War of the Worlds VI at ibuywargames

Infinity is definitely the game of choice at the moment, and last weekend I headed down to Woking again for "War of the Worlds VI", hosted at ibuywargames. This time it was planned to be at the store so we all just about squeezed in there!

First on the sheet was "Capture and Protect", and gamma ray had put out a challenge to anyone he'd not faced before, and I accepted. He was running an Onyx Contact Force list while I was running Vanilla Nomads, with a ten order list concept I've been wanting to give a go for ages.

I forced him to set up first with the intention of weathering the first turn of fire and then hitting back on my first turn. Sadly, it didn't go to plan. An Intruder Sniper was critted off in his first turn, leaving me short one of my major hitting pieces from the start.

My Intruder HMG then emerged under smoke to shoot up the Rodok link team. Unfortunately, I'd messed up my positioning so he was able to heal up his missile launcher, reform the link and open fire again. With a crit and a second hit, my Intruder vanished in a puff of smoke, and the bad positioning caught the Jaguar and Clockmaker as well, turning them all to a light dusting of ash.

That done, an Umbra Something was able to run up the field, grab my beacon and high tail it out of there. With a mere handful of orders left, there were too many casualties for my Iguana Operator to make the run for his beacon - and even failing in a suicidal run to get an "Extreme Prejudice" Classified Objective. The loss of the Iguana left me with a solitary Jaguar left alive on the table, and a 9-0 defeat as gamma ray had just not quite managed to make it all the way back to his deployment zone.

The second mission was Power Pack, and continuing the trend of playing people I've not played before, I got matched up against sam2064, who writes the excellent Strategos Level 3 blog. He was running his ISS for the first time at a tournament.

I had a very different list, designed specifically for Power Pack. It relied on the Kriza Boracs armed with a Mk12 and 360 Visor to be able to get onto the hard to reach objective in the enemy half of the field, and also had a Hellcat with Spitfire to cause some damage due to the terrifying deployment set up in the board corners that left you open to drop troops.

With the Kriza Boracs on one side and a Reaktion Zond (which also has a 360 fire arc) on the other, I'd firmly nailed down the deployment zones. The ISS drop remote, borrowed from Aleph, ran around with a Boarding Shotgun causing carnage. The powerful Core Fireteam, meanwhile, handily took out the Reaktion remote.

I did get one small happy moment when the advancing link team got a little careless about zones of control and walked too near one of my camo tokens - which turned out to be a Zero Killer Hacker, who promptly melted the brain of the link team's hacker.

Major Luna was absolutely brutal this battle - picking off various units and leaving me rather badly pinned down.

My Hellcat, in turn, managed to put a Sophotect onto No Wound Incapacitation, but was promptly taken down before they could cause too much damage.

In the end, the Crane Agent from the Fireteam was able to get properly locked in to the objective, and I wasn't able to dislodge him.

My remaining Zero Minelayer did manage to neatly murder a couple of bounty hunter types hanging around on one of the antenna, but without being a specialist, couldn't get the objective back and left me with a thorough 10-2 kicking.

I felt like I did quite well at dislodging some quite troublesome units, but they weren't the ones I needed to get rid of to hit the objectives - sam2064 was fundamentally much better at focussing in on the objective and actually getting the mission done.

Final game! I was very much in the contention for the wooden spoon, and I was up against Ironclad's Bakunin force at Acquisition. I decided to go for my ten order list again, mostly because Bakunin sometimes means a lot of ODD, and if so, double Intruders would be what you might refer to as a "hard counter".

Again, I managed to win the WIP roll and chose deployment, and tried very hard not to do a happy dance when I saw Ironclad putting down a full Moira link. There were some worrying camo tokens in the midfield - I reckoned two Zeroes and a Prowler - and probably at least one Hacker, and a moderator lying down in an impossible to reach spot in the deployment zone who was almost certainly the Lieutenant.

The Necromunda terrain wasn't perfect for Infinity. Due to the terrain shortcomings, there was a house rule that gaps in the walls smaller than S1 were in fact solid. This gave a lot more line of sight blocking terrain and prevented horror.

First up, a Vertigo Zond dropped to within eight inches of my poor TAG. Now, I didn't know if an assault hacking device was hiding under camouflage at this point, but I really didn't want a possessed TAG.

I had one Hacker hack the transport aircraft (unsuccessfully) while the other one smacked the landed Remote in the face with Oblivion and Isolated it - although on reflection I don't think that would have dealt with the Repeater. Oh well!

As a camo token ran across the board to get into Repeater range, I guessed it was a Killer Hacker. It came out of camo to do something horrible to the Hacker I was running as a Lieutenant with surprise, so the Lieutenant dropped Breakwater (the one time it's useful!) and the other Hacker melted the Zero's brain before it could do any more damage.

In my turn, I ran the Iguana and Lunokhod up into the mid field, and deployed the Koalas. This left a big ugly pile of repeaters and horrible AROs for my opponent to deal with. I shot the Vertigo Zond to death on the way up field - no need to leave it lying around unattended...

With most of my opponent's models hiding out of sight, and short of useful things to do with orders, I ran a Jaguar up the field to get into a better spot to throw smoke and cause mischief in the midfield.

So, up came the Moira link and speculative E/M grenades rained down on my TAG until it was immobilised and isolated. This was definitely "sub-optimal".

Remember how I said I reckoned one of those mid field camo markers was a Prowler? It was indeed a Prowler, and the Spitfire Prowler I'm so found of running. He turned my poor Jaguar into a small bloody mess.

He then came around the corner and shot the Lunokhod into double unconscious. He was, for some reason, super spooked about the Heavy Flamethrower it carries...

The counter punch was appropriately brutal. I threw smoke over the Intruder HMG and took out the Prowler, the E/M Grenade Launcher Moira and Kusanagi, leaving the link as just 3.

My engineer then ran up and restored the Iguana to full power and patched the Lunokhod back up to full health.

The game then swung in Bakunin's favour! The Moira team came around the corner, carefully shooting the Lunokhod from out of Heavy Flamethrower range before coming around further and shooting down the Iguana. The pilot ejected to safety, as the Clockmaker dived into the cover of the damaged remote.

I was then a terrible person and co-ordinated an order between my Lunokhod, Custodier and still camoed Intruder. Everyone shot the Reverend Healer on the objective, and she didn't make it. It was then just a bit of mopping up on the surviving Moiras, and the Clockmaker managed to flip one of the antennaes back to my control.

Finally, I managed to run my Iguana up to the centre console to claim a 7-1 victory in the final turn. This left me a respectable 13th out of 20, and put poor Ironclad into last place for the wooden spoon.

In summary, I had a massive amount of fun at War of the Worlds again, with three entertaining games against three pleasant opponents. Venues are hard to come by, and ibuywargames is a little limited as it only has space for ten tables and is a little cramped. That's still worthwhile, though, as its such a good event with excellent people.

Photos from Warhammer Tottenham Court Road

I took a few photos at Warhammer Tottenham Court Road when I popped in while running errands.

Wayland Games Infinity Christmas Bash

Not a fan of mornings

Before Christmas, I pottered down to Wayland Games to play four games of Infinity at their Christmas Bash. This was a 300 Spec Ops Tournament with four rounds. I decided to take Bakunin along, as that meant that whatever happened, I'd be getting a Corvus Belli achievement for having played three different armies this season.

Looking at the wide range of missions, I chose two lists - one involving a Taskmaster and keeping to one combat group, and the other involving a Lizard, a cheap Moderator link and a few Morlocks for smoke.

First up, it was Highly Classified, and I was drawn against Reyzah's Steel Phalanx force. I picked my single combat group list as it had the Riot Grrl with MSV, plenty of flame damage, and some tough specialists who could get work done.

I was deploying first and going first, and unfortunately, was facing Phoenix in a tall building in the middle of the opposite deployment zone, with excellent fields of fire across most of the field.

My personal objective was Sabotage so I hid my Prowler with D Charges in a nice spot where he could walk up, place and detonate them without any opposition.

I snuck my Lunokhod around the right hand flank to try and hold things up there.

My Prowler then pottered around the corner and put a few holes in Phoenix, but not enough to permanently put him out of commission.

Reyzah then walked up, dropped some smoke so the Prowler was blinded, and proceeded to stab the Prowler to death.

Meanwhile, Ajax took out the Lunokhod and started advancing.

Again, smart use of smoke meant the Taskmaster didn't get a good shot with it's HRL.

In the end, he managed to take down the Taskmaster with Ajax, and I'd pulled so many pieces back to try and stop the rampage, and he had a pretty much unopposed turn to catch up on classifieds. While we'd both gotten two, he was able to smoothly get a third, taking the score to 9-2 to the forces of Aleph.

Game 2, and I was facing seb and his US Ariadna in Supplies. This was definitely an odd table with some hugely tall buildings with very little in the way of access up and down, and weird cover in the deployment zones. I think I chose deployment and then seb chose to go first. I took my TAG list because there was plenty of midfield camo to pick up supply boxes and run off with them.

I was hugely intimidated by seb's massive pile of camo in the midfield, and placed my mid field camo more defensively. This was, it turned out, a massive mistake.

An inferior infiltrating grunt caught my link team with a flamethrower and caused some inconvenient casualties before being blown to pieces by a lot of vengeful people.

I managed to lock down one of the supply boxes with a well placed mine from minelayer.

A bike ran up and grabbed a box - pretty much my worst nightmare - but I managed to shoot the bike down.

Unfortunately, a doctor was able to make it up and rescued the biker, meaning the supply box vanished off into the ether.

It pretty much all went downhill from there. My Lizard simply couldn't dislodge the Grunt HMG link from the backfield and ended up out of action with no way for my engineer to get to it.

This just left me running rubbish hail mary attempts to score a couple of points and it just never went anywhere. I was thoroughly beaten, 10-2.

Third game! Time for a classic game of Safe Area against hans_ze_hammer, who was running Morats. I played him at my one practice game for this tournament, before I'd settled on Bakunin. He'd totalled my Tunguska themed vanilla force then, so I wasn't hugely confident this time.

I went with the Taskmaster single combat group list again, because I was afraid that the TAG list put all the eggs in one basket and wouldn't have enough punch if the TAG went down.

My Prowler was left a little deployable present early on, leaving him pretty stuck.

The Taskmaster was hit with the usual smoke / MSV2 trick from the Morats, and had a bit of a lie down. They then all ran away and got out of line of sight, as they clearly really didn't fancy being smacked about by a Heavy Rocket Launcher.

Meanwhile, I was suffering from my lack of smoke compared to my opponent's good long range troops and smoke. My Lunokhod wasn't really going anywhere on the right flank.

My data tracker Taskmaster tried to push up field and got hit by a mix of shooting and hacking, leaving it unconscious and immobilised!

Meanwhile, my Spec Ops Engineer was shot up by a Krakot, and my Lunokhod took an Adhesive Launcher to the face.

Then Bit wandered over to sit next to Pi-Well...

And my Lieutenant took a Killer Hacking device to the face. This was not going well...

I managed to push back a little for honour, with my Reverend Healer shooting up a bunch of a link team, but that was it for me, losing 5-0.

Game 4: Firefight

I was now so tired I forgot to take photos, but I was up against maddogmiller's Caledonian force at Firefight. I took the Lizard list and did OK, at one point ambling too near a Hacker and getting Possessed, but aggressively reset and ran away, shooting up as much as possible. Picking off easy target cheerleaders resulted in a Lieutenant kill and Caledonia just couldn't recover. I regained some honour with a 7-1 win, putting poor maddogmiller into the wooden spoon position.

I picked up a Data Pack marker from the prize pool, which I was pretty happy with. I picked up a few learning points from the day:

• Consider getting to know one or two units (like your Lizard TAG) better, constantly include them, and vary your lists less.
• Be more aggressive - defensively sitting on the back foot doesn't score mission points.
• Think what your opponent's move is going to be next turn, not just where they're placed this turn.

Wayland events continue to be great fun, and I hope to make more of them in the future.