At the end of February, my wife and I flew out to Mallorca for a long weekend at a spa hotel . . . with a two day Infinity tournament included. the European Infinity Challenge was running its third event, with a five round, 300 point tournament over two days, with people who dropped out after day 1 having an option for a 200 point one day tournament on day 2.
I went last year and really enjoyed it, but didn't keep up with my event write ups as well as I should. We had a little wander along the beach on the way to the hotel and saw a little evidence of some Weather having happened recently. There are some lovely cafes in that part of the island and we definitely want to go again when we have a bit more time.
Enough of the holiday snaps, though - on to the event!
On Day 1 we got to our tables to find a named event pack left for us. The organisation was broadly pretty good, with the table assignments coming to you via the Corvus Belli tournament management software, allowing you to look up on your phone where you were going rather than waiting for it to be shouted out, or having to queue up and be told where to go.
There was one oops where an admin error meant this wasn't the case for one round, but it got sorted pretty well.
There was plenty of cool event loot - an exclusive miniature, an event patch, plus some stickers, bases and so on.
The first game was Power Pack, and I was facing Baez, running Vanilla Combined Army.
He deployed an Impersonation Marker up next to my core link and doctor, so I decided to have McMurrough watch the stairs in the hope of deterring him. Sadly, he was able to go prone and sneak around causing carnage - killing my doctor, Warcor, two members of the link and McMurrough. But fortunately for me, at least, this could have been even worse and turned into a massive order sink.
My Kum biker got the lucky job of taking out the total reaction remote covering a large part of the board. He got into chain rifle range and wrecked it, getting hurt in response and going Dogged. He then became my man of the match by zooming around and taking out another couple of people, getting a classified for passing a Willpower roll on a downed trooper.
I received an absolute pasting overall, though, with Ko Dali dropping in to cause carnage as well. In the end, we'd both flipped a console and got our classified, and Ko Dali was holding my home objective. I started my third turn in retreat and was able to use Command Tokens to have my Zencha cancel its retreat stake and run back and kill Ko Dali, leaving us tied 5-5 with my last order.
Next up was Transmission Matrix. Dahshat are traditionally very weak to hacking and the commonly taken Dahshat list with a Zuyong link with a Rui Shi will not fair well against even moderate hacking. The table was a little weird, but not terrible. It might have been more of a problem with different lists, though.
I was playing against Whoop Whoop, running a Yu Jing list his local community made for him that was a little . . . off the wall. He'd travelled from Germany, and I definitely want to get out there for a tournament at some point in the future.
The plan with this list was to send an Odalisque Haris up to hold the centre while a defensive Brawler link held the home objectives. As insurance, I had Saito Togan hiding out right next to the central objective.
Yu Jing started off by dropping a Liu Xing into my defensive link. Fortunately, the defensive mine and other covering fire dealt with him....
Only to discover that the list actually had four combat jump troops in total as yet more dropped down to cause me problems. Fortunately, they weren't able to do as much damage as they might have otherwise, as the number of them meant that the Yu Jing order pool was pretty limited.
McMurrough got caught by an adhesive ARO, but managed to still score the central zone while immobilised. It was a brutal game where almost everyone died, but I managed to edge a lead in the early rounds and hold the lead. It ended with a 6-4 win, meaning I was in the top half of the field going into the third round.
The final game was a custom mission where you had to try and control a civilian in the centre of the field at the end of each round. I was facing nombrechungo, who was running the Japanese Successionist Army.
The centre was pretty open, and I had the first round. I tried to get some smoke down to cheekily leg it with the civilian, but multiple AROs overcame McMurrough, and a cunning attempt to try a different angle with a Kum biker also got shot down.
I sent the link around another way to try and take out the overwatching ARO pieces, but was already starting to falter as I lost orders and was in a self inflicted bad position.
A turn in Loss of Lieutenant as an Oniwaban and a Ninja turned up and minced my back line contributed to the utter collapse.
The game ended with nombrechungo getting a well deserved 8-0 win, and I had practically nothing left alive on the entire field. This put me firmly out of playing the second day of the main tournament, so I was off to play in the "Low" tournament on Day 2 . . .
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