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.