Infinity - How to win games and influence outcomes

There was an interesting article written by Kris Sherriff over at Bell of Lost Souls about not doing stuff "just because you can". The gist of it, as far as Infinity is concerned, was that "opposed rolls are bad" and that spending orders to give your opponent a chance to kill your own models seems like something you should avoid.

Kris stated that "One of the keys to Infinity is maximizing your Normal Rolls whilst forcing your opponent in to as many Opposed Rolls as possible."

I left an initial comment on the article and then spent a lot of time really pondering his statements. Why are Normal rolls good and can we extrapolate that to other areas of Infinity? Can there be such a thing as a 'key' to playing Infinity well? After a lot of thought (and several re-writes of this article) I've come to believe that you can boil down good Infinity play to three factors (or keys) - order efficiency/effectiveness, reducing variance and mitigating failure.

Whilst the old adage of "it's not your list, it's you" is still banded about, the current tournament missions mean that it's simply not true any more - suitable army composition is an important factor. As such, some of the things discussed below are about list building and unit selection as well as in-game tactics.

Note: This article has now been subtly amended to take the changes from N3 into account. Please do let me know if I've missed anything.

I don't have anything in the way of relevant pics, so enjoy some pretty concept art - all rights belong to Corvus Belli

South Coast Infinity Tournament

This month is a busy time for me with lots of work, gaming and a small holiday thrown in for good measure, I'm booked up throughout the entire month in fact and this has meant that I've had precious little time get stuff actually get stuff painted. I did however manage to attend the latest South Coast Infinity tournament held on the 13th at LVL UP Gaming.

I travelled down on the Friday night with Stuart, another local Bristol player, and we stayed the night in Bournemouth to avoid having to set off super early on the Saturday - it would have been a 3+ hour journey on the day otherwise!

I'm happy to report that everything went better than expected.

A beach holiday with our mascot, Snowdrop, who is hard at work building a sandcastle.

Pigfinity 2014

It was a super busy bank holiday weekend for me. First I had a (not quite) 24 hour gaming session at the Bristol Vanguard club raising money as part of Wargamers All Against Cancer. Thankfully I cut my night short and headed off at about 2am (after six hours of losing at Twilight Imperium) because I was going to be TO'ing my first ever tournament!

This is going to be very picture heavy!

The first of many, I hope.