Into the Infinity of Thoughts – Part One

Infinity is a 28mm skirmish game produced by the Spanish company Corvus Belli that has steadily been building momentum. As it approaches its third edition, N3, which launches at the end of the year, a new starter set, Operation:Icestorm has been launched. For this two part article, Corehammer’s Infinity “veteran” Daniel Duggan, and greenhorn OC talk about their experiences and thoughts with this new boxset and the game as a whole.

Operation Icestorm

The Operation: Icestorm set.

Duggan:

When it comes to 28mm tabletop wargaming, there’s normally only a few main players that people talk about: Games Workshop, Privateer Press, Warlord and Mantic. The outsider to these is Corvus Belli, they’re a Spanish company that make Infinity. You may or may not have heard of Infinity, it’s a sci-fi skirmish game with an anime aesthetic and a very fast cinematic play style. This post is brought to you in part by my recent delve into this futuristic world, and in part by the new boxset Operation: Icestorm which is being released to entice new players to the game.

I’m a big fan of the scaled down skirmish style game, Necromunda was the last time you could truly play a skirmish game of 40k outside of the kill team ruleset. It was a magical time in my gaming life in ’96 when it came out, taking part in campaigns and only having to paint a handful of models compared to the Eldar army I’d been avoiding painting. This was where the fun peaked in the 40k universe for me but it didn’t last long and the flame soon died out. I’ve been looking to reignite that flame ever since, this is where Infinity comes in.

This past Christmas I stayed at Brother Beech’s house for a weekend, much gaming was had and one of the most memorable experiences was our time playing Infinity. The mass of scenery with limited lines of fire, the low model count and the fact you could return fire in your opponent’s turn really set the game apart from anything I’d played before. Plus the D20s were different to roll, I swear I can get better rolls with those things compared to the trusty D6.

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Matt Beech explaining a new gameplay system to a GW fanboy.

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Adam in his “mid-90’s smelly” phase

I was intrigued by the game at this point but couldn’t find a decent starting off point, there were a few starter sets for each of the factions but I never got the nerve to dive in until Corvus Belli announced Operation: Icestorm. Icestorm is their first two-player starter box, it’s basically everything you need to have a full (starter) game of Infinity. You get scenery, dice, counters and 2 factions worth of miniatures which work out at around 165pts each side. If you were ever on the fence about Infinity, this is the set to get you into it. I’d been toying with the idea of a Panoceania sectorial army, also the Nomads looked cool to me from a fluff perspective so having the factions in the Icestorm box also gives me a good jumping off point to delve further into the game.

The “rulebook” is a strange one, nothing like what you’ve seen before in the GW world, it jumps right in to a very basic mission using 3 grunts each side and drip feeds you the rules you’ll need for that one mission. Once you’ve played that, the next one adds an extra model per side and in turn a few more rules until the last mission has the whole box on the table at once. You don’t get every rule covered by the end, but that’s fine, as once the 3rd edition book comes out by the end of 2014 you can get them for free on the Corvus Belli website, along with counters and blast markers that you’ll inevitably require.  The Icestorm book misses out many of the more advanced rules and strips down things like combat jump into a much simpler form, this is done to ease a new player into the game so that the full rules don’t confuse the hell out of you.

Onto the models themselves. You get seven per side, one per faction is exclusive to this box plus an extra model exclusive to the pre-order (you get a card counter to represent this if you missed out). Compared to GW, you’re going to find these a little flimsy, the weapons aren’t as big and it may take you out of your comfort zone. Get over that obstacle and you’ll find they fit together really snugly and you should hardly have any intrusive mould lines. Personally I find the sculpts to be really top notch, the bigger dudes really do look chunkier than the basic grunts and you can see the transition up the heirarchy with the extra armour they put on. For example, the Panoceania ORC trooper looks like he could have been a Fusilier a few years ago, he just kept adding more armour to his set up. The thing I can’t get along with so well with these models is the overly sexualised female sculpts, they’re well sculpted but definitely pander to the perv part of the traditional neckbeard gamer, and being a switched on liberal punk type, it doesn’t really appeal to me. The exception to this is definitely the Reverend Healer, this gal looks like a bad ass futuristic Assassins Creed type, she’ll be kicking ass in many a game I can just tell.

The Nomad models on top of one of the included buildings

The PanO faction

I wanted to jump right in to painting this whole set but as it was delayed nearly four weeks I ended up getting Space Hulk through and I’m balls deep in Genestealers at the moment. Hopefully the small models will be quicker to paint than Space Hulk is, so I may be able to get the set painted so I can do a few demo games with the Corehammer lads before the year is out.

This entry was posted in Gaming, Infinity, Model Review, Reviews by OC. Bookmark the permalink.

About OC

As well as being a veteran edgeman, part of Atonement Records and bass player in bands such as Ironclad, Ark of the Covenant and Natural Order, OC has an unfortunate penchant for collecting plastic models that come in shiny boxes, such as Warhammer models and Lego, and an even more unfortunate tendency for procrastination, meaning much of their contents never see the light of day.

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