MALIFAUX MUSINGS - What’s the Deal?
Written By: Jay Edwards
Okay, you’ve read my articles about why I play Malifaux, how great 4E is going to be, and my thoughts on the newer style of play. At least, I hope you’ve read them. It’s not exactly necessary for you to go and read them to understand this, but… look, I put effort into those articles so it’d be cool if you did. Anyway, I haven’t gotten around to probably the most important question: why should you play Malifaux? Hopefully I can answer that here.
I think the first major selling point of Malifaux is the community. If you’re coming from any other major card or miniatures game, you know of those people. The Grognards, the ones who tell you your paint job isn’t “lore accurate”, and the ones who complain that their chosen faction isn’t empirically the best all the time forever. In my over a decade in this community I have maybe met one or two of “those” people. I’m not saying they don’t exist at all in isolated little shadowy pockets of the community or that the infection isn’t present in some groups, but here in Manitoba and online, the game seems to naturally sanitize itself of those people. When you can go to Reddit and post your mid-quality paint jobs or ask “obvious” questions and not get torn apart, I think that’s a pretty good indication of the healthy attitude of the community writ large. Looking at just the Manitoba community, there’s no better group to play with, so if you want a great group of people to hang out with, that’s one reason to play Malifaux.
Another reason to start playing Malifaux is the personality of the game. You have some amazingly deep characters with very unique poses and sculpts as the main characters of your crew, and I’m talking about much more personality than “he’s on a rock”. Try “flying up with her flaming wings fully stretched out” (Kaeris), “charging while screaming with a giant greatsword” (Lady Justice), or “jumping through her own base, causing wood plank fragments to fly around her in a cloud of destruction” (Mei Feng). Main characters though, you expect dynamic and fun poses right? Malifaux goes one step beyond with unique poses for everything (except 1 model). Each individual model in a crew will have a unique pose and will carry their own personality, so there’s no problem remembering which model did a cool thing because they all look differently. Unless you’re like me and running the Plague keyword - there’s only so many poses Rats can have and when you can run 12 I’m totally okay with them being a repeated mob. Besides, they never do anything cool anyway (except that one time a Rat almost killed a 20-foot tall cyclops).
That kind of leads into the next reason why you should give Malifaux a try - the natural storytelling aspect of the game. In a typical wargame involving soldiers, tanks, and all that jazz, your stories often end up feeling the same - army A valiantly attacked army B and won the tactical zone or the bunker or the crucial supplies. There’s just not a ton you can come up with when you’re playing a military game with ultra-serious objectives and mega-serious units names.
Conversely, Malifaux has woven all of that into game mechanics and can lead to all kinds of scenarios, both serious and wacky. Want to have your mercenary crew fighting a border dispute against a group of guerilla fighters in brutal close-quarters combat? Maybe you want to go wacky by throwing a bunch of bandits into some Southern gremlins to drop flags on their half of the swamp? I just described the same match - Bandit vs Kin with Boundary Dispute as the strategy. Malifaux has a lot of story potential, no matter what kind of story you’re looking for, so that’s a good reason to try it out too.
I’ll give you one other reason to try out Malifaux: the company behind it. A major change from most of the big games out there is that Wyrd, the company behind Malifaux, is not a publicly-traded company. That means that the players are more important to the company than the shareholders. That’s why the app, the rules, and things like the beta are open and free. They don’t have to squeeze every last dollar out of their customers and they actually listen to their community. Sure, they’ll release new models and you’ll want to get them when they come out, but that’s the thing - you’ll want to get them rather than being forced to get them. Most of my Colette crew is still metal. Ugly, hideous, lethal-when-thrown, metal. I could go and get a new set of Performer for her but I don’t have to. My models are still legal and, if some of them ever changed keywords or got dropped, there would be an official proxy I could use them for. To me, that’s a huge reason to get into Malifaux - to support a company that actually cares about its player base and keeps them at the forefront of design.
So those are some of my reasons why you should give Malifaux a try. I have a ton of other reasons too (gameplay, speed, terrain, crew size, etc), but I’ll bore you with those in another article because I could go on for hours about why you should try this game. It’s a really solid game and I think you’ll enjoy it, regardless of who you are. Unless you’re already playing. In that case, when we flippin?
