Infinity Overview

Infinity is a 28mm sci-fi tabletop skirmish miniatures game made by Corvus Beli, a Spanish company. They started it in 2006 and the miniatures line and popularity has expanded exponentially as time has gone on. It takes place about 175 years into our future. The rules are free as well as a free army builder on their website.

Small games are played with 150 points (about 5-10 miniatures) with larger games using 300 points (10-20). Every faction has models that do different things. Regular troopers heavily armoured Special Forces, support and robots. They can also be armed with a variety of weapons from knives and pistols to monofilament blades and plasma rifles. Each weapon has varied ranges and damage output. Needless to say, the variety is astounding and it would be best to start with proxying models with ones you already have. A start point should be 150 points until you get used to the basic rules and the rules for the miniatures you like. There is also the concept of "special weapon cost" or SWC. Items such as heavy machine guns and other support weapons have an SWC cost associated with it. Every 50 points of your forces you are allowed 1 SWC point. This is a good mechanic that keeps special equipment equal between different factions and forces. You must also have one Lieutenant who can give another order just for itself.

Your tabletop should be crowed with terrain. They recommend each terrain piece being no more than 10 cm from one another and the fire lanes (lengths of the playing area with long straight-aways) short.

Once sides are decided and when each player has their forces placed, you begin your turn. During a turn, you get an amount of orders based on the number of models you have on the table. You can have jump troops off the table and totally camouflaged models hidden in areas but they do not give you orders until they are revealed. This rule also limits a small high-point value force from dominating the table because a specialty force of 6 models has a smaller number of orders that a smaller point value force with lots of models and orders.

Orders come in a variety of forms. You could have a model move then move again for an order (short order and another short order). You could have a model use an order to shoot a round and then move. There are short and long grenade orders (direct pitching versus throwing over a wall). Hacking orders. Medical orders. Close combat orders. There are more but you get the idea. It seems imposing when you first read through the rules but makes more sense when you actually play it.

The tagline for the game is "It always your turn" and they are not telling falsehoods when they say this. If you give a model a move order to move between two pieces of covering terrain, if an enemy model can see you, they can have that model "react" to your move with a short shooting order. The model being shot at can also give a short reaction order: shoot back, dodge, hack...etc. To add to the chaos of battle, if multiple models can see the model that did the order they can react to it as well as any model within 8 inches.

To resolve an order you roll a d20, add or subtract modifiers and roll under your statistic. If you roll equal to it, it is a critical success. If there are multiple orders to resolve, each model determines their target number and rolls a d20 at the same time. The highest successful roll beats all others and only its order is resolved. If a model scores a critical then their order is resolved instead. If there is a tie then the model with the highest target number (number required to be under or match) resolves its order. If that number is a tie then they reroll until someone wins. This does mean that if a regular grunt is firing on a stealthy model behind cover (target number 1) and the model being shot at is an special forces model with a kick-ass accurate gun shoots back at the grunt firing in the open (target 12), if the grunt rolls a 1 and the special forces model rolls an 11, the grunt wins. But hey, isn't war hell...

Once a side takes 40% or more casualties, they begin to retreat off the table. That's right, retreat. You can spend orders to suspend this but you are then having a fighting retreat. Models with religious can act normally in this regard.

That's pretty much it. The Infinity website above has lots of cool stuff on it, including this army builder and this miniatures page. Just be warned that because it was written in Spanish and translated to other languages, there are several tense and grammatical errors. Don't let that deter you from the game though. Their free rules are here and download for templates, orders and other counters are here. Also take a look at this demo video. It’s fast and feels really realistic...except for the plasma guns and alien AI and such but realistic none-the-less. Enjoy!