Tinbot III Infinity Tournament

 

At the start of the month I headed up to Norwich to play in the "Tinbot" tournament that was running there. I headed up the night before to avoid an early start and spent some time resorting my token box having managed to drop it some months ago and not taken the time to fix it.

I was running vanilla Combined Army with one 10 model list intended for Supremacy, and then the list I'd run a practice game with for the other two missions.

Game 1: Supremacy

For the first round, I drew against Copper, a very skilled Combined Army player. I had the first turn, but my Speculo Killer got hemmed in by a Libertos Minelayer, and my Q drone was wildly ineffective.

Dukash and Sheskiin managed to flank my Rindak so he couldn't avoid getting shot in the back, and I was definitely ending up on the back foot.

My Rasyat dropped onto the board edge and sadly was broadly ineffective and ended up failing to take out the Q drone and being taken out in return. I'd spent quite a few orders that hadn't turned into the loss of a huge number of orders for Copper, although I did manage to complete my classified.

The Charontid pushed up the vain hope of scoring some points, getting shot up by the Q drone on the way as his plasma rifle was thoroughly outranged, but I was running out of units and was getting out manoeuvred. 

Without much further opposition, Copper neatly pushed plenty of buttons, set up defensive positions and was able to resist my quite weak turn 3 push to solidly secure the game 10-1.

Game 2

Next up was Capture and Protect, against solomon0997, a returning player from N3 who was running Yu Jing. I won the Lieutenant roll and chose deployment to push to get the second turn.

In the first turn, I was showered with Tiger Soldiers, but fortunately a couple of failed Combat Jump rolls meant that only one got close to the beacon, and wasn't quite able to make it into base contact.

In return, I decided to try and push to get Dukash onto the beacon to score some first turn points. Sadly, while he fought most of the way up, he bit off a little more than he could chew and fell on the last order that would have secured him the box.

My opponent then tried to push onto the beacon with his Hac Tao. Sadly, as my opponent was still getting the hang of the rules after a long break, the game was far enough behind that the TO curtailed his second turn so I'd have a turn as well. These things happen sometimes - my opponent was lovely and not doing any intentional mischief, just needing a little too long to work out what to do at this point.

I then engaged in some relatively swift on table violence - a Daturazi cleared a Ninja, threw a smoke to block a Reaction Remote, and then Sheskiin moved up the field. She eliminated a couple of Shaolin, cleared the reaction remote when she got into a good range, and moved up to capture the console to give me the win for this game.

Game 3

For the third game, I was delighted to be paired against my buddy Jarval, the reason I started coming to Norwich events. The final mission was Unmasking, and he was running Kosmoflot.

Having trouble clearing my Q Drone, Jarval resorted to smoke grenades to get up the table, and scored an early decoy before pulling back to not get gunned down.

Agent Dukash then redeemed his appalling run of luck in the games I've run him in so far as he walked out, took out a Volkolak ARO piece, one of the bears, and a Kosmosoldat. It was an absolutely brutal turn that I think left Jarval a little shell shocked!

He returned the favour by air dropping a werewolf onto me. It wasn't quite as destructive, but I lost a chunk of my backline to an angry werewolf.

I then scored a decoy by berserking a Daturazi into it, but Margot and the second bear did away with the Daturazi before it could do any more damage.

My Libertos tried to clear the other decoy and got blinded. Oh deary me.

It was time for Sheskiin to do her thing... She moved up the field, finding an angle to pick off Margot before she could cause any more trouble.

She then worked her way up, dodged around a corner, and engaged the designated target. The poor civilian had no chance and was eaten by this awful alien, before she charged into the bear to pin it down and stop it causing too much damage.

Duroc worked his way around to get smoke down onto the Q drone, but it sadly left not quite enough orders for Kosmoflot to score back the boxes they needed, and the game ended with a Combined victory, 8-4.

It was a great event, held in a school cafeteria that had been booked out for the Saturday. I finished 4th out of 10 players, and would absolutely recommend them to anyone who plays Infinity who can reasonably travel to Norwich. I sadly can't make their next one, but intend to make it up again in the future when time allows.