Tag: Infinity

art drop, Miniatures

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

Larnin' Stuff, Miniatures

Miniatures 101: Like a Bat Out of Scale

Believe it or not, I get a whole lot of questions about miniatures. It might be because I run a miniature blog, or because I spent several years of my life as a freelance miniature painter. It might be because I spend so much time nerding out about miniatures. I have no idea. But, being as how I absolutely love miniatures, I though a series of educational posts covering the full spectrum of the hobby might be handy.

First up, we’ll be covering SCALE.

Exactly what is scale? Really, it’s just a way to make sure that your toy soldiers don’t look too ridiculous when you have them going pew-pew at each other. By collecting miniatures in a similar scale, you can avoid the terrible shame showing up with Micro Machines when all anybody wants to play with is Matchbox cars.

That’s really the nuts and bolts of scale. Your six inch tall Star Wars: Black Series action figures are going to look a little funky if you’re facing off against normal three-and-three quarter inch figures. Scale is a just a handy way to make sure you’re in the right sandbox.

Most miniature games stick to a general range of scale between 28mm and 40mm. But even then, there is a massive amount of variation, even when the scales supposedly match!

Scale normally measures the height of an average (assumedly male from a production standpoint) miniature from the base of its foot to its eye level. Unfortunately, some companies measure from the base of the figure’s foot to the top of its scalp, which means two companies can say they produce 28mm miniatures that can still end up having a pretty sizable difference in height.

28mm Standard

Once one of the most common scales produced in miniatures, 28mm standard miniatures tended towards smaller details in their sculpts, with heads and hands that were more realistically proportioned to their bodies.

You can see this example illustrated with the miniatures below. Both are considered 28mm figures, yet the Core Space mini is definitively smaller than the miniature from Corvus Belli‘s Infinity on the right.

The Core Space miniature was measured from base to the top of her head, while the Infinity model was measured base to eyes. Both are still technically 28mm!

There are still plenty of miniatures being produced in this scale, with some fantastic multi-part kits being produced by Osprey Games for the Frostgrave family of wargames.

Games Workshop has largely disrupted that over the last few decades, with the advent (and proliferation) of what is commonly referred to as “heroic scale”.

28mm Heroic

My haaands are as big as my faaaaaaace!

Supposedly, heroic scale figures are the same scale as 28mm standard, but their larger heads, hands, and feet make them look more like comic book characters (hence heroic). There has also been very little attention paid to keeping the scale of most 28mm heroic figures consistent, which has led to a fair amount of “scale creep” over the last 20 years or so. Just compare a Warhammer 40k Space Marine from 1999 to one produced in the last few years, and you can see a huge difference in their size.

And yes, I know Primaris Marines are bigger. I’m talking about your standard marine. And I have Imperial Guard from 20 years back that are a bit smaller than newer figs.

On the plus side, though, larger minis make for more possibilities for detail, which leads us right to what is becoming the industry standard for miniature scale.

32mm

Malifaux, Zombicide, Kings of War, Runewars, and a fare amount of independent sculptors have settled on the 32mm scale range for their miniatures, which has some definite perks; the larger size allows for crisper details, which can lead to more dynamic or expressive characters.

It’s also close enough to 28mm, especially Heroic 28mm, that most people won’t care much about the size difference.

35mm

There’s really very few games producing minis in 35mm, notably Wild West Exodus and other figures from Warcradle Studios. Everything that we said about larger size is even more apparent at this larger scale, but they’re also much larger than 28mm figures when presented on the same table!

40mm

These Marvel: Crisis Protocol figures pretty much max out the size of scale miniatures, but their larger surface area is far more forgiving to paint!
Should have used a pic of him moving, sorry for the empty space…

Atomic Mass Games produces Marvel Crisis Protocol at 40mm, and at this point they’re one of the few miniature lines at this scale. The miniatures are so large that they are much easier to paint, which is nice, but forget putting your Iron Man on the table against someone’s Frostgrave minis. He’ll look like he’s attacking students from that school model in Zoolander.

Other Common Scales for Wargame Miniatures

Quite a few wargames rely on much smaller scales, and this is purely due to economics of space. If you’re going to re-create Waterloo, you’re going to need a lot of miniatures to pull that off!

That’s where 15mm comes in, which is the standard scale for historical wargames. The average figure is pretty small, which means that a whole lot more of them can fit on a table!

Gaslands has been taking off lately, which uses customized 1/72 scale Matchbox and Hot-Wheels cars. This works out to 20mm scale for miniatures, which there is not a lot produced for, but some enterprising sculptors on Etsy and Patreon have been filling that niche beautifully.

Another semi-common scale is used primarily for giant robot games, but it varies wildly between 3mm and 6mm. At this point, human sized characters are about the size of a Nerds candy, and the real stars of the game are the monsters or robots that the game focuses on.

Of course, there are even smaller scales for starship battles, but even those tend to exaggerate scale to produce evenly sized ships. Star Wars: Armada, I’m looking at you…

Why does any of this matter? That’s a pretty good point, and one that some people won’t even care about. Some folks are just fine facing off with any scale miniature that strikes their fancy, and there is absolutely fine!

There are others, myself included, who get caught up in the scale trap because of the immersive quality of a good miniature game. I like to bring a nicely painted group of figures to play on a table with nicely built and painted terrain, and I tend to get lost in the story that plays out in a game. Differences in scale can be a little jarring, but it’s not a deal breaker for me.

Seen side by side, scale difference can be staggering!

Mostly, this comes from the types of games I like to play. Most of the game systems I like are setting agnostic, which means they don’t have an established universe set up for them. So, you can bring whatever miniatures you want to the party. I have a ton of 28 and 32mm minis, so I tend to collect miniatures in that scale to use in the games I like to play.

If Marvel Crisis Protocol was the only game I played, or I wasn’t really keen on throwing Wolverine at a Genestealer, this wouldn’t be a problem at all!

I also tend to display my painted miniatures, and I like seeing minis that are similar scale displayed together. It might be a little fussy, but that’s my preference!

If you have questions about scale, or miniatures in general, drop a comment below!

Miniatures, Workbench

2020 Secret Santa Project, Part 2

Seeing as how my friends from my local gaming group can’t get together during the pandemic, we decided to do a miniature painting based Secret Santa project.

I was chosen to paint up a Mercenary from Infinity for my friend Brock. Infinity minis are a blast to paint, and the merc he submitted is one of the best figs in the game, so I was really happy to get to work!

I have to admit to a certain crutch with Infinity models, though! I tend to want their boots and gauntlets to look like they were made from high-grade plastics or ceramics, so I often paint them white. I wanted to do something a little different with this merc, since she has a lot of earth tones, so I went with a yellow scheme with Menoth White highlights.

The red tones were Citadel Contrast paints, which were then highlighted up to a warm orange. The reds help balance out the tones established by the yellows and browns, and also contrast her hair.

The hair started out with a turquoise glaze, which was then highlighted up to near white through some soft blue tones. The turquoise base is a pretty good contrast to the red tones. Normally, I would go more green on a project like this, but just happen to live in a country where red and green are considered Christmas colors. And no-one wants a Christmas themed mercenary!

At least no-one I know directly! Who knows, maybe there’s a market for that somewhere out there?

Workbench

The Saga of Why I Hate Blue

About two years ago, my family was in crisis. We owned a restaurant that was doing its very best to sink any possibility of us having even a drop of financial security. So, I dusted off my miniature brushes and started accepting painting commissions again.

Turns out this was a massive mistake. Trying to keep a freelance business organized while your actual livelihood was crashing and burning around you? Not an easy thing to pull off. And I in no way pulled it off.

My friend Jeff hires me to paint a bunch of Pan Oceania minis from Infinity. He payed up front, which is something I try not to accept. Why? Because I might flake out, maybe screw up and not finish the job for a couple of years or something.

Now, it’s not all bad. Jeff actually hired me to work at his awesome game store, and it’s still the most fun I’ve ever had at a job. But I painted a lot of Pan Oceania minis while I was there. Probably more than a hundred. I started having nightmares about the particular blue Jeff liked.

Now it’s nearly two years later, and I finally finished the last of that commission. It’s sad, though, because Jeff is a friend and I should have finished this months ago… and I’m not entirely sure if these are all his figures to begin with!

These might be the last Infinity figs I paint, too. I’m pretty burned out on Infinity. The models are amazing, but I always feel dumb when I play the game. And Corvus Belli made some funding decisions that I’m not a fan of, so back to the stuff that I really enjoy painting!

Then again, they really are sweet looking miniatures! Gah! Indecision is tough!