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.

New Year, Old Year

This year has not been a busy one on the painting front. With a lot of my time taken up with Empire LRP, wargaming has taken the back foot a little. Add to that my getting an excellent amount of Infinity gaming in (in the form of a League and several tournaments), and the painting has really suffered.

In all, I've only managed to get ten things painted this year - and two of those were these simple bits of Reaper Bones scatter terrain!

The clutter problem is really not sorted, and that's a major obstacle - getting to the painting desk is a major faff, so less is getting done.

Malifaux took a bit of a back seat, despite me finally getting Teddy painted. Still, I'll try and get a game or two in this year as well! Infinity will continue to be a big thing for me, and hopefully I'll get less scared of it and get some paint on some models sharpish.

There's still an Infinity tournament and the end of the HATE Infinity League to blog up, so I'll be pushing to get those blog posts written up and out as soon as I can.

I'm semi seriously considering the #painting365 challenge, where you try and get 365 miniatures painted in a year. It'll be an improvement on 10! In any event, the main focus will be on actually achieving the decluttering this year, rather than faffing about and not really making a dent in it!

HATE Infinite League: Bakunin vs. Hassassins

Back to the League, and my next scheduled opponent was Hassassins. "Can we play Rescue?" my opponent asked. "It's just I've not played it before and I'd like to try it."

Using some crates as civilians, because we didn't have enough civilian models to hand, I agreed, and learned very quickly that the reason my opponent had never got to play Rescue before is that Hassassins are really obscenely good at it, and no-one wanted the kicking.

There were swarms of Impersonation Markers crowding up my deployment zone, although at least the Lunokhod and it's Crazy Koalas scared the hell out of my opponent...

Desperate to avoid losing my entire backline in the first turn, I dropped my Sin Eater  to catch them the moment they came around the corner. My first learning experience - he should have been further back to be outside eight inches when they came around the corner.

Oh, and a whole bunch of the models on the other side of the field were actually Holoprojectors, but I wasn't really paying attention given the horror in my front lines.

One of the Mutts ran up the field and isolated my Killer Hacker

Then Bob from Accounting managed to wander all the way around to here without being discovered...

Aaand it's a Fiday! Who'd have thought it...

Short ranged shotgun blast devastate the area - taking out my engineer completely, knocking out Pi-Well and the Sin Eater. Then he planted a mine around the corner to paralyse my link team.

Before finally going and hiding behind Pi-Well from the retribution.

I managed to educate my oppnent about the joys of Minesweeper, stealing the Fiday's mines off him and leaving him trapped by his own, stolen mines. But in my dark amusement, I foolishly turned my back on the other Fiday who ran up and murdered the Lunokhod in revenge.

Meanwhile, Hassassin specialists retreived their civilians without much opposition.

The Moderator link team pushed up the table to try and retreive the situation, but despite causing some damage to the Hassassins at last, weren't quite able to make it as far as a civilian, leaving the score 7-2 to the Hassassins. (I'd picked up a classified somewhere along the way.)

Learning points:

• Don't leave people all in a line where shotguns can come around the corner
• Fiday are pretty fragile once you're through the Impersonation - the Clockmaker would have ironically Crit the first Fiday to death if I'd not used a Demo Charge as a close combat weapon giving myself an unnecessary penalty to hit
• Spread out the Line of Sight of your link team, using the Sixth Sense to counter wandering Fiday
• Put together a stronger, supported push up the field for Rescue, and don't let yourself get put on the back foot, as you'll stay stuck there

Wayland Games ITS Season 9 Launch Event

I . . . forgot that I hadn't blogged this when I started catching up on blog posts! In order to finish my account of the HATE Infinity League this year, you're getting another blast from the past today and two Infinity things in a week...

For the first day of Season 9 back in September, Wayland Games put on a small Infinity tournament. I pottered down to take part. Sadly, the Season 9 pack hadn't been released when it took place, so the local WarCor picked some of the Season 8 missions to make do.

There were an assortment of different tables at Wayland - some from the store and some brought by players. This one used a mix of Bandua, Customeeple and the Corvus Belli cardboard terrain.

This Yu Jing themed table was mostly Micro Art Studio buildings and walkways, nicely painted up, with some additional bits from elsewhere, like the Antenocitis Workshop Happy Panda Noodles. I suspect the truck is TT Combat.

This table was mostly Corvus Belli cardboard again, but with a little extra from TT Combat's range.

I don't know where the jungle and river terrain came from on this table, but the MDF seems to be mostly Spartan Scenery? You can't get it at the moment thanks to Spartan sadly ceasing trading, but I suspect that Warcrade will be making it available if they got the rights to it with everything else they bought.

First up, I was facing MeekRebel's Vanilla Nomads at Supplies. I mostly hunkered down behind a large building, with Knauf up on the roof to provide some ARO mischief.

A prone Zero ended up depressingly near a Krakot Renegade.

Someone made the mistake of wandering around where Knauf could see them and took a round.

Meanwhile, the Zero died to a chain rifle, but had AROed with "Place Mine", which made the Krakot sad.

Armand Le Muet was causing me grief running around the place.

And a Krakot managed to run down and take out my Intruder Lieutenant, although they were set on fire in the process.

A Moran ended up going on a rampage, taking out a whole bunch of my back field.

My Interventor decided they'd had enough and put up a Cybermask.

I attempted the shooting through smoke nonsense with an Intruder HMG, but Armand ducked sufficiently.

He then came down the stairs and got into a gunfight with my Intruder, but I was still toast. As you might have guessed from my complete failure to mention any of the Supply boxes, I never got anywhere near them, scraped my Classified, and took a 10-1 loss...

So, second game up on the port board with all the shipping containers. This was Comms Centre against a Neoterra force played by NiceGuyRosen. This is an early turn one shot, with the Lunokhod already aggressively up the board.

For the first time, I got my Intruder / Smoke combo working well, with a smoke grenade at the feet of the Intruder allowing him to smoothly turn an Uhlan and a Locust Hacker to paste, seriously affecting my opponent's firepower.

Unfortunately, I'd misjudged where I'd put my Reverend Healer, and an Auxbot set her on fire.

The Intruder remembered that standing out in the open was stupid when the smoke cleared, and fire from a link team was a little unlucky, letting him dodge back out of sight.

A Morlock got the lucky job of punching an Auxbot to death.

Just out of this shot on the top right was the other Auxilia, who were clearly going to come in for a late game objective grab.

Suicidal Morlocks were sent in to try and cause backfield chaos, but they were cut down.

The Wildcat Hacker flipped one of the Pan O objectives back again.

Meanwhile, the Auxilia managed to grab the Console, and my Alguacile Forward Observer couldn't quite make it. Still, I'd managed to scrape a win in a hard fought match, 7-4.

Final game, back to the first board again, for a game of Armoury. I was up against Aleph this time, played by SixthAndPowell. I tweaked my set up, learning some lessons from last time about the risks of being brutalised in the first turn.

Classic Intruder set up on the roof this time, far to the side to see past as much of the infinite height building as possible...

Meanwhile, Aleph brought a TAG. Which comes with MSV 2. So, no repeating the Intruder smoke trick here! I tried a Hellcat with an Adhesive Launcher, but they got cut down before they could make it.

A lot of hacking later . . . using a lot of Repeaters and oddness - the only person who could make it to the Armoury from my side was a Securitate HMG who'd been providing the one of the Inconvenient Repeater Hacking Fields most of the game.

In the end, it came down to the last roll - if I'd killed the surviving Aleph trooper in the Armoury, I'd have held it, but sadly, down went the Securitate, giving the game to Aleph 7-0.

While I came 7th in a tournament of 8 people, and only won one of my games, I had great fun at the event overall. I'd definitely recommend heading down to Wayland for their future Infinity events - the next is on 16 December 2017.