James Wilson Codes

This is exciting! My first game of Malifaux Fourth Edition! Now the open beta is announced. It also has the distinction of being the one with the smallest gap between acquiring the models and playing a game — I was literally about to start with proxies when rising impresario James Boosey turned up with the keyword I was planning to buy from him!

My opponent was Adam Eccles, and we were both very psyched to play. He was bringing Mah Tuckett, TITLE, and I was bringing Kirai, Lady of Vengeance. I, like many in the UK community, am going to try very hard to use the title names now that they all have them, rather than fall back to 1 and 2. I’d been planning to pick up Kirai in 3rd edition and had read her cards a lot but never played her, so it was kind of cool to start with her here and not have to worry about comparing to what I knew before.

A disclaimer: we made rules mistakes, as we were learning. The rules will likely change as the open beta progresses. Perhaps the most you can realistically take from this post is vibes. I've also probably not written this up in as much detail, because I was still finding my feet. Hopefully it's still useful to people who haven't tried the new edition yet.

I wasn’t sure how to hire, so I kind of took one of each, on the grounds that Kirai can summon minions, but also having more Uniques would give me more opportunities to resummon Ikiryo. Ikiryo is Kirai’s totem, and she is a beast — a glass hammer cruise missile that you can keep bringing back. A Crew Card ability that applies to all Urami lets them drain a soulstone to either summon her or place her next to you. It looks like a large part of the intended play is doing this, and I almost immediately started activating my models in the wrong order to achieve it.

What I did do was have Kirai immediately scale a Height 4 tower and start blasting with Spirit Barrage. I was loving the new Empower mechanic, where you discard a card of value 1–5 to add a suit. I managed to do some damage to a Survivor and summon a Seishin there. I also tried to use Soothe Spirit with the To My Side trigger to bring Ikiryo forward, but I had no masks in hand to force it through, and didn’t flip one. I’m not sure, looking back, why I didn’t summon the Seishin and then use the next action to summon an Urami minion, rather than Empowering to get Mark Soul. It did more damage, but I think a Goryo in Adam’s deployment zone, with an adversary token on the Survivor (Seishin give them out when they die, and Kirai’s summon has to kill one), would have been more scary. There are many more things like this that I would have done differently, but that’s part of learning a new game!

There were rumours abounding online that damage flips were disappearing, and people involved in the closed beta were pointedly not commenting on them. They turned out to be true, which felt like a big departure from M3E… but actually, I’m totally converted. It was so much quicker and more controllable (for both attacker and defender) that it just… worked. Even when my models were killed, I knew it was coming and could plan accordingly. It saved so much time as well.

The TLDR, as it seemed to me at the time: If it goes through, you will probably deal the amount of damage listed on the attack. In the same way that you will probably do minimum damage in M3E (in fact it’s probably more likely), but you might do one less (if you win the duel by matching totals) or maybe one more if you beat them by 5. It’s just so much more fun. No feel-bad moments where you “cheat to put them on a neg” and they flip two 11s. If you’re unsure about it, I heartily recommend trying it and seeing. I’d grown so used to damage flips that it seemed weird when I first read it, but now I look back and don’t think it was adding much to the game — beyond ritual and disappointment. And if I wanted that, I would _____! (fill in the blank to construct your own joke)

Soulstones are also different. No cheating to reduce damage — and honestly, good riddance. I never actually enjoyed that mechanic. It’s either underwhelming or ruins someone’s day. In fact, none of the old soulstone uses are in this edition. Instead, they fuel powerful abilities. It seems every Crew Card (another new thing — no need to write the Black Blood or Final Veil definition on every card in a crew) gives models a soulstone ability. It felt scary to use them at first, but since you can’t use stones to keep your master alive, why not use them? You get them back when models die (unless they are summons — otherwise Ikiryo would be too good), and it really feels like you should be using them.

As an example, Vengeance is now not automatic. It costs a soulstone and is once per activation, but you can do 2 irreducible damage! So, on the face of it, that doesn’t look great, but what if a model with 2 health left attacks you? It’s dead. So it’s a very powerful deterrent.

Back to the game, though. Scoring was a bit of a mess. I realised the next day that while I thought I scored two Scheme points in Turn 1, I actually didn’t. Take the High Ground (insert Obi-Wan gif here, if you like) meant that my Shikome wasn’t controlling the building, as TrixieBelle had leapt (in her mech suit — can’t wait to see the new sculpt) up to engage her. This meant that Adam removed a Strategy for Collapse the Mines when I should have, and all sorts of stuff. I’m going to get into Schemes and Strategy scoring more in my next writeup, given that I did some of it wrong. It’ll take some getting used to, but I think it’ll be more fun than previously. I suspect it’s something that’ll get tweaked throughout the open beta.

There was quite a lot of killing. Adam’s Rooster Rider literally pecked a Gwisin to death, which is a scene from a film I would pay good money to watch. Overall, I had a blast, and I’m itching to try it out again! I'd also like to point out, with pride, that it was the first game of M4E to be played at Powder Monkey Gaming!