Blast-Tastic!

I recently had the pleasure of attending Blast-Tastic! (yes, the exclamation mark is compulsory), a small sci-fi specific wargaming show in Bristol, for it's very first event. Considering it was an entirely new venture I have to say it was very smoothly run by Michael of Angel Barracks.

I signed up to run demonstration games of Infinity throughout the day using scenery kindly provided by Ian from The Wargaming Trader.

The show itself was a success, although I did bemoan the lack of a bring-and-buy which is normally a great draw for me, and I even picked up some new bits of scenery to take back to my local club.

The main hall with traders and participation games

List of the Week - Hunting Bounties

" A lot of people won't change a plan, that's how they end up not winning." - Dog the Bounty Hunter

I'm trying out something new for the blog, a bit of an experiment I guess as I have no idea if this is something that people would be interested in. Each week (or two, or three...) I'll cook up an interesting looking list and talk about it in the context of the current ITS system.

Sometimes it'll be pure theory-crafting, sometimes it'll come with a battle report, either way I hope that these lists will cause some discussion.

This first list spawned in a car journey on the way back from a tournament in Exeter when Robin (i0003), Matt (Drastic), Stuart (Fathi Amirmoez) and I were plotting lists for an upcoming tournament. Frankly it's just too much fun not to share.

How could you say no? - Image from Corvus Belli

Wayland Tournament Report

I'm still trying to hit my stride with writing tournament reports, so please do let me know if this is the sort of thing you'd like to read more of. :)

In addition to all the seminars happening last weekend there was also an 8-man ITS tournament on the Sunday run by Paul Quinn. Never one to pass up the opportunity to play against some new faces I signed up.

It was an unusual format - 200pts with a Spec Ops - and the missions were Supplies, Frontline and Annihilation. 200pts is normally a very restrictive format as it can be difficult to get a good mix of specialists and decent attacking units whilst retaining a full order pool, but using a Spec Ops frees up your points significantly as it provides cheap Chain of Command, heavy weaponry or hacker/doctor/engineer support as necessary.

As a complete aside, we ended up watching Celebrity Juice and Release the Hounds on the Saturday night. When did TV get weird?

Apparently this is a thing. Would be better with Antipodes though.

Infinity - All the News that's Fit to Print

Last weekend (27th-28th September) was the Infinity event at Tabletop Nation hosted by Wayland Games and attended by Carlos (Bostria to some of you) from Corvus Belli.

They were two fun filled days and included a couple of Seminars where lots of juicy information was revealed, an ITS tournament (report coming soon to a blog near you) and lots of demo games. Of these I'm sure you are all most interested in the gossip. Some of this might commonly be known by now, especially by those following the news closely, but hopefully there will be a few gems in here.

Tabitha Lyons in a Bolt cosplay

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.