So lets start with Von Shill........

   I have to start with the fact that I got Von Shill as an accident.  Two years ago for Christmas I told my lovely wife that I would like a new Malifaux crew for Christmas.  Now I could have sworn that I told her I wanted Som'er Teeth Jones, the Gremlin master, however when she got to my game store, The Game Room, she talked to my friend Bruce who was working there and he told her I wanted Von Shill.  When I opened it Christmas morning, I was surprised but happy and starting working on putting it together.
   Once I had everything together it sat in my bag, getting occasional play, but mostly just primed  for a while.  Once I decided I wanted to paint them, I started talking to my friends, Chris Borer and Brian Sobb.  They are both very good painters, with Chris winning something like 23 golden demon awards from GW and if you remember back a bit to a few Rotten Harvests ago he painted the Grateful Dead teddy pictured here.  His website showing all of his best work is at Full Borer Miniatures. 
   Brian has won two silver golden demons, a gold rogue demon (adepticon before it was crystal brush), and a bronze rogue demon.  Sobb has done a lot of good painting work and always has a good tip or two that helps me a bunch.  So you can understand how it can feel to be working with my skill next to some really great painter/sculpters.  So they helped me with any number of things, starting with color schemes and painting tips, on to using washes to get all the lines between everything.  Of anything I have painted I believe that Von Shill and his crew have been the best work I have done.  I also need to thank Chris for putting Von Shill's eye patch on, the librarian's book mark and other small items in the crew that I know I am forgetting.

   Now lets talk about how he and his crew play.  Not really a tactica, but just how he plays for me.  My typical 50 stone crew looks like this:

• Von Shill - The Shirt comes off, Engage at Will - Cache 3 stones.
• Steam Trunk - I use a metal mimic trunk from the old AD&D miniatures, and I call it luggage.
• Hannah - Scramble, Spoils of War - Proxied with the Librarian on a 50mm base
• Freikorps Specialist - Flamethrower
• Freikorpsmann
• Freikorpsmann
• Freikorpsmann
• Freikorps Trapper

   This is a crew that definitely needs to be together in a tight group.  With Freikorps armor you don't have to worry about blasts, so you can keep them clumped up without worrying about losing the whole crew to someone like Rasputina.  Since you are moving them in a group, the order that you move them in is important.  You need to keep as many people as possible within the 4 inches around the Steam Trunk.  Anyone within 4 inches of the trunk can use its 3 zero actions as their own.  The steam trunk's zero actions are all condition removers, so you can get rid of poison and heal, remove burning, and removing corpse/scrap markers.  This along with the blast protection protects you from crews like Sonia and McMorning that rely on handing out conditions to remove your crew from the board.  With them being set up in a 4 inch bubble around the Steam Trunk, you are going to have trouble with your objective grabbers.  You can always send out the odd Freikorpsmann out on a run to drop an objective marker or get into position out of the bubble, because of their unimpeded ability.  Since they can ignore severe terrain, they have the ability to get their full 10 inches of movement in most situations.  Nothing worse then seeing a freikorpsmann rushing through a big piece of forest terrain through to the other side, out of your range, and you can't even follow.  At 5 points they can even be lost if needed.
   You might want to keep 1 in the bubble though, since with Spoils of War upgrade you will get 2 soulstones each time your Freikorpsmann can kill a Henchman, Enforcer or Master.  It is a handy way to bump up your cache, even though he is no where near as stone intensive as he used to be.  I find the main use for soul stones is drawing those two extra cards after you look at your control hand, and the odd damage prevention flip, but with the healing flip you can get from the trunk, that is only occasionally needed.
   Now for his avatar upgrade.  This will be based off the 2/17 update for the avatars.  Von Shill turns into the avatar of conflict. During the premanifest he gives his crew a bump as he often does by increasing the change by 2 inches and melee by +1 if the crew member is charging a model that Von Shill is engaged with.  Now with his engagement range of only 1 inch, it isn't a huge advantage, but nice fluff of a soldier rushing to the aid of his commanding officer.  He also gets another way to heal with a 2/3/4 and a place effect within 8 inch.  It being a place effect rather than a push means that intervening terrain doesn't matter and you place Von Shill anywhere in base to base with the friendly model (doesn't even have to be a Freikorps model).
   Now once he manifests he get a nice bump, mostly going to his crew rather that helping himself.  He grants all his Freikorps Companion, if a Freikorps dies within 6 inch Von Shill gains reactivate, and finally he gets a pulse within 8 inches that will cause his Friekorps to pass a willpower duel and heal 1/2/3.  All handy things in the middle of the game to help the crew with any troubles they are having.  This is a good example of an avatar I wouldn't want to manifest until turn 3 or 4 when my crew is starting to get a bit hurt.  I like how Von Shill's avatar helps his crew more then himself and reenforces that bubble concept of his crew.  He already has so many attack options, that having those kind of healing options is a nice change.
   With all the teamwork and options I find that this is a great crew for a starting player, who wants to learn the rules of the game without a lot of difficult choices at to what they want to do.  It also helps that it is a hard hitting, good armored crew that will last long even against another hard hitting crew.  The Von Shill crew is a lot of fun to play and I highly recommend it as a good fall back crew for anyone to play.

   So this has gone on longer then most of my blogs, I feel like I got out everything I wanted to say...which is just about a first for me.  I hope you enjoyed reading, and in the next I think we will talk about Pandora and how I play her crew.  Thanx for spending some time....have a good one.

Wow those figures looked great.........

   So when you are talking about miniatures, you always end up talking about modeling and painting.  Just about every model that you play these kinds of games with (Malifaux, Kill Zone, Blood Bowl) start as gray metal or plastic pieces attached to a sprue.  A sprue is just the plastic or metal piece that the model parts are attached too.  Sometimes as many as ten pieces even for a normal model that might measure an inch or two high and an inch wide.  All those pieces have to be removed from the sprue, the flash and mold lines have to be removed, then you figure out how the pieces attach to the main section of the model.  For plastic models, there are usually posts the will only insert to a specific hold in the model, with other plastic models there are just two flat plains that have to be attached.  Instead of super glue for a plastic model, there is plastic cement you can use that will fuse the plastic pieces together.

   With metal models it is a little different, there are almost never posts in the metal, so you create those posts yourself, typically you use a pin drill and part of a paperclip or wire.  Once you drill out the top of the arm for instance you insert a part of the paperclip and then drill into the body until you can  sink the other half of the paperclip and superglue the whole thing together.  The paperclip works to make the attachment that much stronger then just trying to stick the arm on with superglue alone.  After you have the arm attached, then you take a look for any gaps or misalignments between the arm and the body.  There is always something that shows a gap.  Then you get putty out and work with a couple different tools to get putty into the gap, and smooth it out, so that once you do prime and paint them, you wont see the gap.  Depending on how much work you want to put into cleaning and puttying, it can take anywhere from 15 minutes to 4 hours to clean a model properly.

  
   Once you are done with this step, you already have a lot of time into a single model.  While this doesn't sound that bad for a smaller game with 7-12 models, in larger army sized games, there can be hundreds of models to clean, prime, and paint.
   As you have looked at the pictures throughout this blog post, I wanted to give you an idea of what I am working on right now.  This was a special order Malifaux crew that was released in green dayglow plastic.  It is my new Pandora crew.  The first model I am showing is the Poltergeist, it is Pandora's totem, so it is connected to her and only she can use it in the game.  I have never had one, so I was happy to get it in the new plastic crew box.  The little kid is Baby Kade, the model that first drew me into Malifaux when it first came out in 2009.  That little kid, sitting there with his diaper and knife drew me right into the story.  The little plastic piece shown below is his right arm that I am having a friend of mine Chris help me to set just right.  Usually when you put a model together you can fudge connections and leave little gaps because you will putty the gaps to fill them in, and then paint the whole model  so it covers all those little "indiscretions".  In this case there will be little to no paint on the model at all, so the fit needs to be pretty clean.  I will post pics after I finish getting it assembled, and maybe tell you a little more about Chris once I ask him if it is ok.

  This is one of the things I really enjoy about gaming overall.  Gaming encompasses more then just playing the game.  You can play, or paint, or sculpt or any combination of the three.  You can spend as much or as little time on hobbying as well, while there are tournaments that require all models have 3 colors on them (the minimum standard), very few players will required that for normal play.  I have never told anyone that they couldn't play against me just because of how their models looked.

   This is one of my first posts with pictures.  At least of Malifaux models.  I hope you enjoy it and I hope to hear if you liked it.  I am going to play around with the formatting a little and see if I can make the page look a little better too, especially if I am going to keep posting more pictures.

   Thanx for the reading...

So what is it about Malifaux

   In my last blog post, I said at the end that I would like to keep writing, so I am continuing to write tonight, and I will just post it sometime soon.
   I know that everyone is really excited to hear more about Malifaux (lol), so here we go.  Malifaux at its most basic is a miniatures game.  What this means is that you buy models that work with the game, and build them, paint them, base them, and then hit the table to play.  So the first thing that jumped out at me are the models.

Quoted from the back of the Malifaux rulebook: "Based in an alternate Earth, Malifaux uses gothic, steampunk, victorian horror with a dose of the wild west to inject fun and depth into the magical lawlessness of a world rife with monsters, necropunks, man-machine hybrids, gunslingers, and power-hungry politicos. Actively using character-driven stories to define the world of Malifaux, seek your fortune in this fast paced and brutal 32mm tabletop miniature skirmish game. Assemble your crew and stake your claim!"

   It was the monsters that drew me into the game.  They are called Neverborn.  The very first model I saw was called Baby Kade.  It is literally a baby wearing a diaper with a little teddy bear in one arm and a knife in the other.  I saw that and had to look into the game.  I got the rules and picked up a full crew.  Once I looked at the rule card, I saw that Baby Kade actually had a power called "The Kid has a Knife".  I have been hooked ever since.
   So to start playing you need anywhere from 6 to 12 models, the rule book, a deck of cards, a tape measure, and a table with some terrain on it.  I could go into a LOT more depth about how you play, but if you really want to know the rules go to the website, or ask me for a demo game.....now don't all rush at once, I have time for you all, single file line!.....A different question that I would like to look at is why this game when there are a large number of other games I could be playing.  Even other skirmish games. 
   For me there are a couple of reasons that I prefer Malifaux over other miniature games that I have played.  The first is that Malifaux uses cards rather than dice.  What this means is that you have your rerolls in your hand.  That doesn't sound like a big deal, but I don't do great with dice, I have some bad luck in that department, and seeing my "rolls" in my hand makes it a better system.
   The second big difference, and the one that is hardest for most game players to deal with, is that even if your crew is wiped out to the man, you can still win the game.  When a player usually played a game, fighting and destroying the other guy's crew is usually a very easy way to win a game.  I can also tell you from a personal perspective that it is also a very satisfying way to win.  In Malifaux, it is the objectives you are working toward and as long as you get the three "mission objectives", called schemes and strategies, complete, you win.

   I am going to wrap this up for this post.  Those are the big two reasons I like Malifaux, and I am sure I will go into more next time.  There is a lot of territory for us to cover yet, even just for Malifaux, let alone the other games I am playing.  I hate to skim these so much for something I love playing, but I am trying to keep these down to a page each.  I will just have to write a bit more often then I planned.  I know, I know, you cant wait.  So looking forward to diving in deeper with you all.....until next time......