The thing about Malifaux is that it isn’t a hugely popular game; I’d never heard of it before my partner brought it up and started getting into it. Warhammer I’d heard of. Malifaux – not so much.

So given that, it’s perhaps not entirely out of the question that we have chances here and again to play against people who worked on the game, or are “internet famous” about the game. We’re smack-dab in the middle of the Boston-NYC corridor, not in some secluded place far from civilization.

Fields of Faux is the last tournament we’ll be playing until the new year, and the culmination of the previous three league nights.

Round 1: Rasputina, Abominable vs Nekima, Nephilim Queen

My opponent: Brandon from Danger Planet. I’ve been in tournaments with him before, but this is the first time we ever actually played each other. He’s a master player, and though he said he’d never actually played Nekima before, the outcome never was in doubt.

*Strategy: *Plant Explosives – just leave explosives on the enemy table half and hope they don’t just pick them up Deployment: Wedge – triangle on the side of the table *Scheme Pool: *Assassinate, Reshape the Land, Make it Look Like an Accident

I had a unit deficit which grew greater as the game progressed and he summoned stuff. Eventually I would just watch as he took several moves in a row and undid everything. This wouldn’t be the last time it happened. I did get a move in where Blessed of December killed a 12 wound enemy model in one activation, which was fun, but, again, my growing piece deficit made it hard for me to make schemes and strategies that couldn’t just be undone.

Round 2: Perdita Ortega, La Diabla vs Rasputina, Abominable

Last time we met up, I easily won. He’d changed his crew up since then.

*Strategy: *Boundary Dispute. We each have three pucks and score when we have more on the enemy half of the board than they have in ours. *Deployment: *Corner. Due to the placement restrictions for Boundary Dispute, the pucks had to be placed in inconvenient places. *Scheme Pool: *Scout the Rooftops, Search the Area, Public Demonstration

This was a bad one for me. His master, Perdita, sat herself up on a rooftop and, through “reload” tokens handed to her by her team due to the crew card, was able to shoot me nearly every activation, as well as many other times during her turn. It was like walking into a machine gun nest and there wasn’t anything I could do about it. My usual strategy is to hold the center with my tanks, but her mobility and ranged attacks meant they could just stay away and fight from range. The corner deployment means we start as far away from each other as possible, and having to keep the pucks moving was a constant struggle. I finally did get them under some amount of control, but as in the first game, I was just losing too many units and I forfeited in the third turn.

Round 3: Viktoria Chambers, Ashes and Blood vs Rasputina, Abominable

The last time I fought the Viktorias (they are twins with the same name or something), in third edition, I won with my Foundry crew. This one was actually fairly close.

*Strategy: *Informants (point control) *Deployment: *Flank. Not my best, but not as bad as corner. *Scheme Pool: *Ensnare, Take the Highground, Breakthrough

My opponent focused down my tanks while my second stringers, Snow Storm and Blessed, took down his weaker units. We ended turn 3 within a point of each other and very few units left on either side. I missed a scheme and the extra point on another, or we’d have been tied or I’d have been slightly ahead; a little more careful play and this would have been a win.

In the end, I lost all three games – 3-6, 3-10, 5-6 – and so got first pick at the prize table. There’s consolations for being the worst. But, even though there weren’t any wins for me today, it’s always fun to get out and play.

Now comes the boring part. Painting my next crew, Performer, and getting ready for the January games leading up to CaptainCon in February. Another chilly Rhode Island tournament. Gonna be a blast, I think.