Two different instances of Infinity

 

I was lucky enough to spend a couple of afternoons playing Infinity in the past week. A couple of folks were keen to get a demo of Infinity, and we arranged to meet at The Dice Cup. I've also signed up for a campaign down in London with HATE as I can get games in online using Tabletop Simulator, and I had my first campaign game.

I'm deeply grateful to Yashar who offered some excellent advice for structuring some demo games. One player was interested in JSA, and the other Bakunin. We ran a first skirmish with three Keisotsu against three Moderators. We then added a Daiyokai and a Penitent Observant, along with the Lieutenant rules. Finally, we wrote two 150 point lists to add a few more rules in and had a small three turn game.

Everyone seemed to have a great time, and I'm hoping we'll get more games in shortly.

Meanwhile, HATE is holding a new narrative campaign, and I've signed up to play with my Shasvastii. I'm not in London as much, but Tabletop Simulator exists. For the first round, I got paired with Yashar for a mission of "Area of Interest", one of the latest season of ITS missions. Yashar returned with their beloved MRRF.

I ended up losing 6-3. I learned to fear the Vystrel, a new defensive piece in Ariadna. I also learned a whole bunch about the challenges of diagonal deployments and how much longer ranges are because of them. I'm incredibly stoked about the new season as a result and my brain is now wanting to play more games to learn more about how these new missions play.

Planning some actual miniature hobby

 

With the realisation that I'd been too busy to use up my holiday allowance this year, I have the week off. The eBay clear out continues. The unpacking continues. I've got two games of Infinity booked, so we may see a battle report of some kind if I remember to take enough pictures...

But I also really wanted to start getting into getting some miniature assembly done. First up on my to do list is a Halfling Blood Bowl team. With the new edition out, I'm sure there will be some folk interested in getting some games in.

More experienced players of Blood Bowl may be asking where on earth the Treemen are in this picture. Well, I haven't bought any yet! The new rulebook and the team's Treemen will be the reward for getting the rest of the team assembled and ready for paint. I'm not daft enough to try and play Blood Bowl with a Halfling team without any Treemen...

I also could really do with getting my Dungeons and Lasers set off sprue and into a storage box. They're pre-painted, so it's not really an "assembly" job, but it's something that will take time.

As a potential bonus, I found this box of assorted Frostgrave sprues. I may be joining a Pathfinder campaign in the new year, so knocking up an assortment of generic baddies could be a fun little side project.

Now, where are my clippers?

The near meditative practice of having a clear out

As I packed up this week's eBay sales to head out to their new owners, I found it becoming strangely restful. There was a certain preciseness to the routine of packing the item, taping up the box and carefully affixing the postage label.

This whole thing was probably reinforced by the rain drumming on the conservatory, and my impulsive decision to re-listen to Pablo Honey all the way through. The soundtrack to my adolescence's kitchen chores was bound to put me into some kind of mood.

...

Of course, this whole thing has been thrown out of kilter by my getting distracted part way through writing this, unpacking a box of rugs, then finding a key box of scenery, my Frostgrave warband, my currently assembled Malifaux and most importantly, my Infinity token box.

I'm writing this on Sunday night to be scheduled for Monday evening, and currently my brain is in full excited "we're back in business" mode while it really needs to be drinking a nice mug of mint tea, chilling out and getting ready for bed.

And my mind drifts back to Pablo Honey and "You do it to yourself, you do, and that's what really hurts..."

Clear out first steps

 
So, I've finally gotten started on my clear out on eBay. There's a pretty eclectic mix of things for sale, and a pretty good reason for the eclecticism. I have a lot of stuff to get rid of, and this round of listing represents some easy wins. I had a box for eBay sales, and as I was unpacking, if I found something I wanted rid of, it went in the box.

There's some trends to this batch, too. First up are souvenir items I'm either not using any more or have never really used - the bags and the art print. There's then a bunch of stuff for out of production games - cards, dice and so on - that someone might have a use for, but if they don't sell they're either going in the recycling or the Big Bucket of Dice. There's a Magic the Gathering playmat from when I was trying that out in 2015, and then a handful of Infinity figures I have duplicates of because I needed two of some things for the number of armies I have.

In short, there's nothing here that's hard to deal with - I won't be mad if it sells for a small amount, and I don't have emotional investment in it. The only work was taking the photographs and writing the listings. The next box of stuff is more of a muddle, and may take me a little more work to go through...

Do feel free to have a nose through my eBay listings if you read this soon enough. You're not just getting something that will make you happy, you're helping make me happy passing on things I'm no longer using...

Infinity October 2025 Rules Update and Me

Corvus Belli have dropped two massive updates for Infinity this month. They've returned several factions that hadn't been given rules this edition into play, updated a lot of army lists to get some better balance, and updated some rules to make things clearer or less unbalanced to play against.

On top of this, there's a new tournament mission pack, where all the old missions have been replaced (only the most recent three were kept), and a bunch of new ones added. As someone who's taken a few months off the game, I'm feeling a little bit like the meme from Community where the guy walks in to chaos having just gone to fetch the pizzas.

OK, White Company is probably the easiest here. "Officially" the faction had no changes, but a few profiles they borrow from other factions got considerable glow ups - Blockers, in particular have moved from something I only took to see what they could do, to likely a regular inclusion in lists. Taowu gained a Chain of Command profile, and there were a couple of other light adjustments. I might even try the Anaconda at some point.

My Shasvastii got caught in the blast as the vanilla Combined Army took a well deserved balance adjustment to Ikadrons. Their points moving to 11 and losing Flash Pulses is entirely fair, but they were helping prop up the quite weak Shasvastii. Some of the Shasvastii characters got some changes or some new profiles. Victor Messer is definitely better, and the Jayth / Gwailo fireteam gained a keyword to make getting the link bonus easier.

Combined Army, meanwhile, got a bit more of a thorough overhaul. Several Shasvastii and Next Wave profiles got banished to their own factions, cheap order profiles became a little harder to come by, and a few of the regularly taken big scary pieces got a bit of a rework that I think actually makes them a little better overall.

In the land of my other NA2 factions, Druze changes were negligible, Ikari gained a Tohaa profile (the Kiiutan Imposter), and Dahshat similarly only got a couple of minor profile changes due to them being shared with other factions.

In the land of Nomads, the biggest change is officially NA2 - Star Co, the mixed Nomad mercenary company, returned. They're fine. There's basically no changes or they'd mess up the Nomad balance. Meanwhile Nomads got basically no changes. A couple of new profiles that were lacking a bit of oomph got some slight changes, but that was about it.

The changes don't affect me a huge amount. I am loving them, though. In a lot of my factions I've got a couple of new or reworked profiles to play around with and see how they change how the faction works. That said, I'm likely to start pretty conservatively with some simple Direct Action missions and some models I mostly know as I try and remind myself how to play...

Dolmenwood Review

 

My Dolmenwood Kickstarter arrived last week, and I've taken some time to go through it and write a few thoughts on it. I originally planned to write this on Sunday evening. At about 7pm I sat down to have a quick scan through the Player's Book . . . and then it was bedtime.

I'm glad I didn't write the review on Sunday evening, because as I read through, and talked to a few of my friends over social media, I picked up a few nuances my initial scan read had missed.

Dolmenwood is both a game and a setting. The game is in the style of early D&D, with nine classes and six "kindreds". Attacks and skills seem to be quite a shallow progression, while hit points start very low with a dice per level and low modifiers so  the increase feels a lot steeper. I haven't had time to learn the spells yet, so I'm not sure how much they increase the power level.

The setting is a fantasy medieval realm, with a mix of mortals and fairies. As you may pick up from the name, the majority of the published setting is set in a large wood. It's ruled over by mortal nobles, has more civilised and more dangerous areas, has fairies, witches and monsters.

The game runs off three books - a Player's Book, a Monster Book, and the Campaign Book. The Player Book has all the player facing rules, the Monster Book does precisely what you'd expect, and the Campaign Book includes the GM guides, a detailed world guide including locations, NPCs and factions. I cannot emphasise enough how massive the Campaign Book is. It's more than twice the size of the player's book. I also got a book of maps with a mix of maps that are of use to the GM, and a bunch you can show to the players.

My Kickstarter Pledge also included four pre-written adventures. At least some of these have been previously published for Old School Essentials and D&D 5e. I had a scan through Winter's Daughter, which was a good starting adventure that gave a good indicator of how you might want to organise your own adventure if you were making your own.

It's an excellent adventure that's got a big "fairy tale" vibe. It's dripping with character and style. It feels very accessible and like a good starter.

I also got a canvas map designed to be player facing, and two canvas referee maps with all the secret information you need. I am unsure why I got two referee maps - it was in my pledge manager automatically at my pledge level.

The map is huge, and shows the real depth of Dolmenwood. It can be played as a hex crawl exploration, and this is where it's real "unique selling point" is. Every single hex has a write up in the campaign guide (though obviously, I've not read every single one, so I don't know what the balance of "places of interest" to "featureless swamp" there is. But there seems to be quite a lot there.

I also picked up the Adventuring Party box with a bunch of miniatures, because I am a sucker.

There's eleven miniatures in the set, with a mix of the different classes and kindreds. There's a bit of a shortage of goat people, short moss people and little bat people miniatures, so it's particularly useful for those.

The dice and dice bag fills me with joy. The highest number on each dice have little mushroom symbols on. They include 3D6 so you can roll your starting stats. The dice bag has some lovely embroidery on, and feels like a much nicer material and better quality than the Critical Role dice bag I got a while back.

Dolmenwood is selling you a dream. It has the potential set up for a massive long running campaign with your friends, in person, with beautiful in person props and miniatures. It recommends you run with six characters, whether that's six players, or having retainers and hirelings to make up numbers.

But the recommendation of numbers alone makes me want to run the "perfect" Dolmenwood game with six players - a sandbox where it's based off the goals the players come up with rather than a fixed plot arc or specific threat for them to try and defeat.

I don't have a local tabletop group yet, and you'd not want to jump straight into a massive commitment of a campaign like this. You'd want to build up to it.

But the dream is there. 

Flesh and Blood Pre-release, and thoughts on pacing

 

On Friday evening I headed down to The Dice Cup for the Flesh and Blood "Super Slam" pre-release. The new set has a bit of a death match / wrestling theme, and two of the four heroes are the class I play - Guardian.

I had a bunch of fun, winning two out of my three games, and got a bunch of cards I'll be able to use later. However, it turned out that sorting these cards out, so I can return the cards I don't need to the store "commons" box next week, took up a good chunk of my hobby time this weekend.

I got as far as "getting the box of stuff for eBay" out in order to take photographs and get started, but once I'd finished sorting household tasks, it was late Sunday and I stood a real risk of wrecking my work week trying to get it done.

While circumstances conspired to cause there to be a few more household tasks than usual, I should have been able to foresee the time that sorting cards would take up, and maybe not have decided that Sunday would be a great time to cook a roast rather than a stir fry.

So it's an important reminder that while you might at first thing that things beyond your control are impacting your hobby time, there's still plenty of stuff that you do control, and choices you make that get in the way of you having more time for your hobby.

The hobby of moving boxes around

 

My weekend was pretty caught up with washing up and laundry, which is not really the stuff of hobby blogs. But there's a reason why my time was spent on house stuff rather than fun stuff.

The house move is nearly done. I've been engaging in what a recent Knights of Dice YouTube video kind of referred to as "the hobby of moving boxes around". We still need to sell the flat, and the new house is full of boxes that need sorting and surplus stuff selling, but soon, soon, we'll only be heading down to London for work rather than for work and working on getting the flat ready for sale.

Still, I did manage to fit in a trip down to Bad Moon Café to play some Flesh and Blood the last time I was down. It remains my hobby sanity lifeline, but remains challenging to photograph. So have this painted junction box from South London instead...

Some potential projects

The real world continues to inconveniently time consuming, and impeding my ability to spend all my time on random hobby projects. The tedious and complicated way our house move is happening continues to soak up vast amounts of time, but the little windows of delight in our new home show that it will all be worth it in the end.

I am actively champing at the bit to get to some hobby projects. It goes without saying Infinity is high on the list - that hasn't changed. But what else is catching my eye?

There's a pretty big Underworlds scene up here, and I do have a couple of warbands painted already. I do need to find the new edition cards I have somewhere. The matter is slightly complicated by my not having the current edition box for boards and tokens and whatever, and budget currently precludes fixing that.

But it seems likely I should be able to get a few games in once I've found the decks, and if I have fun with that, I'll look to get the latest set.

Quite a few people are also playing Age of Sigmar Spearhead. For this, I do have a whole Spearhead in the Skaventide box - but it's unassembled and unpainted. That's a slightly more chunky hobby project than "find a few things", but I do at least already own everything I need to do that. I've got both of the Spearhead scenery and board sets, too.

I'm getting quite excited by Heresy, as lots of other people are. A little audit of kits has shown that bits and pieces of other abandoned projects comes to about 800 points or so, but is heavily lacking in troops. One box of Heresy Tactical Marines would get me to a small playable force at about 1,000 points or so.

But I have no finished models! This feels like a good "get a couple out, get them done, then paint another kit" type project. If and when I've gotten everything else done and ready, I can grab the tactical box as my reward.

 

I am wavering on Old World, readers. While I have a bunch of Bretonnian kits, what is bringing me joy is the idea of Empire of Man. But I am definitely not in a place to be buying a huge new army.

Conveniently for me, the TSN Arena has put together some rules for playing The Old World at 500 points. This seems eminently more achievable as a goal for the Bretonnians, and perhaps once that's done, I can switch my focus to Empire?

What do you know, Malifaux is releasing a new edition! I was just getting into the local scene as part of a Slow Grow campaign when Covid hit - my last game got cancelled right as lockdown hit for the first time.

I haven't found anyone playing locally, but there is a pretty thriving national scene. I can't see it being too challenging to get some paint on my crew, grab the new cards once they come out, and sign up to a small event.

And finally, the low bar. This bit of resin from Fenris Games is intended for my photography set up. Once I find it, cleaning it, undercoating it, and painting it up with some simple techniques will be a pretty simple win to get something done.

These are a whole lot of projects. My current thinking is very much based around trying to set aside the time to get one pretty hefty hobby project done a month. I definitely have too much on in September, but I'm looking thoughtfully at October or November for being able to maybe start doing something that isn't unpacking boxes, or sorting things to be sold on eBay.

Having the space, both physically and metaphorically, is the reason we moved. I'm looking forward to being through the work that gets us there.