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.

War of the Worlds V at "ibuywargames"

So, on Saturday I headed down to Woking with a whole bunch of the Infinity players from HATE to do some of this ITS tournament stuff. Unfortunately, a booking mix up meant that the tournament had to relocate from the local Conservative Club to the ibuywargames store, but everyone was very accomodating and it went off without any further hitches.

I was running Corregidor for the first time ever. In the end, I only ever used one of the two lists, which basically consisted of a full Senor Massacre Jaguar link, my always loved Lunokhod, a smattering of specialists and a Haris link of Wildcats with a Spitfire.

First up was Transmission Matrix against generic Nomads. My plan had always been to run a simple Alguacile Hacker to do some cheap annoying AROs against Hackers until she died, while my opponent was running Zoe and Pi-Well and two Interventors. After one careless move of Pi-Well in range of a repeater wasted a co-ordinated order as the plan was urgently changed to "reset", my Hacker was squished like a bug.

The smoke or eclipse options of the Jaguar link was excellent, and meant I could selectively decide whether I was going to keep the board open for my Intruder, or shut it down for my opponent's. My Intruder had an excellent moment himself when a Vertigo Zond landed on the ground near the roof he was hiding on, and he destroyed it with a speculative fire grenade. I could just imagine, as the model was prone, the veteran troop sighing, casually lobbing a grenade over the wall, and nodding at a job well done at the sound of a breaking remote...

Sadly, my opponent had muddled up "explosive" ammunition and blast templates, so his Tsyklon with Feuerbach was a teensy bit better than it actually is, but it seemed like an honest mistake. I never managed to catch up with him after lunch to let him know once I realised. In my game, however, it managed not to change anything due to my Jaguar link's tendency to not roll under an 18 for armour saves. In the end, Senor Massacre held the centre objective in close combat with a rival Jaguar to squeak me a 5-4 win despite almost everyone of my models being dead.

After a delicious lunch at the Korean Restaurant next door we headed back to play Hunting Party. This is a new mission where you're trying to immobilise specialists and enemy Lieutenants, and your more elite troops all get issued with Adhesive Launchers. I was up against one of the other HATE residents, who was running Yu Jing.

I decided to start the exercise by dropping a Hellcat with Adhesive Launcher right behind his Lieutenant. Sadly, I couldn't thread the needle sufficiently to be completely undetected, and some warnings meant enough models turned around that I'd only have one shot at gluing the Lieutenant. The Hellcat missed and was reduced to a fine red smear by a lot of angry guns.

My Alguacile made it to one of the antennas, but couldn't activate it for any points. Meanwhile, my Lunokhod reduced a hacker to a smouldering pile of ash.

Senor Massacre and friends made it up the field, but when the time came for the final run at the Lieutenant, he couldn't quite land his E/M grenade and was instead glued in place. A mistake in the placement of my Lieutenant meant a Tiger Soldier was able to drop down and glue her in the back. This left me with a thorough 8-0 kicking.

Battle three was Comms Centre against Yu Jing. Nine antennae to flip to your side, with the aim of getting more than your opponent -while taking out your opponents specialists and designated target, preferably with your "data tracker". My Wildcat Haris did a lot of work here as the Spitfire "data tracker" gunned down the designated target and anyone else foolish enough to stick their heads out for a good while.

My Hellcat managed to stuff his landing this time and was shot to pieces after landing in the open near way too many people...

The careless placing of a couple of specialists meant my opponent was in the lead with specialists, and I was in real trouble...

An Oniwaban materialising in my backfield and murdering my engineer did not help the situation - but I was able to set him on fire before he could kill my designated target (who you can see in the corner here).

With all my specialists dead, I resorted to brute violence and killed enough of his models to put him into retreat, preventing him from pressing any more of those pesky console buttons to take the lead, leaving us tied at 5-5.

In the end, I ended up 13th out of 20. I won some Nomad transfers I've been wanting to pick up for a while, and also some more Antenocitis Workshop brass etch, because you can never have enough...

I'd definitely recommend the ibuywargames tournaments to anyone who plays Infinity. They're good fun, and more welcoming than you might expect. While people are competitive, its in a friendly way, and not in a way that would leave you with a feel bad experience. Hopefully I'll see some of my readers at the Totally Crit Open X2 this coming weekend...