Gaming Thoughts – Winter Challenge Aftermath

Yesterday saw a group of us from Pigmar travel down to the home of Exeter Inquisition for our first Infinity event of 2015, The Winter Challenge.

As the latest version of ITS isn’t out yet, and N3 is still pretty fresh in everyone’s minds, this event was a bit of a break from the norm, with Sunday’s tournament being a doubles event, non-ITS and basically just a fun way to get used to the new edition.

Each player had 150pts to spend, but wouldn’t know who their partner was until the day, and so making a list proved to be a bit of a challenge in itself. We knew the mission beforehand, so at least had a starting point! (For those interested, the mission can be found here.)

I reasoned that I would go for something fairly balanced – a bit of long-ranged firepower (as many of the previous events I’ve been to have had fairly open tables), with an aggressive element to push forward onto the objective and (hopefully) claim us some points.

My list consisted of:

Kamael Light Infantry – Combi Rifle
Kamael Light Infantry – Combi Rifle
Gao Rael – Sniper Rifle
Makaul – Heavy Flamethrower
Sakiel – Viral Combi Rifle
Kamael Light Infantry – Spitfire
Chaksa Auxiliar – Heavy Flamethrower
Chaksa Auxiliar – HMG

The defensive element was the Gao Rael Sniper along with the pair of Kamael Combis (one of which was my Lieutenant) and the Chaksa with HMG (along with Neurocinetics, which is always fun), while the other fireteam of the Makaul, Sakiel and Kamael with Spitfire would advance up the board with the Chaksa Heavy Flamethrower (who also has Baggage) to get onto the building and deter anyone from coming up there.

I had been paired with David, aka MarcoSkoll on the forums, who had some beautifully converted models, and had a Haqqislam list consisting of the following:

Hafza – Spitfire
Djanbazan Doctor – Rifle/Light Shotgun
Nasmat remote
Ghulam – Rifle/Light Shotgun
Hunzakut – Rifle/Light Shotgun
Hassassin Lasiq – Viral Sniper Rifle
Naffatu – Rifle/Light Flamethrower
Sekban – AP Rifle

Sadly for this report, I managed to completely forget to take any photos, so I’ll keep things fairly brief and you’ll have to imagine the tables I’m afraid!

Our first game saw us matched up against Robin (i0003) and Dave P who were Combined Army and PanOceania respectively, on a military base table, and I think it’s fair to say that having Robin across the table from us put us right on the back foot (Robin’s a lovely guy, but given his stellar ITS ranking, it meant I deployed so defensively that I had little to no AROs in my first turn!). That left David to bear the brunt of the initial Combined Army/PanO assault, all but decimating his half of the force from the off. We tried to claw things back in our turn, but we’d been so deliberate and hesitant about deployment that our time was running short, so as we rushed through our turns to get things done, we probably made a few reckless mistakes and we were almost tabled, aside from my lone Gao Rael, who was wounded, but alive.

Game 2 put us against Matt and Matt (Drastic and KazakMatt) with a Neoterra/Ariadna alliance. We were on a relatively open forest table, and since David and I had won the Initiative roll-off, we chose the deployment side with the most tall buildings to make use of our snipers. Similar to last game, as the other guys were going first, we deployed everything prone behind something so as to wait until our first turn to spring the ambush, as it were. Matt and Matt capitalised on this and rushed the central objective building with a pair of infiltrating camo markers and a Para Commando with HMG, which we were unable to stop effectively. Meanwhile, the Neoterrans set up a bit of a perimeter to stop us from advancing. Time got away from us so we were only able to fit in a single turn each, and it was all we could do to trade shots with our snipers against theirs while trying to advance on teh building and toss grenades over the parapet to hopefully clear them out, but sadly it wasn’t to be, so it was another loss for myself and David.

In game 3 we faced James and Harry with a Shasvastii and Aleph mix. This table was dense, and I mean *very* dense – we like to play on fairly dense tables at home, but we always try and give a few longer fire lanes as well for variety. This table had a large tower just outside of one of the deployment zones and since we were facing Shasvastii, which are known for camo and likely to have infiltrators, usually snipers, we went for the denial tactic and chose that board edge. I managed to get my Gao Rael into a pretty decent position (and probably the only decent spot on the table for multiple opportunities to cover the approach to the objective building), and he reaped a terrible toll on the unfortunate aliens and bio-synthetic beings, gunning many of them down while remaining untouched himself. We managed to blast through our final turns and in the end managed to hold the central building, netting us our only win of the day.

All in all, I had a blast, as did my other club-mates, and we all came away from the day smiling, due to Ian’s fantastic organisation, our great opponents and my playing partner David – roll on the next one!