Tuesday, 14 April 2015

Infinity Weekender I - BIG Tournament

This Saturday was a big day for me as it was the first Infinity tournament held in Bristol and was the capstone on our escalation league. Ten Competitors showed up for a 200 points ITS event at Bristol Independent Gaming, all hunting for fame, glory and riches. Or at least some new toy soldiers and a certificate!

The prizes were from a pair of Tournament Packs, plus the obligatory wooden spoon, and were distributed as follows:
  • 1st Place: 3 blister packs and a patch
  • 2nd Place: 2 blister packs and a patch
  • 3rd Place: 1 blister pack and a patch
  • Last Place: Wooden Spoon (granting discounted entry to the next event!)
  • Raffle Prize: Armand "Le Muet" - Freelance Killer
Yep, First place was not going to be getting the limited edition mini. This was deliberately done because the event was going to be host to a mix of very new and very experienced players. I wanted to keep some excitement going right through to the end of the event as anybody had the chance of snagging a cool prize without having to worry about their score.

One thing that I didn't know at the time though was that the ITS Winners Pack (with Le Muet in it) also had a patch and badge stating "ITS Winner 2015 Season" on it. If I had known then I would have removed them and given them to first place also. Lesson learnt for any future events.

Not a bad prize pool for a £9 event I think!

The missions chosen were Supplies, Frontline and Seize the Antenna. I picked these because they were familiar to me, had fairly easy to understand rules, were quite well balanced and didn't require too many objective markers or overly specific lists. I didn't want to use the fancy new 2015 missions as I wasn't confident in my ability to answer rules questions about them on the fly!

We had six tables set up as I was was expecting 11 players, with me playing the bye, but we had a drop out on the day. That meant that we could cycle players round the tables pretty easily though, and only one person played on the same table twice - which was just down to me mucking up the table assignments a bit!

It was my first time running a full event at this venue and I was slightly concerned about whether we would have enough suitable scenery or not. In particular I didn't think there was enough high cover on some of the tables which could have been an issue for TAGs. I assumed that they would be few and far between at this points level though, especially as they are not very common in the South West meta.

We had a good mix of factions represented, with only Yu Jing forces absent on the day, which is a great indicator of the health of the game. Haqqislam were predictably popular as they have (arguably) some of the best minis in the game.

In the end, the top four places were only separated by as many points, so it was a very close run event. Congratulations to Robin, John and Darren for the top three rankings, Matt J for picking up the much-coveted spoon and Javier for taking home Le Muet!

The final standings

That just about wraps it up for the Saturday, I've dumped the rest of the pictures below for easy perusal and do check out part two of my Infinity Weekender.

Hope to see you all at the next Bristol event. :)

Table 1 - My own gaming table

Table 2 - The rocky outpost.

Table 3 - The ruined city

Table 4 - The... errr... abandoned Wild West theme park?

Table 5 - Frontier Colony

Table 6 - Science Labs - Provided by Robin (i0003) - Many thanks!

Robin's Halqa out on patrol

Alessandro's Naffatun and Nasmat

Darren's Dog Soldier leading the charge

John's Nomads on patrol

2 comments:

  1. I wish those were my nomads but mine are not that well painted!:)

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    1. Must have mixed up my notes on which photo went with which player. All corrected now (Sorry John!).:)

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