Malifaux – This year I kept my Gencon order pretty light. I picked up the new book (love seeing my name in print) and the Nightmare Hanging Tree which netted me Miss Terious the special edition Death Marshall. Wyrd must have had a massive amount of orders again this year as it took much longer than normal to get this in hand. No worries as the models aren't out for general release for a month or more I wasn't in a rush.
Quickly flipping through the book I noticed it's a little smaller than the previous books. This makes sense as there's not a huge add-on to the rules. Essential Storm of Shadows is a faction book for the Ten Thunders. The catch is all the Ten Thunders models in this book are dual faction, meaning they can be used either as Ten Thunders or within their native faction. The idea behind this is the gangs from the Three Kingdoms are infiltrating the existing factions. A nice bit or rules reflecting fluff.
The art and design of the book is very much the same as the last two books, so fans of that style won't be disappointed. They've also kept with the story, rules story format so you can sit down and read the book cover to cover.
I haven't sat down to read through the book yet, but will post a full review after I've had some time to thoroughly read it.
The next items that I pulled from my big box are the new plastic models. The Hanging Tree and Miss Terious, both are special edition models which in itself is impressive to do a small run of detailed plastics. The boxes these models come in are huge, I can see this being a problem for stores with limited shelf space as the Miss Terious box is almost as big as a crew box by herself. It seems like they could have better designed the boxes to take up less space and use less packing material, but it's a minor thing I imagine retailers will voice their concern as more of the line comes out in plastic and the number of skus overwhelms the existing shelf space.
Taking the model out of the box the plastic appears to be a solid grey similar to the GW plastic but not quite as brittle. Miss Terious in in a bunch of small pieces and the detail is pretty good. She does look very different then the metal minis in the line, I don't think that's a bad thing and I won't be able to finalize my opinion until she's painted as next to the other Guild models I own.
The Hanging Tree came in an even bigger box, however this one has foam pads to keep the sprues from banging together. A nice thing considering the limited nature of the product however not really necessary as the plastic seems to be very durable. I'm not overly impressed with this model. It's clean and pretty sharp but compared to the Nightmare models of previous years this one falls kind of flat. Again first impressions only my opinion will probably change once I get it put together and painted.
My plan is to pick up a Garden of Moor cemetery set and have a themed terrain set using the Hanging Trees. Of course given the amount of projects on my plate that isn't going to happen until later this year. In the meantime I should be able to incorporate them as terrain pieces on my other boards. I don't really see using them as Hanged models given the dramatic increase in base size.
