Gremlin dissection: The young Lacroix

In the third dissection of the gremlin crew we have the young Lacroix. They are the small “up and comers “ in the family and they are the totems of Lacroix. They have a supporting role in handing out upgrades to Ophelia and getting yourself some cheap models to help you out activate your opponent.

The stats

The young have a cost of 2 and have the Peon, Living and totem (Lacroix) characteristic. They are also gremlin and they are kin, which lets you target them with the abilities that Ophelia has.

They have a Df of 5, Wp and Wd of 3. They have a Wk of 6, which is pretty fast, and no charge. They are also Ht 1.

The skills

They have 4 abilities: Gets Into Everything, Role Model, Insignificant, Small Target

The first one is Gets Into Everything. You get to make an Attack action that’s printed on Ophelia’s gun upgrades within 6’’ and you get a Sh -2 penalty. That’s pretty good especially with the threatening gun upgrades which lets you fire twice a turn. For the other guns you drop the upgrades, so you can only fire them once.

The next one ( Role Model) lets you hire 3 of these models instead of the normal 1. They are a great addition, but I might be getting 2 in the future instead of 3 to save some costs.

With the next one (Insignificant) you can’t take interact actions, so they can’t be used for objectives or schemes that requires you to take interaction actions.

The last one (Small Target)  gives the attacker a [-] to hit you with shooting attacks. This helps them to survive  a little longer, but they are still fairly easy to kill.

The attacks

They have 2  actions they can do.

The first one is a shooting attack: the Much Abused Pistol. It deals 1/3/4 damage and has the trigger Dumb Luck, which lets you double the damage and you suffer half the amount of damage a s well. The trigger isn’t that useful, because when you do moderate damage, you kill yourself as well. To do severe damage is not that likely either, since you need to have a bit of luck to get that severe off.

The next one is a tactical action “Here You Go!”. It lets you attach one of Ophelia’s gun upgrades to her. It effectively let her use upgrades without spending the additional soulstones to take them in the first place; also Ophelia can use other AP instead of wasting an AP to get the gun she needs.

They are totems, so they can’t take upgrades. What you see is what you get.

The looks

We only have one picture for the 3 models so that’s a bit disappointing. The old models look really nice and they have a nice flavor so I recommend the old models while you wait for a new release.

The playbook

Keep them out of harms way, because they are fairly easy to kill with 3 wounds. Try to use cover and other intervening models as your advantage. They already get a bonus with their tiny-ability, so every bonus will help. You’ll probably struggle with the reckoning strategy, so I tend to experiment with1 or 2 Young ones.

I tend to place them behind Ophelia, except if I want to shoot something, then I try to place them parallel to Ophelia.

Another use for the young Lacroix is, in later game turns, use them to stop other models from moving, by engaging them in close combat. In the later turns you can make sure that your opponent’s models have to deal with these small nuisances instead of focusing on completing schemes and strategies. In that way they serve another purpose instead of handing out upgrades to Ophelia. And if you use defensive stance on them they can tie models up for multiple turns (if you’re lucky that is)