Gaming Mats on the Cheap If you Preorder for NOVA Pick-Up - Mats in action, and a Note on Malifaux at NOVA

SO, I got in a game against a local buddy the other night and we finally got some good pics of painted crews battling it out with awesome terrain on one of Frontline Gaming's Mega MATS.

This is the NOVA Open's "Frostland" terrain layout for Malifaux this year. It's been an interesting thing, but we basically were able to put a 5-year veteran terrain crew and con resource set behind a terrain design process that we vetted past Mack Martin and Justin Gibbs during design, to gain their input / etc.

My buddy Shades prefers asymmetrical layouts, especially for pick-up gaming, so we rearranged it, but at NOVA the Malifaux winter boards are some of the symmetrical ones (they aren't all symmetrical), and will look like this:

What's cool is the board was made even more aesthetically pleasing by the fact we played it on one of the Mega MATS (a 4x4 Cobblestone board, just with the 3x3 marked off).

There were some highlights from the game, and I'll get to those. If you want a Mega MAT, one of the big downsides is that unless you live in California, it's going to cost you about $20 for shipping. They're basically giant mousepads, and are highly resistant to water or damage, and they also roll dice really well and push minis smoothly. These seem like small things but they actually are pretty rad. I don't tend to "hock" for products, but if I believe in them, I will.

To wit, KR Multicase. We've even worked it out so that we'll finally have KR for sale at NOVA this year, and we've gone so far as to procure foam tuned to the SuperNOVA VIP bag purchasers armies of preference, so that they can use their buy-one-get-one-free yearly bonus (a gift from KR) on them.

So to talk about the Mats at all, it took a lot of me actually messing with them to be like, alright alright alright, these are cool.

Anywho, you can get them from the NOVA Open store at their retail rate, but with 0 shipping by picking them up at NOVA. THAT SAID, YOU CANNOT BUY THEM AT NOVA. YOU HAVE TO PRE-PURCHASE THEM BY 11:59PM AUGUST 17.

So, yeah, don't show up at NOVA and be ticked that we don't have stock for you. It's expensive to ship, as just highlighted, and this is a test year. Reece and Co from Frontline are showing up at NOVA, and they'll bring as many Mats as pre-sell through the NOVA site. You get to pick exactly which style of mat you want during the checkout process.

Go here to buy.

Back to Malifaux. We basically built the Field of Dreams for this year. If you build it, they will come hopefully rings true, but hope is not a strategy, so we've done a lot to make sure whoever does show up for a new, first year event has a pretty incredible time. To level set, most of our skirmish level games in their first year see about 15-25 people show up. Malifaux seems to be pacing ahead of that, but one never knows!

So, we built incredible terrain, we are bringing Mack Martin and Justin Gibbs, who together made the game (Justin works for Wyrd, Mack is a freelancer with background at Wyrd), we'll have some of the things as swag and available that you otherwise can only get at GenCon or by waiting for October or later to purchase. We'll even have signed copies of the new rule/fluff/scenario book, Crossroads.

So whoever shows up for Malifaux is going to have an incredible time, and that was the idea. Four days of organized and open gaming, intimate face-time with the people who designed the game, awesome swag, and the best Malifaux tournament terrain on the planet (I'll stand by this).

The other Malifaux layouts for this year, just FYI ...

As for the individual game, I really had a blast ... Shades made a couple of tactically risky maneuvers, and his Cards made him pay for it. I, as is the norm for me, played like a close-to-the-vest panzy with my eye only on trying to get 10 points, and my cards rewarded me for it with repeated double-negative all-severe flips and the like.

I also learned that Burt Jebsen hiding in a mass of Bayou Gremlins and with multiple +Ram suit auras stacked on him ... is a total Master murderer. Because of his native ram, he's always doing 3/4/5 ... but if you add Lenny and a Skeeter w/ Somer's do it like dis aura down adding another ram, and if you flip or cheat in a ram ... he's doing 6/7/8 per hit on a Ml6 attack with Reckless. If said Master tries to target him, you just say "nah punch that Gremlin instead." So ... yeah, that's a thing. This was also the primary reason I won, as I was able to severely injure Marcus with three attacks from Burt, then cheat the I flip w/ Trixi and dust him off with Som'er, who was hovering nearby. I even turned him into a piglet, I believe.

Shades learned some good lessons about how to deal with a turn1-summon crew (I summon 5 models on Turn 1 by burning whatever stones / cards I need to toward the task, then get on with the game and do not tend to summon anything else unless tactically it's called for), and we rematched at the regular Malifaux Mondays to a much tighter finish.

I need to get me a Burt and finish painting my crew ... that Miss Terious is my counts-as Burt for this game #embarrassingproxies (but at least she's really well painted!)