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Hi everybody, within a few months I will be heading off to university. With that being said I want to keep miniature wargaming as a hobby, but I have had to put 40K on hiatus because it is too time consuming.

I was wondering which of the two miniature games was the least time consuming: Hordes or Malifaux. Time consuming as in collecting, building, painting, and playing games. Much appreciated.

X-Wing might be a good choice for you, if you want to focus on the gaming part of it.

If you want to spend a little time painting models, Malifaux has a tiny model count. But the price per model is quite high, and the models are a very different aesthetic -- that's not a bad thing, but it's gotta be to your liking.

Unlike 40k, Hordes and Malifaux basically give you nearly zero building time, since nearly all the models have only 1 variant and go together a lot more simply than GW models. You're essentially looking at cleaning up the plastic/resin/metal and following pretty simple assembly instructions. Painting time, of course, can vary greatly -- it just depends on how wellyou want to paint your models.

From a gaming perspective, it depends a lot on your scene and play partners and scene. It just depends on what people are playing and what they want to play. I mean, AoS, 40k, WMH, XWing... they could all work out; it just depends on the size and type of game that there is interest in, and how that intersects with what you're looking for. Since you already have 40k models, you might even think about Kill Team, if there's any interest -- they're fast games, you wouldn't need new models, and transportation isn't an issue.

 Talys wrote:
X-Wing might be a good choice for you, if you want to focus on the gaming part of it.

If you want to spend a little time painting models, Malifaux has a tiny model count. But the price per model is quite high, and the models are a very different aesthetic -- that's not a bad thing, but it's gotta be to your liking.

Unlike 40k, Hordes and Malifaux basically give you nearly zero building time, since nearly all the models have only 1 variant and go together a lot more simply than GW models. You're essentially looking at cleaning up the plastic/resin/metal and following pretty simple assembly instructions. Painting time, of course, can vary greatly -- it just depends on how wellyou want to paint your models.

From a gaming perspective, it depends a lot on your scene and play partners and scene. It just depends on what people are playing and what they want to play. I mean, AoS, 40k, WMH, XWing... they could all work out; it just depends on the size and type of game that there is interest in, and how that intersects with what you're looking for. Since you already have 40k models, you might even think about Kill Team, if there's any interest -- they're fast games, you wouldn't need new models, and transportation isn't an issue.

Hey Talys, thanks for your advice! I'm hoping to start a clean slate game, so unfortunately 40K is out of the question. I'm just curious, a game of Malifaux is not necessarily shorter than a game of Hordes, right? I do love the models for both games but I need something in which I can build really quickly (I do need to build the miniatures), paint, and start playing 30-60 min games.

Neither Hordes nor Malifaux are particularly big games in terms of model count, though I think (I could be wrong) that Malifaux is considerably smaller.

I think a better bet might be to check in with the game shops and clubs around your university and see which game has the most traction. It wouldn't make sense to choose one with only a slightly smaller model count if your chances of getting in a game are slim-to-none.

X;Wing bar none is definitely the easiest and cheapest if you can resist the gotta catch em all mentality (pro tip, no one can) everything is ready to go right out of the box, the game is slick, the rulebook is 30 pages, and even people who have never wargames before can easily wrap their heads around it. It's very easy to get people into and doesn't require a lot of space either..


For the best "true" wargame (aka something without prepaints) I would recommend dropzone commander. 10mm scale is stupid easy to paint, entire units consist of 3-6 models usually, and your entire army will compose of maybe 30 models or so (if you count infantry bases as 1 model) you can easily fit a massive army into a single KR cardboard case.

In addition, dropzone commander terrain is by far the easiest and cheapest terrain to find bar none. They make a 4x6 tileset consisting of 1x1 tiles with different types on both sides and card buildings thats like $40 for the box and will give you all the terrain you'll ever need. I bought one of the boxes and it's a steal and of very high quality cardstock/cardboard. If you get the starter set, it comes with 2 playmats and enough buildings for a 4x4 table as well as two 500pt starter armies, the full rulebook, and all the counters and templates you could ever need.

The problem is in the USA it can be hard to find a community, no idea what it's like in Canada but I doubt much better. However, it's not expensive to start and I got a massive 2000pt+ PHR army for under $200 by being smart with eBay. Even with new models, the warstore sells at a good discount and its not very expensive if you use a couple plastic starter armies as a core (which are great because the boxes pay for themselves just with the 3 plastic dropship you get, everything else in them is gravy.) I'm collecting PHR and UCM for this reason, so I can demo the game to friends.

If building is important Malifaux beats Hordes no question. Malifaux plastics are (mostly) enjoyable builds with some trickieness to them that makes it feel like an accomplishment while Hordes is mostly insert peg A into hole B and you're done with the chore. Painting wise Hordes has bold details while Malifaux is lots of fine detail with relatively large areas that need definition from the paint job.

Basically Hordes comes together quickly while Malifaux either rewards you for your effort or makes it clear you don't care about X portion of preparing the minis.

As for game size Hordes runs 20-30ish per side if I remember correctly while Malifaux is usualy less than 10 on the table and another 15 in the wings for building to the objective. (Malifaux you set up the board, determine objective THEN build your list)

Depending on how meticulous you are with cleaning your minis be aware of the soul scorching endeavor of cleaning PVC mold lines off of WMH minis.

If you're sold on the "30-60 minute games" aspect, you might be out of luck on WarmaHordes / Malifaux. Both routinely go longer than that – I'd budget 90 minutes minimum for both systems. (Your mileage may vary, of course.)

Malifaux is definitely on the lower end for time spent building, painting and collecting.

For a crew, you'll need a crew starter and a few additional boxes, either solo models or packs with multiple models. Generally, you'll wind up with about 15 models of which you'll probably be deploying 8-10 in a game. Those ~15 models have a lot of flexibility in how they're used, many models can be used in multiple ways. So mastering them will take many games.

Where Malifaux falls down is gaming time. While the game was massively streamlined with its second edition, you're still as said earlier looking at 90 minutes for a game, sometimes 2 hours if either player is playing a summoning master. So much happens between those few models.

You're not going to get game time down to an hour or less outside of some very, very light games like Mercs or X-Wing (and even this depends on the size of the game), or boardgames.

Even with that said, I think that Malifaux still plays faster than Warmahordes.

And the miniatures look about a hundred times better. (I had Malifaux figures years before trying the game. They look very, very good.)

Plus... I just plain do not like Privateer Press these days.

The Auld Grump