To explain why I don’t play WarmaHordes, I simply say “it’s as gamey as a card game, but with miniatures.” Imagine my surprise when I found a game that’s essentially just that – a CCG with miniatures! And you know what? Malediction is pretty good.
Listen to the Fortified Niche episode.
In Malediction, you’re a Seeker, wielder of a powerful legacy Relic, delving into the land uncovered by the game’s namesake wound in reality. More prosaically, your Seeker is the main card of your deck and their legacy is what defines your-sub army. So while the game has four factions at the outset, each Seeker comes with a couple of rules that will make their deckbuilding and gameplay different.
The deck building is easy, they have a whole website for that – it has all the cards and automates all the checks. But once you’re on the table, start you’re bidding cards for initiative (they will get banished from the game), placing terrain (both players choose their own set), deploying units, and then alternating activations. Units have two Action Points per, usually used in some combination of Attack and/or Move.
Malediction rules are fairly easy. Statlines are present on the cards, and many units have two or fewer abilities which are all succinctly explained on said cards. For attacks, claiming Relics, and so on, you only need to be within 1″ of the object in question. Dice rolls also simple: d20 plus the attack skill vs. the enemy defense stat. Hit, deal normal damage. Miss, deal graze. Nat 20 deals the sum of normal and graze, nat 1 deal just 1 damage, no modifiers. Once a unit is out of HP, it’s dead, and the enemy gains its cost in Mastery.
Mastery is your victory points. You gain them for holding (not capturing!) Relics and defeating enemies. You lose them by losing Relics, which also means that your unit carrying it died. Relics are randomly generated whenever they’re picked up – even after being dropped! Units may also have Items, but they need to be attached when they’re first deployed.
Units, items, spells – all are cards drawn from your deck, all are used by paying Echoes, a lump sum of which is given at the start of the game. Most often, Echo is refilled by at the start of the round – you get twice the round number. There’s an interesting interaction between Echoes and deployment. At the start of the turn/round, you can deploy units next to unengaged friendlies. So you have to weight the obvious utility of starting strong and getting those strong units relics vs. starting out with a few trash scouts and then deploying more powerful stuff next turn. Granted, what you’re deploying depends on what you draw…
But enough about the rules, let’s talk about the Malediction Tabletop Simulator module. It’s fully scripted, so much so, that there’s not one, but two tutorial modes. But even if you switch to “veteran mode,” the mod can still automatically set up your army based on the deck you assembled online, refill echoes at the start of your turn, and handle a lot of the tedious busywork. It’s the greatest thing I’ve ever seen.
Malediction is an interesting concept for a game. It runs really fast, and it’s very easy and cheap to get into online. Not that much more expensive to do it offline – and then you can start printing and painting the official miniatures…