How I am feeling about Malifaux Fourth Edition
My feelings
I know that Fourth Edition hasn’t officially officially landed yet, but the app is out (just on Android at time of writing) the cards are finalised and I’m getting games in! A number of our local players have decided to wait until now before diving back in, finding themselves a bit burned out by following all the changes. This is totally valid, and while I’ve missed playing with them so much, it’s given me an opportunity to paint models and play in a few other systems.
I also bought some Draugr to round out my Revenant collection and have enjoyed painting them. I’m pleased with the Denim.
I’ve missed blogging about my games. I kind of petered out a but because, well, everyone was writing battle reports - but the battle reports were functional, to feedback to Wyrd, and I thought contributing to that was more important than writing for entertainment (and hopefully a little bit of education) like I try to do here.
It also felt like a number of people contributing to discussion during the Open Beta had slightly different motives than just feedback. I appreciate it’s been a surprisingly emotional time for many people, but it felt like a lot of people were a) taking things very personally and b) trying to put a lot of influence on the developers to do what they thought, or boost their favourite faction’s power level. This led to a bit of a toxic vibe at times on Discord and the forums and I kind of zoned out a little bit because of that.
The biggest reason however, is that the rules kept changing! I was spending a lot of time printing cards, and learning rules and I didn’t really have time to write!
It was also exciting to be a guest on The Hopeful Prospect podcast and to meet Cody. We had a lovely chat, although we did not stay on the subject of Malifaux. The X-files do get discussed…
The Ruleset
I'm actually very excited about the ruleset for Fourth. It has been, at times, a rollercoaster of emotions. It feels so long ago that it got announced. Initially I was dubious about the lack of damage flips - now I wouldn't go back, it feels like we all wasted a lot of time doing them. I'm very happy about the changes to soulstones, for something so exciting in the lore, using them to randomly reduce damage sure was not a fun mechanic (for anyone, really, in my opinion).
I was very skeptical about the changes to markers at first - I made a lot of lovely custom Pyre Markers and I used to like looking at the board and seeing it ablaze. However, a limit of 5 does actually make the game more interesting. I was concerned that scrap/corpse markers going and being replaced with a generic remains marker would lead to a loss of flavour, and I still feel this a little bit in my soul - but I have to admit, it is much more streamlined now. Still feels weird for ghosts to drop them, but I can see how with things like the Grave Robbing scheme that requires you to collect them, and more factions having a way of making use of them that it makes sense.
I was also very unsure about Mindless Zombies changes (will write more on this in a future battle report!) but similarly I now feel like they are in a good place, although they will be used differently from M3E.
Pretty much everything that I was unsure about, I could see a clear gameplay reason for, and almost all of it I now like! So I am genuinely excited about playing more and entering events over the next few months. It hasn't made the game play quicker for me. I'm still timing out and not finishing games, and I struggled with this before, so I really want to get better at those quick decisions. I think it has the potential to be a faster game for me - I'm just dithering.
So, bring it on! Look out for an event report from Green Jokers Monthly soon, and I leave you with some hobby pics - things I've done that I like. Not claiming, and never will claim to have any high level of skill at painting, just trying to make my plastic people look nice for gaming and get a little better each time.
