Tactica: SCHEMES

Malifaux: scheme selection

In Malifaux it’s not about wiping out the enemy.
Well, usually.
It’s about completing your mission. And not just that, on top of that mission you can select a couple of schemes, like side bets or bonus objectives, to complement that strategy or minimize the losses if everything goes FUBAR. Scheme selection wins or loses you the game: choose poorly and you can face defeat even after wiping your opponent from the table.

So you know who (or what) you’ll be playing against and you’ve flipped your strategy, so now it’s time to select your crew and schemes. We’ll be assuming you’re trying to complete your strategy here, and so will your opponent, and from that assumption we’ll be formulating something resembling sound tactical advice. It may not apply to all masters in equal measure, but it should contain some general truths that might prove somewhat useful. I tend to follow these guidelines, so at least you can turn them against me now that I’ve put them in writing.

Most schemes have an option of leaving them secret, or announcing them to your opponent after deployment. Announced schemes are worth two points, while secret schemes only grant a single point (compared to the four points for a fully completed strategy, and two points if it’s only partially completed). If you think you won’t be able to pull off one of your schemes if you announce it there’s no shame in not revealing it. Score the easy point, it will often make the difference between winning and losing. And always, ALWAYS, listen to your opponent’s announced schemes. Cocky (or clueless) opponents will be telling you their battle plan even before the first turn of the game has started.

Bodyguard: Keep your master (or a henchman) alive. This is a good scheme to take if you’ve got a master that’s hard to kill (think Perdita, Zoraida and the likes), your opponent doesn’t have a strategy that requires him to dedicate resources to killing your master and you generally feel confident you can keep your master out of harm’s way. Always good to hold on to a few extra ‘Stones if you want to announce this one, or your opponent might decide your master is worth the effort after all.
Breakthrough: Conquer the opposing deployment zone. This one is difficult. If your opponent has a strategy that requires him to send a lot of models up the board (claim jump, reconnoitre), you can usually score it easily. If he has a reason to hang back (treasure hunt) you really shouldn’t bother. If you have assassinate and need to go after a guys like Ramo, who like to sit in his deployment zone, you can bank on it that you’ll have a lot of models in there anyway. Unless you’re getting trashed.
Eye for an eye: Keep the model count within one model of each other. An ideal scheme for people who can play around with this model count. Ressers are good, if you’re not playing army of the dead (see below), or arcanists with spiders (which can become insignificant). Also a good scheme if you’ve flipped slaughter and your opponent doesn’t have the luxury of avoiding a straight-up confrontation.
Hold Out: Defend your own deployment zone. This scheme is all to often chosen because people don’t think about their game plan. Really nasty with corner deployments too, lots of ground to cover. Think twice about selecting this if you have a strategy that requires you to move up the board, or are playing against slaughter or, especially, reconnoitre.
Stake a Claim: Grab a piece of terrain while driving out all enemies. Risky to announce, since even a single enemy model can ruin your day. Unannounced, however, this scheme is pretty much impossible to stop unless you’ve been tabled (or are being too obvious about it) Especially great if you have to perform a reconnoitre.

Crew specific schemes:
Army of the Dead (Resurrectionists): End the game with more undead models in play and corpse counters carried than your opponent has left. A no-brainer with Nicodem against crews that drop corpse counters (if they don’t have to slaughter you). McMourning can pull it off too, but you have to keep your dogs together in order to mitigate the insignificant trait. Saemus is usually better off taking something else.
Kidnap (Neverborn): “Kill” an opponent’s selected minion in melee. Once again rather master-specific. Lilith should always take this. Really. No exceptions. Pandora and Zoraida… well, depends on your crew really. The fact that you have to make a melee kill can make this a tricky proposition. It’s always unannounced though, so for two points it’s often worth the risk. Select your opponent’s best melee fighter and just let him come to you, then keep hitting him until he goes down.
Raid (Guild): End the game with more minions than your opponent. The Guild’s actually not very good at this scheme. They tend to fare poorly once casualties start piling up and will often lose in wars of attrition. If you have to slaughter your opponent’s crew it’s often worth it to go for broke though.
Sabotage (Arcanists): Destroy a terrain feature. This is again a scheme that provides full points without announcing it, making it very hard to counter. You can even take it twice. The only downside is that insignificant models can’t lug around explosives, so no moleman demolitionists! Or solo spiders for that matter.
Thwart (Outcasts): Stop your opponent from completing his primary objective. It takes guts to select this one: it’s automatically announced, the bad guys will be throwing everything they can at you and in the mean time you have to complete your own objectives. If you flipped a strategy that’s complimentary with your opponent’s (assassinate vs. assassinate for example) you can play for all the marbles. If you complete yours your opponent will utterly fail at his, and thus you score thwart as well as the strategy. Think before you thwart!