Breaking Up with a Game

Sometimes, you love a game with all your heart, and a relationship is kindled that lasts a lifetime. For me, Mordheim, and to a lesser extent, Necromunda, have been huge anchors for my love of the hobby. Other games, like 40k and Malifaux, have been fun excuses to paint up armies and hang with friends. And then there are those select few that come along, make me incredibly happy, and then fizzle out after a bit (I’m looking at you, Wild West Exodus!). But nothing, and I mean nothing, is worse in this hobby than falling in love with a game and realizing, years later, that you just can’t stand it anymore.

The game in question (this time, at least) is Corvus Belli’s Infinity. I stumbled across the game around 2014, found the models breathtaking, and there was a community of really fun and entertaining players already invested in it at a game store that just gelled with me. Now, 10 years later, that game store has moved two states away, a good chunk of that community moved with it, and I’m finding myself staring at a bunch of Infinity models that I have no interest in playing with.

I’m also wondering if I ever liked the game at all, or if it was just that community? Now that they’ve moved on, my interest in gaming in general is pretty abysmal. Sure, I’ve always been a painter/modeler way more than I’ve been a gamer, but there was always the appeal of getting together with friends and rolling some dice that just fueled everything else.

And don’t get me wrong, I still have a local community, but we’re largely dependent on the one person in our group that has enough room and is centrally located, and we all have tricky schedules. A good game store really is a freaking asset, nay, a treasure, that you don’t realize you’ll miss until it’s gone.

Infinity has some of the nicest models in the world of miniatures, and some of my friends swear it’s one of the best game systems out there. I always found it mechanically tedious, and felt like I was doing a math bee in my underpants every time I played.

And seriously, I delt craps once upon a time. I can handle some pretty complex mental work. Infinity just beat the hell out of me.

Now, for a multitude of reasons that I won’t get into other than missing my store and half my community, I just can’t stand the game. I don’t want to play it, I’m completely uninterested in new releases, and I have several hundred miniatures staring at me and making me feel guilty as hell. What am I going to do with all this pewter?

The obvious answer is to sell it all, pay off some more medical bills, and make more Necromunda magic happen in my life. But that gets complicated. There’s a bittersweet, personal history with a lot of these minis.

When I found Shiv Games, I was more alone in my hobby space than I had been in decades. Since moving back to Salt Lake City, I had lost my regular gaming group, and was just going through the motions. After Shiv, I had a good group of people to hang out with. I painted my own miniatures, and even took on some commissions from the crew there.

All said and done, I probably painted close to 2,000 Infinity miniatures. I even ended up working at Shiv for a while, and painted the Jeff’s Shock Army, which I now own and can’t bear to part with.

Every single one of these models has a memory, whether it’s happily painting away at the shop and talking to the crew, sharing a laugh and a story or two. Or helping folks get their armies ready before tournaments, or building a table of terrain that I still think is the best work I’ve ever done.

And now, I have a bunch of models that make me a little sad. I really have no idea what to do with them. Part of me thinks they would be cool as models for Stargrave or Five Parsecs from Home, part of me wants to just build cool displays for them, and part of me just wants to launch them into the sun.

Sheesh. I only meant to write a few paragraphs, and now I’m being maudlin as hell. This is tricky. I’m not good at tricky!

So, this is where I’m going to ask you folks what you would do in this situation. I may not act on any of it, but I am genuinely interested in what other people might do!

Thanks for reading, and may all your rolls be entertaining rolls.

-Leigh