Random Gaming Things

Last night I ended up back at the Parlor for the first time in a while. Dan, Ryan, Jay and I hit up a few games of Malifaux, then headed out for pizza, like old times. It was a nice diversion. Evidently Mondays are a pretty good night to go to the Parlor as the miniatures tables were pretty much empty. And by "pretty much" I mean the four of us were the only ones there. Something to remember.

Dan found a model space station at the Parlor. It's an old "Russian Space Station" from the movie Armageddon. While that proved lucky for me - I've been looking for a basic space station model and figured kits would be the best way to get one - it just made me laugh. Why was this thing ever put on the Parlor's shelf? It makes no sense! I don't understand some of their practices. They have a lot of space filled with stock that doesn't move. That's got to be expensive to maintain. Still, it's the best gaming store around, and they always treat us well. But yeah, got a space station. I'll be putting it together (tonight, maybe) in preparation for the Firestorm: Armada campaign we're going to try. Several of the missions require space stations, so now we'll have one!

We ended up playing Malifaux at the Parlor. Between the three of us (Jay was late, so he didn't play), we have only one book, so there was a lot of down time as people were trying to read what their people did. This was my first game and I picked up the Neverborn faction to proxy and try. Lilith and her demons. Massive in melee with no ranged options. I faced Ryan with a group of shooters. Everything fell my way. I had lost only one model by the time his last model did a last-ditch suicide plan to try to kill as much as he could, and then I lost a second model. It probably wasn't a very good game to see how the games could go. Bad match-up, I think.

I played this game once at GenCon and after playing last night and then watching Dan play, I still have the same conclusion: interesting concept and I like how every model is so dynamic in its abilities, but I dislike the card mechanic. It's basically like rolling a d13 for your variability. It's the same reason I dislike rolling a d20 in roleplaying games. I prefer the roll and keep method where you have a bell curve of results rather than a flat chance of everything. In Warmachine, for example, you're rolling two dice (most times) and adding them. So while I could get from a 2 to a 12, I'm far more likely to end up in the 6-8 range. It's a bit easier to count on. Sure there are games where luck is a huge factor, but they'll be less likely than a game where I'm as likely to pull a King (13) as an Ace (1).

Anywho, in the end, I'll play the game, because everyone else is. It uses the same scale as Warmachine, so I can easily proxy some of my existing models for the ones I'd need, and I can bum the book from others when I need to. I'd just prefer if the mechanic was more consistent. Maybe you pull a number of cards equal to your ATK or DEF stat (or whatever the equal is) and keep the highest. That way I'd be pulling in four cards and knowing I'd have better odds for getting a higher number instead of pulling in one card and keeping it, and then maybe cheating (if my cheating hand was lucky enough to pull high). In the two games last night and the demo, the cards had such a huge factor in how the game went that tactics, I felt, took a back seat.