CaptainCon 2026: Masters of Malifaux

CaptainCon is an annual convention in Warwick, Rhode Island celebrating tabletop gaming from all of New England and points beyond. And although there’s plenty of space reserved for board games, roleplaying games and card games, the convention is probably the largest venue for miniatures gaming in New England. Warwick, being adjacent to Rhode Island’s largest airport and a fairly short drive from both Boston and New York City, is about as central a place as you can get in New England aside from being in Boston itself.

But for us in the Connecticut Malifaux community, this is our chance to face the best Malifaux players in the country. There are few opportunities to face so many expert players in one place in the country, especially when not centered around any of the truly large gaming conventions like Origins or GenCon.

We got up early and headed east, into the near-zero (F) degree weather, toward the blinding sun, and made our way to a state so small that it has just one international airport. We had to be early because registration for our first Malifaux match started at 10AM.

There were three matches on Friday. We had the deployments, strategies and schemes for all the matches for the entire weekend ahead of time. The first two Friday matches were deployed with Flank and Corner, two deployments that didn’t really work well with my slower moving December team, so I thought I would try out the team I am currently painting (slowly), Performer on the first two, and save December for the third. Standard deployment, with Reshape the Land in the scheme pool allowing me to get an easy two points by just making the ice pillars I’d make anyway.

This was also going to be the first time I’d played Performer against someone other than Kasul. I was a little nervous.

Performer is led by the famous Colette du Bois. She and her travelling troupe put on shows throughout Europe and the world of Malifaux through the Breach that cover up an extensive smuggling operation that shares the wealth of the other world with the nations of Europe, while bringing goods from our world into the alternate world, all under the poking noses of the Guild. If the Guild ever catches on to what they’re doing, it’ll be prison for all of them. But Colette is enough of a magician to ensure the Guild is always looking in the wrong direction.

The Performer keyword are masters of misdirection, setting Decoys around to keep enemies focused on the wrong target, able sometimes to swap places with decoys and even send people flying far, like the acrobats they are.

I made the final decision on my team as I was taking those pictures above. Colette, Star of the Stage (AKA Colette 1), with her Mechanical Doves totems. Shadowlark and her two Blackbird minions would come along, the sexy Carlos Vasquez (of course), and unpainted Cassandra Felton, and Envy, one of the seven Deadly Sins. Performer doesn’t have a lot of firepower; Envy would provide some, Cassandra would do her part, and hopefully, the other performers would be able to use their mobility to score points while Cassandra and Envy kept the rest locked down.

My first match was against Ophelia 2. I am not sure I’ve ever played Ophelia before; she’s with the Bayou faction (basically: greenskins) and Bayou is always kinda kooky. In this game, though, my opponent was a pro and made each of his moves in a couple of minutes while I was still carefully reading my crew cards in order to make each of my slow moves. Ophelia takes upgrades that she can use to do special attacks or give her crew special buffs, or spend them to disregard attacks that I make.

My opponent knew that my heavy hitters were Envy and Cassandra. I’d misplaced Cassandra during deployment and it took a turn for her to get in the fight. Envy had no such problem; I got him into position quickly. Unfortunately, it seems Ophelia could force him to turn his guns on my own team, which hurt. And once she had finished with that, she focused him down and killed him.

My team can do quite a lot with enemy scheme markers. Ophelia chose schemes that didn’t require her to drop scheme markers, which nullified a lot of my best moves.

This was a timed game, and I was too slow and ran out of time. This led to my only loss of the tournament, 10-3.

My intent was to play Colette again for the second game of the tournament, but those hopes were dashed when my next opponent started unpacking his Colette 2, Smuggler, team. “Oh nice — a mirror match!” he said, when he saw that we’d both be playing Colette, although different versions of her.

“Nope,” I said, quickly repacking my Performer team. “You look like you know what you’re doing. I’ll be playing December again.” Having just been humiliated by Ophelia, I wasn’t looking forward to having the same thing happen again with someone who knew what he was doing.

It looked like he was just also putting together a December team, and if I wasn’t going to give him the Performer mirror match he was looking forward to, at least he could see how December played.

I don’t usually like playing against other Arcanist players, because it seems like a betrayal, somehow.

Deployment was Corner, and as attacker, I was able to choose which corner I wanted. The corner I wanted was the one that was largely clear, and where the opposite corner was blocked by a huge house. He cursed my name (in a good-natured way) the entire game. His plan was to use Dorian Crowe to toss the crew into the center of the board. He wasn’t able to do this because of how we deployed. You can see from the timer that this is quite late in the game, and Dorian is still back there by the deployment zone, along with his master, Colette. Two powerful units who couldn’t really contribute to the game purely because of the deployment.

The strategy was to kick three pucks from each deployment zone over to the enemy half of the board. This was easy for me, and I got a puck over on the first turn. Since he had to kick the pucks around the big building, he wasn’t able to get one over until turn 2. He did do a better job than me of getting more than just one over, as I was focused more on making schemes and killing his models.

December, in fourth edition, has a lot of damage available. As I’d found in my first match with Performer, Performer does not. The only reason he ended the game with so many models still on the table was that the table was crowded beyond imagination and it was a struggle to engage. But sometimes we would meet. This didn’t usually end will with Performer.

Next time I play Performer, I think I will take along some more DPS units. Envy was a good choice, I think. Arcane Emissary will be better, as emissaries take the keyword of their master, making them a Performer for the purposes of the game, whereas Envy, as a Versatile model, would not. Not a huge issue in Performer’s case, as the crew card abilities lie largely with doing stuff with decoy and scheme markers.

This game ended partway as we started Turn 4 with only a minute or so each on the clock, so we elected to take the score as it was at the end of the third turn, tied up at 4-4. I’m fairly certain I would have won had we continued, but the clock is a beast.

My last match of the day (and of the weekend) would match my Raspy against the deadly Lady Justice, Death-Touched. The blind leader of the Guild’s Death Marshalls hunts necromancers, using the power of the Grave Spirit itself to enable her to perceive the world around her.

Lady Justice has a reputation, in Malifaux, for basically being a psycho killer. If you’re with the Resurrectionist faction, look out, she won’t settle for just your blood. She’ll take your very soul. But even if you aren’t wearing Resurrectionist colors, you might be working for them. If the only way to keep Malifaux safe from necromancy is to kill absolutely anyone who might stand in her way, well, she’s down with that.

This photo doesn’t show the complete play area, there’s a lot of stuff going on.

Even if the starting scheme for me hadn’t been “Reshape the Land”, I’d have put those ice pillars up blocking the most obvious way to my half of the board, anyway. It’s kind of what Rasputina does, after all.

The version of Lady J I’ve faced before specialized in devastating direct damage. It seemed the Death-Touched variant drops corpse markers and then pulses conditions from those corpses. This was good, in a way, with Bashe on the team, as he eats corpses. He’s a giant alligator. It is what he does. But, the same ice pillars that kept Lady J pent up made it difficult for Snow Storm and Bashe to get good licks on her, so I had to bring Raspy up on the side to take her on directly. Having Raspy within 6″ of an enemy model in base contact with an ice pillar makes that model unable to move or be moved without explicitly using a “Walk” action.

The Strategy was to drop bombs on the enemy side of the board. My Scheme for the last turn was Assassinate, targeting Lady J. 1 point for getting her below half health, 2 points for killing her. I had my December Acolyte harassing the Lone Marshal on the side, where he was guarding a bomb. The acolyte could pick it up and deny Lady J the strategy point if I could only move the marshal out of the way. The acolyte would need to use both his actions to do this; one to walk to it, one to pick it up. He could use the crew card ability as a signature action that would do the trick, if it hit, but that was far from certain.

I had gotten Lady J to exactly half her health. I had very few activations left, and it was going to be up to Rasputina to either go for the Lady J kill or to go for the strategy point. She has four chances to move the Lone Marshal (I’d used Mara to drop an ice pillar nearby so she could cast through it). It took three of them to move the marshal. I used my last attack against Lady J, but missed.

That miss meant I would not get a win in the tournament, and we drew, again, 4-4.

0-1-2 was my score at the end, which was pretty far from prizes, but, it wasn’t the worst, and I was happy with how things ended. I’m always worried about 0-3-0 in these things — three losses.

This was Kasul’s second round table. Foundry was my old favorite team in third edition, but it’s hard to play them now since they stopped being part of the Arcanist faction. I could, and I have, but when you enter a tournament, you have to declare a faction, and for me, it’s always going to be Arcanist, so I simply cannot play them in a tournament. Against friends it’s fine, but even then, I’d rather preparing my tournament teams.

Kasul won this game against Von Schill. I think we’ve both faced Von Schill many times in the past. He comes up a lot and he can be surprisingly tough if he’s allowed to control the positioning.

I’m not going to write up Kasul’s games — he can if he likes — but he ended the tournament 1-2-0. Since he did get a win, he ranked up slightly higher than me. (He ended up 22/27, and I ended up 23/27).

Unfortunately, Kasul spent Friday not only playing, but getting sick. The dry winter air was giving everyone sniffles. He had to withdraw from the team tournament for Saturday and Sunday. I’d committed to playing two games of Dungeon Crawl Classic Saturday. I’ll write about those games later. We came home without playing in the team tournament. I hope it’s going well!