Mini Malifaux League - Week 1

Malifaux – Week one went off without a hitch. We had 13 players signs up for the three week league with every faction represented. Everyone showed up on time and game wrapped up by 10 pm (most before that). I was happy to see some new faces participating in the event as well as the regular crowd.

Week One used the "Break the Seals" scenario that was featured during the GenCon 2011 event. A fun scenario that involves three columns in the center of the table. On player has to defend the columns the other has to destroy them. The scenario was quite fun, although I did have one player voice his concern that the defender has an advantage. Based on the results I would have to say it is a minor advantage if anything. 

We did have several tables of TerraClips set up and players seemed to enjoy them. I still prefer more three dimensional terrain, but for what they are and the easy of storage TerraClips is a great product. I will say you need to either add additional elements to the board or give height to some of the printed elements to get the right amount of terrain on the board.

Mini Malifaux League

Malifaux – RIW Hobbies will be hosting a Mini Malifaux League beginning August 16, 2011. The league will be basically a three week "tournament" in which players will play one 40 Soulstone Encounter each week. This is the prefect opportunity for players to test their new toys presented in Malifaux Book 3 - Twisted Fates, proxies for unreleased models are allowed as long as they are a close approximation of the model they represent.

I've posted the scenarios up on the Paperbag Warriors page. Buy in is $5 and prizes brought back from GenCon will be awarded based on attendance. 

Format is:

• Single Faction

• Domination Format (per Gaining Ground)

• Story-based encounters 

• Painting is encouraged but not required

• Games begin at 7:00pm sharp 

"I Left My Heart In Malifaux" Wrap-up

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Malifaux – The February tournament went off without a hitch. We had a respectable 15 players show up. Several players made the drive up from Toledo and other parts of the Metro Detroit area (as well as RIW regulars). 

Every faction was represented with at least two players per faction. 

Rounds lasted 90 min with about half of the players able to complete a full 6 turns. I'm still wrestling with a way to allow players enough time to complete their games and still have a decent sized list. 35 soul stones seems to be the right size for tournament games, but I'm wondering if 90 mins is enough time. I'm going to continue to track the last turn played per round for the next few events I run to see if it improves.

I'm a big fan of the lotto system for large prizes. It gives all players a chance to win something cool regardless of skill level. For this event the players daily average determined the number of tickets they were awarded, and players were able to purchase additional tickets for $1 each. Store credit and pins were awarded to the 5 best in faction winners, and the other categories were awarded pins.

The final results were as follows:

Best in Faction, Outcast; Overall Winner – Vincent Curkov

Best in Faction, Neverborn – Dave "nerdelemental" Bowen

Best in Faction, Arcanist – Sheri Chap

Best in Faction, Guild – Dave Kruger

Best in Faction, Resurectionist – Jonathan "shortman" Mann

Best Painted – Scott "Griff" (Gremlins)

Best Sportsman – Ryan Romans (Seamus) [Ten way tie randomly determined]

Biggest Loser – Jaimie Mitchell (Kirai)

City Table Lotto – Amber, Arcanist

I liked the addtion of "soft scores." Thirteen of the fifteen crews were painted to some extent. I noticed that the players marked down for bad sportsmanship had multiple judge calls. What was interesting to me was this changed the dynamic and actually worked against players that tried to be "cut-throat" or "rules-lawyers."

I also tried to be sure that match-ups would actually determine best-in-faction to prevent any ties which can be common with true round-robin events. Also to keep things interesting the first two rounds no one was matched up against their friends/regular opponents. 

Save the Date – Feb 5, 2011

Since this is a Valetine's Day Themed event, there will be a special rule in effect for the entire day.

Each board will have a fixed strategy and special event/terrain.

At the beginning of each round the TO will flip a card from the top of a deck. If the card is a heart/ram or a joker than the following rule will be in effect for the duration of the round.

Love is in the Air

Models attacking a model of the opposite sex receive a negative twist on CB duels, models attacking a model of the same sex receive a positive twist on CB duels. Constructs are sexless and neither rule applies to them.

Metro Malifaux League Wrap Up

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The league was a success. Overall I think allowing people to chose their opponents and take an average for the games played was the biggest draw for this league. It kept things feeling very casual while keeping a competitive environment. Tuesday we'll be having some tiebreaker games and then the awards. 

Basically the way the league worked was:

Players chose their opponents and must play one game per week and can play a maximum of three games per week. A win is worth 3 VP, Tie 2 VP and Loss 1VP. The total number of VP players earn is averaged with the number of games played to determine each week's score.

After five weeks the winner's are determined. In the event of a tie the total Encounter VP's are used for the tie-breaker. If the players who are tied agree, there will instead be a tiebreaker game during the award week.

If you're interested here's the weekly strategies:

Week 1

Week 2

Week 3

Week 4

Week 5