Wayland January Infinity Tournament

Captain_Rose is organising monthly Infinity tournaments down at Wayland Games Centre. January was Cryogenics, The Armory and Frontline. Due to the hobby room being too disorganised, I couldn't find one of my White Company cases, which meant I ended up taking my Shasvastii.

First up was Cryogenics, and I was playing Elgriffo who was running Bakunin. His list consisted of a chunky Riot Grrl core link and then a bunch of support. I'd taken a Malignos who was chilling out in hiding near one of the objectives, and he got a shot at Zoe when she walked too close. He then got isolated, smoked and killed by a Morlock, but I was happy he took up a bunch of orders to do so.

That Morlock was my absolute nemesis as it went on a huge killing spree through my backlines, really wrecking face.

My Caliban with a Spitfire came across, managed to kill Zoe and Pi-Well, then on to the Reverend Moira, ending the game on three wounds and holding down a zone for me.

There was no way I was going to dislodge a whole Riot Grrl link, but my Mentor was able to slip past them to get within eight inches of the other HVT to squeak a 7-6 victory. My opponent had made the wrong call about whether to Delay or Discover on one crucial order, and if that had gone the other way, I think he'd have held out to a draw!

Game 2 was The Armory, and I was up against Vanilla Combined Army, being run by geomatrix. His first game had run a bit long so we started a little late, but we managed to get a full three turns in. I'd brought the Minelayer Speculo, and was able to drop a mine down next to a big line of models who'd thought they were well out of sight behind a building that was on the far side of the Armory to me. He ended up needing to spend quite a few orders getting the mine cleared on his first turn.

The mine clearance had left his Charontid Lieutenant relatively close to my Speculo, who managed to get across and chop him in half at the expense of getting shot down themselves. But this left his force really lacking in hit pieces.

With second turn, it was much easier for me to sneak in models to score controlling the Armory, and it ended up being a 7-2 win for me. This meant I was two games up and heading to play the final mission with a very short break due to our late start.

I was facing Reyzah, who had also decided to run Shasvastii. Things did not start well with a Taigha managing to make a run across the table and take out my Mentor Lieutenant in the first turn. Things continued in a similarly tough light, with me constantly short on orders and unable to get much out of my deployment zone, facing a Haiduk, Q-Drone and Noctifer Missile Launcher ARO team.

My Malignos also failed to do the job as a Seed Soldier Paramedic claiming my HVT took most of my third turn orders to put down. While I managed to scrape the final score to lose 4-3, with 125 points left on the board to Reyzah's 225, I was never going to tip the points over to a win.

All in all, I had three really fun games. It was a pretty laid back affair with eight players. Some of the Wayland Infinity terrain is a bit scrappy after years of play, but it was still functional. I'll definitely go again when I'm next free.

I've been trying to win more games than I lose for a while now, and for the first time after a tournament, I'm sitting on an ELO score over the starting 1,000 while on an exact 50% win rate.

I'm not confident I'll stay with this good a record with the tough opponents I expect to see at St Albans Smackdown in February, but I wanted to mark the milestone and achievement, because I'm really proud of it.