I finally got around to playing my first 300 points (full size) game of Infinity last night. It’s only been five or six years in the making.

We played Supplies, where three objectives are distributed along the center line and we were competing to abscond with them. I won’t be doing an AAR here—indeed, they can take a lot of effort to put together and make learning a game harder than needed. This my impressions after playing the game.

It beat my expectations.

I expected to be confused in places and struggle to keep what my units do in my head. Overall, I hit very few bumps in the road and was actually able to focus on the tactical play of the game more or less immediately.

I did make amateur mistakes—I wasn’t aggressive enough with my Asawira (heavy gunfighter) and thus ceded board control which cost me the objectives. I did manage a parry by moving my Ghulam Link Team (light utility, but dangerous as a group), headed up by Yara Haddad (light gunfighter), and had we finished the game (we ended early for time as we started quite late) I firmly believe I had a chance of stealing an objective. Between that group and a paratrooper I was about to drop in, I had a solid line of attack to steal one of the objectives, likely forcing a tie breaker.

I was impressed with the immediacy of the tactical play and how easy it was to process what went right and wrong in the game. I had expected the layers of rules to obfuscate the tactics for me, as they did in Horus Heresy at first, but the tactics of “Dude shoots, dude dies, grab objectives” is so easily grasped at a base level that you’re left to really solve how best to use your unique pieces, rather than trying to trace cause and effect through piles of dice and long term decisions.

I had a blast and got the opportunity to feel clever in places—this is exactly what I want from my tactical skirmish games. I’ve found myself mulling over the game and even went model by model in my list and thought about how I could have better implemented them. My Asawira needed to be more aggressive, my Barid was underutilized, I overinvested actions into my Nadhir, etc.

The activation system proved fascinating to interact with. Combined with all the unique units on the board and the struggles of lethal gameplay, it made for a consistent set of interesting little puzzles. I found myself pondering and processing a lot more, but I also found that often times the solution was “Invest 3-4 actions into this one model to accomplish X” at which point I burned through a third of my turn quickly. This created a reasonable pace to things: think, act a bunch, think, act a bunch, etc. The end result was that the game still felt like it moved fairly quick.

Of course, this is all impressions off my very first full sized learner game. We only had one rule interaction we had to look up, which may have been lucky. I also played a game against myself the evening before to hammer out what my units do, which helped tremendously.

I walk away quite pleased and if I had the opportunity to play another game tonight, I’d do it. I’d play a game nightly for the next few nights if I could. I’m in full-on obsession now. I fully intend to play the next tournament and really try to “git good.”

Infinity definitely has its hooks in me.

…Someone, please freeze my credit card.