a tweet to @malifauxschemes.  You don't need to put anything in the body and it will respond with something like this

Case 2

Send a tweet to @malifauxschemes with the hashtag #ggn where n is a number between 1 and 7 and the bot will respond with the appropriate GG2014 Strategy and Deployment.  n is the round that you want to pick.  So sending #gg4 will be the 4th round.  The bot automatically determines the correct month.

Case 3

If you send a tweet to the bot with the hashtag #vassal in it it will randomly determine a map for you to play on as well.  However with the advent of the M2e module this map list is currently out of date. Needless to say, once the Vassal module is updated and the breadth of maps is back, I will update the bot again.

Hopefully that gives you enough information to use the bot and have fun through the breach.

Oh yes that is Summer Glau as a terminator.  Well frankly why wouldn't you.

Tale of Malifaux Bloggers - Initial Purchases

Its all a bit confusing for me this #ToMBs lark.  Not sure if I am supposed to be posting stuff now or not.  Well I will anyway and just get shouted at after the fact.

So as I said last post I have decided to play Collodi, mainly because he is a very different style of master to my other two main ones in Misaki and McMourning.  Of course it wouldn't be fun unless I put some restrictions on myself so I will only be taking models with the PUPPET characteristic as I just don't see him working with things that he can't control. This basically means that I can take all the Effigies and from the Arcanist faction I can get Mannequins and Coryphee.  Just probably not this month :)

Which of course brings up the thorny question of what to buy and when.  Well thats what Excel is designed for isn't it?  Yes I went and built a colour coded spreadsheet to detail my month on month purchases, keep track of the overall budget and generally make me look like a sad loser.  I didn't put any pivot tables in it though.

Anyway, what does this paragon of spreadsheets say.

Well for the first month I get $60 to spend and I can see no better way of spending it than on the Collodi boxed set ($37) and a proxy for Vasilisa ($13) which gives me $10 to carry over to next month.  These are all models that I will pretty much use every game I play with him so it makes an excellent core to the crew.  I might not put all the Wicked Dolls and Marionettes on the table to start with but chances are I will be summoning in as well.  Wonder if I can use the scrap counters before Ramos does?

Models ready to be build and based.

As I already had all the models that I needed I was able to just go ahead and get them cleaned up and based.  Unfortunately with the wonderful weather we are having here in the UK at the moment I haven't been able to get them undercoated. 

And here they are built based and ready for some undercoat action (only 4 pins in Collodi!!).

The trickiest model to source was of course Vasilisa as she was the one model in the crew that needed a proxy from the outset.  Fortunately I have a big list of alternative model suppliers and I found this beauty in the Tale of War Range.

She is called Lissete, Puppet Angel and is a really lovely model, perfect for Collodis new Henchman (Henchlady?  Hench Puppet?)   I especially like the Jack in the Box that comes with her.


All of this puppet goodness weighs in at a whopping 31 stones.  Mmm, not so good that.  Still with some upgrades and cache it should be good for some 40ss games and I'll probably have activation advantage, at least to start with :)

Next time I'll talk about the potential colour schemes and perhaps even get some basecoats on a model.

Tale of Malifaux Bloggers - 0 Day Post

Like many other Malifaux players I have been sucked into the madness that is the Tale of Malifaux Bloggers (ToMB) - if you have no idea what I am talking about then you can check out Dave Chandlers blog where he explains it all like only he can - but basically its an x month project where each participant keeps a running blog that talks about how they are getting on with building, painting and using a new crew.

So first of all I needed to decide what crew I was going to do.  This was not an easy process.  Originally I decided to do Pandora as I really like the new plastics but the more I thought about it and the more I read her rules and talked it over with existing Pandora players the more I realised that I didn't want to play her, which as I had already picked up the new boxed set was a bit of a kick in the nuts.

What to do?

Now as mentioned on various podcasts (like the most excellent Malifools) I had been thinking about playing the puppet master himself, Collodi, at some point this year.  In 1.5 I wasn't his biggest fan as he broke to many fundamental rules of the game, which, combined with his henchman status, meant that he could be horribly abused if desired. Fortunately for me though, in M2e he seems to be on a similar power level as everyone else.  He is also a very different type of master from both McMourning and Misaki so would present a different gaming challenge, something that I was relishing.

The big problem was that I didn't intend to paint up his metal version, thinking that I would wait for the new plastics that are bound to be along at some point.  However with the failure of the Pandora experiment something was going to have to give and it turned out to be my resolve to wait for the plastics.

So Collodi it is.  My current plan is to paint up the crew to as high a standard as I can and then auction the whole thing off for charity when the plastics are out.

Next time I will go over my initial crew choices and discuss some colour scheme thoughts, but until then, stay frosty.