It seems the next step in my miniature gaming journey is to return to my very first step: Infinity. Years ago, when I first considered playing miniature wargames, I found Infinity and fell in love with the lore, setting, and idea of the game. I even went as far as to get a demo at my local store—only to find out the local group was basically dead. From there, I signed up for a 40k League and found my local club, Victory Gamers, and I haven’t regretted it since.

The funny part is, though… I never really stopped wanting to play Infinity. I convinced myself it’s too complicated for a person like me who hops games so often, or that I hated building metal models so I wouldn’t enjoy the hobby aspect. My recent foray into Warhammer 30,000 convinced me that stat lines and special rules really aren’t that bad once you play them enough. My recent foray into moderns convinced me I want a highly lethal, tactical skirmish game where every decision matters.

Put those together and the only remaining issue is the metal models. Well, I got over it. In my initial foray, years ago, I pinned every arm and ensured every miniature was super secure. That was tedious and for a new hobbyist, genuinely terrible to deal with. When I moved over to Games Workshop plastics, I vowed never to look back.

Thankfully, I know better now. I didn’t pin a single model, but I did use the tissue trick here and there. Rip a small piece of tissue paper, put it onto the joint with the super glue, then press and hold the parts together. This allowed me to conquer every difficult or load bearing connection point. I’ve successfully dropped one or two of my minis (Asawira, Ragik) without them breaking into fifty pieces. I even dropped my Sunduqbut, which is made of too many pieces, and it didn’t break. Maybe I’m lucky, but I feel a lot more confident now.

The challenge I didn’t expect is how much effort I put into each mini for what is, ultimately, somewhat frustrating results. I decided I would paint them the traditional way: layer, wash, highlight, edge highlight. This has resulted in good minis, but not great minis. In fact, I’m about halfway through my Haqqislamic forces and I decided to give in and just bust out the airbrush to get cleaner, better highlighted greens.

I haven’t finished any of those models yet, but I suspect they’ll look considerably better and paint much faster.

Cool, so we got over the nonsense about rules and building minis. What about lore?

I still love it.

Haqqislam is a society founded on the best aspects of Islam as a faith, pivoted toward the “Search for knowledge.” The Hassassins, the sectorial (sub-faction) I’m aiming to play, are a league of assassins dedicated to killing or destroying anyone or anything that will harm mankind’s pursuit of progress and greater understanding of the universe. They act from the shadows to ensure that mankind will continue to advance. They don’t do this for Haqqislam alone. They act to better all of mankind.

They follow the Old Man of the Mountain, a mysterious figure who pulls the strings from behind the scenes. No one knows anything about him, but every Hassassin follows him and will follow whatever orders come from him.

You see the problem, right?

They’re a society dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge and the advancement of science… who follow an unknowable force of mysterious origin and mysterious purposes. The Old Man of the Mountain could be ALEPH (the AI helping mankind to even exist as a galaxy spanning set of empires) or even nothing at all. It could be various forces manipulating each other. No one knows, but the irony is a fun bit of storytelling.

I’ve read through the RPG lore for Haqqislam and I’ve really enjoyed the process of getting myself hyped up to play. The only issue I’ve had is my desire to paint to a high quality, which has been satisfying, but slow going. It’s starting to put a damper on my hype as I’ve sat on minis for two weeks now. I’ll likely speed up the rest of the force considerably, and when I inevitably buy into Yu Jing, I’ll plan to speed paint them from the start to avoid this issue altogether.

After I finish painting my initial batch of models, I’ll start in on the terrain. I have a full board printed out, but I’m continuing to print the needed scatter terrain to occupy roads, sidewalks, etc. One issue I’ve noticed is that any mat with a road is somewhat painful in the game. You want taller buildings toward the center as a general rule, so people can’t just deploy on top of them and they can help prevent full-board line of sight. Roads on mats tend to cross the center, which makes this hard to do.

As you can see on my board above, the amount of terrain is nearing good, but the “roads” being so large causes a lot of problems. I’ll likely solve this by simply buying a new mat, but finding ones that work well with this issue in mind is hard. I could just buy generic mats without roads, but those feel dissatisfying. Times like this, I consider building a full 4×4 board… then remember that it’s a time consuming, expensive process that leads to a product which looks great, is hard to move, and is clunky to store. Not great.

I’ll continue to mull it over. As of right now I have three boards planned and two mats solidly selected (all from Deepcut Studios). The boards are:

1. Haqqislam City – I’ll use the Haqqislam mat from Deepcut Studios and layer a bunch of scifi middle eastern terrain on top. I have plans to take an existing set and cut it up/reshape it to fit the theme a little better. Expect lots of greenery and a lot of work.

2. Yu Jing Snowy Outpost – Snowy themed board with generic outpost style terrain. Will see if I can come up with a way to brand things and theme it closer to being a place owned by Yu Ching, but if I keep it generic it should work well for other scifi settings. We’ll see on that front.

3. Generic Cityscape – This is the one I’m starting with. I plan to do a cyberpunk cityscape with some Asian themed buildings thrown in for additional flavor. Not much to write home about here, but I think it’ll look cool and be a fun excuse to produce a board with lots of colors.

In contrast to how I approached Horus Heresy earlier this Summer, I’ve pretty much planned to go “All in” with Infinity. The first board is already printed, but I’ll rethink the other two boards as I go. Per minimum I’ll have around 30 Haqqislam models and the cityscape board. I believe I’ll get through making the Haqqislam board, then we’ll see if the game grabs me enough for me to continue.

For now, this is the fun part. I love the rush of getting into a game and thinking through all the possibilities. As I sit, I’m confident Infinity will be a game I play for at least a year, similar to what I did with Legion, Lord of the Rings, and Marvel Crisis Protocol. Horus Heresy will stay on my docket, but decrease in importance. Chain of Command will likely see a resurgence for me as I have two campaigns lined up and I never truly tire of it.

Well, back to painting. I’m hoping to motivate myself enough to finish all my remaining Haqqislam (15ish models) this weekend via speed painting. Will report back next week with some Off the Bench posts.

Hopefully.