It’s been a bit over three weeks since I got all of these guys assembled, and I’ve made excellent progress on painting them.

They’re pretty close to being all done: I need to do a couple of finishing touches on the Healer (though I’m not happy with her and am half-inclined to strip the paint and start over), and I’ve got to wrap up the Iguana(s).  That’s it!

I got the chance to muddle through some how-to-play games with Chris S last week.  It’s not the full rules or anything (yes, the Mobile Brigada will have a flamethrower and a techno-rifle, but for this: he just has a gun), but enough to convey how the game plays, how the dice mechanic works, etc.

I like what I see so far… but I’m utterly boggled how anyone would or could play this in a tournament environment.  Given that A – my experience with “competitive” 40K and Fantasy is that you cannot assume your opponent will play his rules correctly (deliberately or accidentally) and B – (to make a wholly unfair generalization that I’m going to try to make as least awful as I can) competitive skirmish game players skew towards taking full advantage of every advantage than can wring out of a situation: Infinity’s expectation that you don’t even know what models your opponent has taken until they turn up just makes me tense up.

Like: there’s a whole “optical camo” thing where a model is invisible until they do something.  That’s facilitated by just not putting the model on the table and, when you decide to do something with them, put them down and say, “This guy’s been here, all along.”  In a vacuum, casually, that’s cool.  Hella cool, even.  With prizes or money on the line, though… We used to have a guy around for Fantasy who’d have Magic Standards on his units… that magically changed what they were from game to game to whatever was more appropriate against their opponent and situation.   There is no way that that guy’s list wouldn’t end up shifting from game to game, and no way his dudes wouldn’t uncloak in the most advantageous place, always.

What I’m saying is: I’m looking forward to actually playing Infinity (grown-up, all the rules Infinity, whenever it decides to come out), but I don’t think it’ll be what I play at NoVA this year. (Which is a shame, ’cause I’m still trying to figure out what that’s going to be.)