Old West & a new game

Actually got in a game of Legends of the Old West last Friday. We're supposed to be working on a translation of AE WWII (a game I have given up on) to a free game called No Limits, which is basically an attempt to use the Vor rules for a generaic design your own army type game.

Anyway, Jeff (who has most of the WWII minis) couldn't make it so Gavin and I busted out our Old West minis so I could try out my Mexican Banditos list that I'd had for a couple weeks. For those who don't know, Legends of the Old West is basically the Lord of the Rings rules with the Mordheim warband & experience rules. And its actually better than the sum of its parts.

The Mexican banditos are an outlaws variant from the Alamo supplement, which is a $45 book with mostly army stuff (think the return of the king rulebook) and like 3 pages of skirmish rules.

Anyway, my banditos tried robbing the bank of a town where the only law is a posse of cowgirls. (Gavin has this thing for collecting female minis; if they came out with female Tau he'd be all over it). The banditos had a good showing early but took some heavy casualties from the trail boss, and we were both making Head for the Hills tests. But the trail boss, a mini pattern after Sharon Stone from the Quick and the Dead, realized she was all alone and decided she'd had enough. So a good showing and I've decided I like these guys. I'd very much like to do an Old West campaign, buuuut. . .

A new game has come out, called Malifaux. Thematically its a magical steampunk & Victorian horror minis game. From what I can tell, a group of guys said "hey, let's make Warmachine better."

So each Crew is led by a "Master" who is a character and can cast certain spells. Technically all models can cast spells but these guys are master sorcerers. Then there's minions and henchmen you hire for your crew. There's 4 factions and mercenaries (which can be fielded by itself).

There's no focus to be handed out. There are "soulstones" but only certain guys can 'boost' their spells & actions. There's alternating activations so the combo-ing won't be as bad as Warmahordes, or so I'm told. There are some 'companion' models which activate at the same time as other models so we'll see.

The big difference is the use of a deck instead of dice. Tests are handled with a 52 card deck w/two jokers (red joker is critical success, black joker is crit fail). To pass a test, you have to add your stat plus the number value of the card you flip from the top of the deck to equal/beat the target number. (for things like combat, it's an opposed test).

If you don't like the card you flip, you can replace it with one from your hand (you draw a certain number of cards from your deck at the start of your turn). Or, if your guy is a wizard, you can spend a finite amount of your 'soulstone' to flip a second card which is cumulative with the first (i.e. boost the roll).

Some abilities & spell require you to have a certain suit to pull off the effect in addition to beating the target number. So a spell may have a 13 target number and also require one of the cards to be a club. Then to top it off, some casters always count as playing certain suits. So a caster may always count as playing clubs, and a really powerful spell requires a TN 17 with a club & a heart. Since the caster "comes with" a club you only need to add a heart card to the total.

So I'm thinking I'll proxy some stuff and give it a try this coming Friday. There four factions are: Guild (the law enforcers, with a number of old west style gunslingers), the Resurrectionists (necromancers), the Neverborn (demons), and the Arcanists (techno-magic & beast masters).

I'm currently leaning towards the technomancers (but not the beast master guys in the faction) or the ressurectionists. There's a mad hatter master, who's a serial killer dandy running around with an entourage of dead hookers (who have as spells: lure, distract, and undress). Plus there's a dominatrix undead hooker. The black humor of it is what's appealing to me. The other faction is playing the outcasts. They're essentially like the Ronin from rez, where they basically are their own bevy of special rules, but some of them look fun.

I'll post more after I've given the game a try.