Catching up

So summer holidays are over and gaming is moving back into full swing again, which means writing slightly more blog entries than I have over the past couple of months.

So whats been happening over the summer?

Well GENCON happened and thanks to my wonderful ninja shopper Dawn (@sassylady1970) I was able to get my hands on some new M2e goodies just a couple of days after the event.  I've talked at length about my thoughts on M2e over on Malifools but suffice to say I am very happy with my purchases.  So much so that I have decided that I will be going to Adepticon again next year for nearly 4 days of Malifaux goodness. 

Of course this means I have to start painting a new crew and I'll be talking about that in future posts.

What else, oh the Zombicide rulebooks for both Toxic City Mall and Prison Outbreak have been published and the first part of the Kickstarter is supposed to be shipping within the next couple of weeks.  Zombicide Season 1 remains a firm favourite within the Marshall household and everyone is looking forward to getting the expansions and wielding the chainsaws again.

Painting continues on my Saga force for the upcoming Sagamath.  I've got 2 points done so far with another 4 in various stages of paint.  Its not until November so I'm pretty hopeful that I'll get it all done, though I do need to get my painting mojo back - I'm just not in a painting mood at the moment and its becoming a chore rather than something that I want to do.  Still if I do get it done then I can work on my Bushido figures (Savage Wave) and my gang for Dead Mans Hand (the Hellcats)

Well that was odd as this sort of turned into one of those essays you used to get at school, you know the 'What I did on my Holidays' one.  Guess that's what I get after not updating for a couple of months.  Hopefully slightly more regular updates from now on.

New Malifaux Art Part Deux

Another day another slew of Malifaux art from @ericjgames.  Gencon can be fun :)

The new book cover, I wonder if it will be in hardback?

New Malifaux Art

As Gencon rushes towards us (less than a month to go) Wyrd, or more specifically @ericjgames is posting pieces of finalised box art as well as other teasers.  For instance he just let slip that this years 'Miss' model (the figure you get free at a $100 spend) will be an Arcanist.  Unfortunately so far I haven't thought of any Rasputina related Miss names - best guess I have seen online is Miss Fire.

Anyway enough waffle, here's the art (think its a pretty safe bet that any box art we are shown means the box will be at Gencon)

An Arsenal box is a faction deck, this one shows the Whiskey Golem

Lilith showing the Mature has been replaced by Barnaby (or whatever his name is)

You have to admit, he does look angry

My favourite so far, putting the Ronin in a different group and on the background changes the whole piece for me.

Bits and Pieces

So yesterdays post brought up a few questions in twitter and the comments so thought I would try and answer them in a second post in 24 hours (something never seen before in the history of my blogs)

The blue foam comes from http://www.craftfoam.co.uk.  Its pricy (approx £55 for a box) but you get a lot of foam for that money.  The 25mm thick stuff that I am using on this board comes in a box of 12 sheets, and each sheet is 600mm square (just over 2' square).  Perfect for splitting with friends or a club.

To cut it I have been using the score and snap method to get the pieces to the correct approximate size and then a hot wire cutter to tidy up the edges.

Its a hot wire cutter

I got mine from Amazon but as I was working on the board last night I snapped my last piece of wire :( so think I may upgrade to a slightly more expensive model.

Couple of people asked me about the size - its a 3' square, the main canal is 6" wide and the sub canals are 3".  Fortunately I can fit a 3' board in the back of my car so don't need to make it in 2 pieces.

The terrain on top of the board will be moveable scatter terrain but will have predefined places so that when I set it up it will be the same every time, not sure if I will mark those places somehow - black shadow areas perhaps - but will definitely have pictures so I remember how it goes together as one of the things I learnt from the 4M tables is that if you have a lot of complexity then you will forget where it all goes :)

Right, think that about covers it.  Glued some of the sections onto the board last night but have run out of No More Nails so will have to wait a few days before I can pick up some more.  Oh well will just have to paint figures instead.

Its been a while

So haven't written anything on here for a while, not because I haven't had anything to say, but because I was just fantastically busy with the Malifaux tournament I ran last week.  Still that is now in the books, so I am back and this post I want to talk about making custom gaming tables.

One of the things that I wanted to do with 4M was make a set of tables that wasn't just generic scatter terrain on top of a plain board, and whilst I didn't quite get to the point that I wanted, I did get over halfway there.

Lair of December Rasputina Board

However for my next event (Malifools Campaign of Carnage) I want to take the boards to the next level and thought that this blog would be an excellent place to document my progress.

So the first board I will be making originally started out as a dockyard board but quickly mutated into a Malifaux Canals board.  So far I have roughed out the areas of land and started cladding the canal sides in embossed plasticard.  More as I progress :)

Rough areas of land marked out in pen.  Main canal is 6" wide and offset so centreline is on land.

Looks slightly better with the foam laid out to give it some depth.

Started to clad the foam in Wills paving

The Sky is Falling

He who rejects change is the architect of decay.  The only human institution which rejects progress is the cemetery.  ~Harold Wilson

As we rush headlong towards the Malifaux 2nd Edition open beta so the amount of hatred for the announced changes increases on forums and Twitter.  This seems to boil down along these sorts of lines -

• The game is going to be ruined
• Its not Malifaux anymore
• Why didnt they just make the changes I said, then it would be perfect
• I don't want it to be dumbed down and thats what they are doing
• Waaah Waaah Waaah*

However now we have a new target for our rage as yesterday Eric J (head honcho over at Wyrd) posted a blog article called Playtesters Lie and frankly it doesn't seem to have gone down well.  Even players who I normally consider sane and rational have been left with a sour taste in their mouths and have taken to the various forms of social media to express this.

The problem I have with this is that IMO Eric actually has it spot on and its something I see all the time in my real life job.  When we give out new pieces of software to folks via our beta program I can pretty much predict which features are going to get feedback from which testers and what that feedback is going to be.  This is because testers will always bias the use of the software to their own internal use cases and feedback will always be focused around that.  Gamers are no different.  We will look at how our masters are affected and our feedback testing will be naturally biased by that.  Eric has actually shown in his blog that he understands this and from a design point of view thats very important.

The other thing that this has knocked on is that I've seen folks saying that the public beta is all just window dressing and nothing will change.   To that I say bollocks.  If that was going to be the case they just wouldn't bother, M2e would have just been presented as a fait acompli at GENCON later in the year.   Will core tenants of the new ruleset change.  No, and if you thought they would you are deluding yourself, you aren't going to be able to rewrite the rules into what you want them to be, if you want to do that go start your own game company.  Yes that does mean that things like the new soulstone mechanics are here to stay.  What I'm certain you will be able to influence are things like SS cost of models, the language used to describe something (hopefully there is good clear robust langauge around LOS for instance) or how interacts on a particular strategy function.   

So will the world end when the M2e beta is released? No it won't (I hope) but its not going to be the same game that you have been playing for the last few years either.  The good thing of course is that noone is stopping you playing 1st Edition as long as you want.  The miniature police aren't going to come around your house and take away your V1 stat cards after all.

If nothing ever changed, there'd be no butterflies.  ~Author Unknown

*OK possibly I haven't seen the last one, though sometimes it feels like it :) 

New blog on the block

Just a quick mention for my friends Matts new blog Double Negative Flip where he is going to detail how he is an even worse Malifaux player than I am.  Its almost certainly NSFW - Rebecca once kept a swear chart when I was playing Matt and ran out of paper - but inbetween the frequent Anglo Saxon language :) you'll find a lot of good stuff.  Just keep an open mind.

You can find it at http://doublenegativeflip.blogspot.co.uk/