A nice bit of hardcore...

So, last night saw an attempt at a mini hardcore tournament of Malifaux at my games club.

The players were, in no particular order:
Connor (Proximocoal) with his pig filth
Lucasz with Ototo and 3 torakage
Col with Huggy, a beckoner, and illuminated and a young nephilim
Paj with Hannah and some other models (I didn't see what he was using)
Ben with Taelor and 3 ronin
Me with Valedictorian, Student of viscera and two rotten belles.

We drew suits to see who was paired up, both Connor and I had masks, Lucasz ended up facing Col and Ben faced Paj. The common scheme for the first round was Frame for Murder (I took it on the Student, Connor either had it on Old Major or the stuffed piglet. This is entirely conjecture as he didn't score for it and Old Major survived whereas the stuffed piglet blew itself up)

Connor and I played the quickest game of Malifaux I have ever experienced (well, apart from that one game against Jordan where I destroyed him by the end of the first turn...). With only four models each I knew the turns would be relatively quick. The student went down in the first turn to a red joker of damage from a warpig. One of the Belles pulled the stuffed piglet out of the way to try and keep it from doing too much harm, and the Valedictorian started to beat up some pigs.
Turn two ended rather quickly, leaving me ill equipped to score for Turf War, but Connor got a point out of it. Turn three was over equally as quickly as I was reduced down to just the Valedictorian who had suffered 3 wounds from an exploding piglet and Black Jokered on the damage prevention... Connor scored his second point for Turf War.
Turn four saw the Valedictorian wipe out the remaining Warpig with a cheated in Red Joker for damage, but she was unable to do any serious damage to Old Major before he mashed her into the ground. We called it here as a) I had nothing left, and b) neither of us were able to score anything in the last turn.

The second game of the night saw me face Lucasz. The common scheme was spring the trap.
I thought I was clever by dropping a couple of scheme markers with my first two activations (the student, who lecture noted a torakage to prevent it from from declaring triggers (these guys really need triggers to pull off a lot of their shenanigans) and the Valedictorian who did lecture notes on Ototo. My plan was then to lure Ototo over to spring the trap first turn, but it turns out he is immune to moves or pushes from enemy models, so I that plan didn't work...
Lucasz cleverly managed to position two scheme markers near the Valedictorian so he could score three for the scheme, plus 1 for the strategy, netting him a 4-1 lead in turn two.
Turn three saw me reduce Ototo to one or two wounds remaining and then the student (who was going to die at the end of turn to poison) and one of the belles dropped scheme markers to score me 3 for spring the trap thanks to the sad (but predictable) death of the student which made it so that our crews were of equal size, and we both scored for the strategy, making it a 5-all tie.
Turn four and I managed to kill Ototo, but he still had two torakage in the centre area to score a 6th point. I had two models there to score me my 6th point, as one of the Belles had been picked off by the torakage and their hideous "I'm on my own so I'm proper lethal!" rule...
Turn five and we were both down to just one model each (the torakage are immune to disengaging strikes too!). Overall it was a 6-all draw.

Sadly, people had left and we ran out of time, so I didn't get to have a third game, but since Lucasz has only played like five games, then I can't really complain that it took longer than the 20 minute time limit normally on hardcore games.

As always, comments, etc. are welcome.