Malifaux M2E - Thoughts on the Core Rules

Malifaux 2nd edition (M2E) has been released to the public.  I figured I’d give some of my thoughts on it.  It seems the thing to do these days.

Before I start, I want to give you a little background.  I was in the beta test.  I know for some people that means an immediate dismissal of my opinions, and that’s fine.  I’m just a guy typing words into a computer – my opinion should always be taken with a grain of salt.  (Though if you want the correct opinion, just follow my lead.)

When I first saw M2E, I remember having a number of feelings, most of them pretty negative.  Early on, I actually put up a long post about how I felt the game had lost everything that made me enjoy Malifaux.  I didn’t enjoy the models, I didn’t enjoy the strategies, and I thought the rules were clunky.

 

In the months since then, my opinion has completely shifted to the point where even if I cannot be sure whether I will enjoy M2E as much as I did v1, I can say with certainty that I think the new core rules are better.

I have a lot to say about the game, but I thought a good place to start was for me to evaluate what I wanted to see change (as seen back in this post) and how that compared with what did end up changing after all.

Drain Souls

What I wanted:  I wanted this to remain in the game but changed in such a way that when it was used, models could still get points for strategies and schemes.    

What happened:  It is gone.  Flat out gone.  No need to worry about odd rules interactions because they don’t exist anymore.

Result: I am happy with this change.  I would have preferred keeping it but changing how it works, but eliminating it entirely removes the headache forever.

Strategies / Schemes

What I wanted:  I wanted them reworked – there were a number of issues with them.  Repeated schemes.  They favored speed over others.  Too many kill strategies and schemes.  A few schemes that were impossible to stop.  And faction schemes that were imbalanced (Archanist and Neverborn, mostly).  I wanted all of this fixed.

What happened:  They certainly did get reworked, more than I was expecting.  Schemes are more important.  Scheme pools.  Scheme markers.  No more faction schemes at all.  Time will tell whether I end up thinking there’s more variation in the schemes, but it’s looking pretty positive to me.

Result:  Improvement across the board.

 

Terrifying / Non-Living Models

What I wanted:  I wanted the result of terrifying to be weakened and the amount of terrifying to increase, essentially.

What happened:  Basically exactly that.  Fall back was removed and Terrifying either ends your current activation (if you’re in the middle of your activation) or gives you Paralyze (if it happens outside your activation).  Also, Terrifying picks a certain type of model to work against.

Result:  Hit right on what I wanted.

Pre-measuring

What I wanted:  Pre-measuring.

What happened:  Pre-measuring.

Result:  Flat out success.

Loaded Keywords

What I wanted:  There were a lot of similar rules that all piled around.  Fly and Float.  Pitiful, Harmless and Irrisistable.  Arachnid, Shambling and Scout.  I wanted them all combined so the bits about why one was better than another in what situation was removed.

What happened:  Pretty much exactly that.  Most similar rules got combined together.

Result:  Success.

Clean Up Confusing Rules

What I wanted:  A lot of the confusing rules were annoying to deal with.  Towards and Directly Towards.  Calculating range when height was involved.  A big one I missed in my first write-up was Effects – what are they.  Capital-A Attack versus lower-case-a attack.

What happened:  Some of these were addressed.  Effects got changed to Conditions, which was a fantastic shift.  Line of Sight I know is still a little wonky.  There is still some room for improvement here, but they feel clearer to me now than v1 did.  Whether a few years of kicking the tires is going to shake out more weird rules interactions or not only time can tell.  I tend to think there will be, but that’s only because I have yet to find a game that doesn’t end up with some weirdness after any given length of time.

Result:  Partial success, but still room to improve.

So there we have it.  So far it’s actually looking pretty solid compared with my initial hopes for the game.  I was trying to pin down why I liked the game so much, and being able to look back at a recorded set of issues I had with the game and see how many of them were specifically addressed with the new edition, I guess it makes a lot of sense.

And that’s not even getting into the changes that happened that I wasn’t actually looking for.

Upgrades – Okay, now this one I’m actually not completely on board with.  Conceptually I can see the plan, but all things being equal, I would rather play a game without Upgrades than with.  They just don’t fit my style as well.  But if they’re the major disappointment to me from M2E, I’ll call that a good day.

Scheme Markers – Now these are fantastic.  I love this idea.  It makes schemes feel much more dynamic to me.  Making a standard interact to work with all schemes means that schemes can be achieved while still keeping them hidden.  You can achieve a scheme while your opponent doesn’t know what you’re doing.  You can lay traps for your opponent with them by either encouraging him to go after them or by making it look like you’re doing one thing to pull him out of position while you move off to do something else.  Overall, a fantastic change and probably my second favorite in the new version.

Scheme Pool – I did not like this at all when I first saw it.  I thought it was over-complicated, useless, and severely limited my ability to play the game I wanted to play.  Then I used the scheme pool for a half dozen games or so.  Now I love it.  With 19 schemes available, if I had full choice of all schemes, I would easily slip back into the v1 pattern of “choose two of these five schemes I know how to do very well every game”.  Now I can’t.  The schemes I might know well may not be available for every game.  It keeps the missions feeling fresh and varied.

Soulstones – This is a change that I can understand the two sides.  I love that soulstones have more uses but are weaker than they used to be.  In the past, they turned your master into an amazing beast that could do what it wanted to any non-soulstone users.  Now, not so much anymore.  Soulstone users still have some real solid benefits with auto-suits and with prevention flips, but they can’t get to the point where they’re automatically succeeding at what they want.

One other thing about soulstones I disliked from v1 was when you sent a soulstone user at another soulstone user.  Both players would generally have the cheat, and then both would spend a soulstone, and the entire duel came down to who flipped better on the random single card.  Now that’s gone, and the emphasis is on who has the higher cheat and stat.  The way I think it should be.

Five-turn Limit – This came across to me the same way the Scheme Pool initially did.  And then something crazy happened.  I played with the five-turn limit and the game actually felt okay.  I tried it again and strangely, I liked it.  I played again and again and again and soon I came to the realization that it wasn’t a fluke.  I loved five-turn games.  So much, in fact, that I wish v1 had only been five turns.  This is, hands down, my favorite change to the v2 core rules.

Why do I like five-turn games?  In v1, my games often went like this: I would move out, ambush and kill all my opponents’ models, then grab my schemes and/or strategy.  I would usually be able to wipe out most of my opponents’ crew by turn 4 or so, so that gave me 2 turns to collect my points.  Piece of cake.

Now if I try that, I am killing my opponent’s crew by turn 4 or so, and I run out of time to collect my points.  I’ve played games where one person went all-out for their points and the other went for killing, then tried to grab their points, and they lost because they ran out of time.  One of the things I’ve seen pointed to as a reason why Malifaux was so cool – that you could win a game while still being wiped out – is now more feasible.  I think I had done that maybe a handful of times in v1.  In v2, if you play smart and grab your VPs as fast as possible, you can do that more often when your opponent doesn’t try to grab theirs.

So there we have it.  My first article on M2E.  I’m certainly a fan of the new version of Malifaux and am enjoying getting it out to the larger audience.  It took me a while to get to the point where I could say that, but I think the game that’s out is a very fine product, and now hopefully we’ll be able to get the balance of the models to a solid state before it’s all locked down.

Thanks to everyone who is out there working hard at testing the models.  The best way to learn the game is by playing it, and the best way to find the problems with it is by putting them on the table.  Not once, not twice, but a lot.  Hundreds upon hundreds of games have already been played in the closed beta to get the game where it is now.  Let’s get thousands more through these next weeks to get the game to an awesome product.