My local game store, The Hobby Kingdom, has run a Christmas Paint Exchange every year for about the last 6-7 years. I started the first one when I was playing Warmachine, and took the tradition with me when I joined the Infinity group in 2014. The basic idea is that each participant drops off an unpainted miniature, which is then handed off to a random person to paint for them. The mini can be anything, but people tend to drop off mercenaries, civilians, and support models as it’s less painful when those types of ancillary models don’t perfectly match your army’s paint scheme.

This past year, I received my random model, and it turned out to be a civilian belonging to local feline tattoo artist Tom, whom you may recognize as the previous recipient of camels and knights and stacking elephants in addition to probably half a dozen small projects that weren’t worth posting to the blog. In other words, I am already way too good to Tom, and he absolutely doesn’t deserve any more of my beneficence. So when I saw the boring-ass model he contributed for me to paint…

…I immediately said “screw that” and started pondering what else I could do for him. Technically I already have a few of his other models that I’ve pledged to convert or paint for him, but even those weren’t really piquing my interest.

So, **** it.

I sculpted him a Boba Fett.

As you do.

I’m about to start up an intro league for Infinity at my store, and I wanted to provide the new players some sort of cheat sheet to help them keep track of various items they’ll be running into frequently during their first few games. Several rules references have been put together by various individuals, but all of them seem to be aimed at experienced players and as such have a lot of information that I don’t want to burden people with right out of the gate.

As is my way, when I found that something I wanted didn’t exist, I shrugged and made it myself. My reference sheet explains how to read unit profiles and weapon profiles, how to spend orders, and has a list of fairly common skills that might come up during a demo game.

It’s definitely aimed at completely new players– existing players will find it all a bit redundant and obvious. ?

• Infinity Quick Reference (Pages 1 & 2) [PDF, 3mb]

I’ve added the sheet to my Infinity Tools page in the top menu. Feel free to download and print some copies If it looks like the information might be useful for you. 🙂

March 23rd Update:

I just realized that I never posted the second reference sheet (pages 3 and 4) that I made to support weeks 2 and 3 of my boot camp, covering common weapons, camouflage, and specialists. So, here’s that part:

• Infinity Quick Reference (Pages 3 & 4) [PDF, 3mb]

-Spud

I ran an Infinity league at my local store this past summer. An ongoing narrative ran through the five weeks of missions, and that narrative frequently called for battles to take place in fairly specific locations that are difficult to represent with the terrain my store had on-hand. I didn’t want the players to have to play these missions with ill-fitting boards, so in the month leading up to the league, I spent some time creating new terrain pieces to match the environments I was planning to send them into. You’ve already seen one result of this effort in the form of the sewer board. A second one– a modular system of space station walls– was built enough to be played on during the league, but I never finished sprucing it up because I didn’t like how tedious it was to assemble each time we used it. (I may revisit that bucket of components at some point in the future, though).

The third board I built took the most work, but ended up being my absolute favourite. The inciting incident for the entire campaign was an alien attack on a Yu Jing cargo transport over Paradiso, and I wanted an actual ship for the players to play on. I traditionally build my Infinity terrain out of hand-cut foamcore construction with hand-cut craft foam detailing; this technique yields great-looking terrain that is extremely durable, but it takes quite a long time to build due to all of the precise manual cutting. I only had two weeks and change to build my spacecraft, though, so I had to figure out some shortcuts that would let me do more construction than normal in the time I had available.

I ran an Infinity league this past summer at my store, and as I was prepping one of the weeks, I realized that the story I was writing really demanded that a mission or two take place in a sewer.

This was a problem, seeing how my store does not have sewer terrain. However, this was not a large problem, because… come on. It’s freaking sewers, people.

Three short blasts of the Terrain Party Horn summoned my army to my side, and we proceeded to churn out our smelly battlefield in the span of an afternoon.

Though the Space Mounties have been fighting valiantly to protect their country’s interests across the galaxy, they have found themselves outflanked by superior enemy firepower and discourteous sneakiness. In the face of this pressure, the NeoCanadian Courtesy Division has called in for the transfer of its most elite troops to reinforce the Canadian line.

Part 1: Arctic Space Ninja

The first to arrive was a representative of the deadliest regiment NeoCanada can muster: the Ijurujuq, an elite Inuit stealth corps that mercily stalk the snowbound lands of Space Nunavut.

The Inuit forces would be represented on the field by the Swiss Guard, also known as “the deadliest model in PanOceania”. The NeoTerra starter I picked up contained a Swiss Guard model that I’ve never liked, awkwardly one-handing a missile launcher while pointlessly brandishing a knife. Once I had the model in my hands, though, I realized that the torso and legs of this model are absolutely gorgeous in their design, detailing, and posing, and it was really only the arms that had always made me dislike the model. This ended up working perfectly– I had planned to perform a weapon swap anyway, so if I just sculpted him a new set of arms I could very easily jettison everything I didn’t like about the model and be left with an utterly badass pile of Arctic pewter and putty. 🙂

I first published my Classified Objectives deck in march, and the response since then has been fantastic. I was recently approached by the French Infinity community at Bureau-Aegis to produce a translation of the cards, which I was happy to help with as I get very few opportunities to speak en Français, and it’s fun when the opportunity arises. 🙂

While working on the translation project, I made some adjustments to the card template to add features that had been requested by both the English and French communities:

1. Enlarged objective text – it turns out I was wasting a lot of real estate in the title bar; shrinking that down gave me enough space to increase the objective text by two font sizes:

2. Card backs in multiple colours – so that several players at the same table can tell their decks apart:

3. Professionally-printed copies – thanks to an awesome site called PrinterStudio.com that E-Warden directed me to; I uploaded the images to their service and made the designs available for anyone to buy. I picked up enough copies for my store to use and the quality’s pretty good– comparable to a standard deck of playing cards (though a bit thinner than, say, a Magic or other CCG card).

4. English and French versions of all of the above – thanks to the awesome translation work of Anaris and his friends from the Bureau-Aegis community!

All of the above combine together to result in 20 (!) printable PDF versions of the deck and 10 purchasable versions, all of which are available on a new Infinity Tools page linked in the top menu, which also contains a link to the Hacking Helper, and will house anything else I make in the future.

And yes, there will be more. Stay tuned. 🙂

-Spud