Infinity Rulebook- First Impressions

Hey, folks. SinSynn here.

Yeah, I'm sure yer all looking for Loquacious and whatnot, but she couldn't be here today. She's doing that convention thing, or whatevs, so...yeah. Here I am, plugging the gap. Err...filling in. Whatever.
Sigh.
Not sure how convinced me, but I'm sure it's due to those strange pheromones that Terrain females exude all over the place, convincing men to do their bidding. Which is weird, cuz she convinced me to do this via text...
-_-
Terran females. Waddayagonnado?

But, hey, good timing, cuz guess what came in da mail for ol' SinSynn today?
Ah, yeah...my Infinity rulebook.
I was totally gonna say 'guess what I'm holding right now,' but you people have sick minds. Nyah.
:P

My first impression?
It's pretty nice.

*The cover*

Strangely, the cover features a western-comic styled piece of artwork, almost Marvel/DC in appearance.
I...don't really like it, especially the weird leg sticking outta the upper left-hand corner. I much prefer the 'standard fare' Infinity artwork I see accompanying their stuffs, and on their website.

And this is where the issue kinda begins for me. Y'see, my stupid stepson got me into anime and manga years ago, so I am, by nature, predisposed to liking Infinity. A lot.
So once I get past the cover (it ain't easy. That leg is freaking me out, man), I immediately get entranced by the lil' future-tech squiggly lines on the borders of the page. Even the fonts and presentation are all 'Ghost in the Machine.'
Naturally, I am entirely inclined to get all teeny-bopper Beatle's fan from the 50's on you, but I took an oath as a blogger to be, like, impartial and completely non-opinionated, and, uh....do my best to....be professional...

*choke*

Yeah, I'm still doing community service for my last on-line discourse with Hark, so I'm just gonna shoot from the hip here (hey, there's a new approach for me), and just speak my peace here.

So, yeah, I'm a sucker for all kindsa anime types o' stuffs. Especially if it features tentacles.
:)

*two for two*

Anime and manga stylings are a cornerstone of the Infinity aesthetic, so anyone who doesn't like these things is very, very unlikely to be attracted to the game. The basic game setting and model design doesn't go all the way to big-headed, doe-eyed chibi characters, but both will be comfortably familiar to anyone who's ever watched a few episodes of Ghost in the Shell.
And if you've ever wanted a Tachikoma, well....

*Yeah, they got those. Natch*

Bein' that all the rules and peripheral stuffs (army and weapons lists, printable markers and templates) are available online, the rulebook isn't necessarily a must-have, but it is nice to have. I'll tell you why- and this is kinda strange for me to say, honestly- it's got the fluff.
Infinity is the first game I'm tackling solo. The Ultimate Rival isn't around this time. I usually rely on him to do, like, pretty much everything. He'll learn the game, buy all the stuffs we need to play it, and teach it to me in our gaming garage.
Errr...his gaming garage. Heh.
Ahem.

This time, however, I'm on my own. It's my job to learn the game and buy da stuffs. This time, I'll be pulling in the next garage gamer. It's the circle of life, man.

I have, of course, perused the Infinity website (perhaps at length. Don't you judge me), and I've read the lil' blurbs that accompany the model descriptions and pics and whatnot, but I must admit that without some sorta background, some sorta setting and context, that Infinity the game struck me as being a bit confusing and...complicated, I guess.

Funny what a few pages of fluff and a couple of illustrations can do fer a game...

*I know what these are now!*

The first 100+ pages of the Infinity rulebook are fluff. Broken into chapters that describe the primary forces featured in the game, this section really helped pull together the whole Infinity universe for me. For the first time ever, I sat and ingested some new fluff, and I found it funny that the first time I sorta missed it was in it's absence.
Thumbs up fer da fluff.
Shush, you. It could happen.


I hafta tell ya, the book is a bit dated, and new armies have been added to the game (ALEPH and Tohaa), and the core game has grown as well. There's an expansion and a campaign book out there now. There's a ton of new models and even whole game mechanics. Even being sorta new to Infinity, it feels like the game needs a...consolidation, maybe? Or maybe a separation, since a fair amount of space is given over to individual unit descriptions and statlines, which I know are, well, completely incomplete at this point.

Overall, the fluff (and there's a bunch of it) is interesting and amusing. It is neither as over-the-top as what GW puts in their books, nor as dry and sanitized as what appears in the Flames of War books. The background is presented in many fashions- some of the stories are written like straight up fiction, others are written up like intercepted military transmissions or pieces of dictation, snippets of speeches, etc.
Nothing revolutionary here, but the switches in style and the brevity of the tales themselves makes it all quick and easy to ingest.

The book itself is big enough to knock a fool out with. It features nice, shiny, glossy paper, bound in a quality fashion in a solid, thick cover. Very nice, but it's pretty much what I'd expect in yer standard fifty dollar rulebook nowadays (remember that fifty dollars is like, seventy five dollars when Games Workshop is pricing things).
More familiar Infinity artwork is splashed liberally throughout (and none of it has random legs poking into the frame). Every page has a lil' sumpthin' on it, from a small three-panel comic that seems lifted from the middle of a manga at random, to huge, lavish, two page spreads. All of it contributes to the overall vibe very convincingly.

There are some oddly phrased sentences in the english version, and I know this is due to translation issues. There are a couple of missing letters here and there, but neither of this niggling details appear frequently enough to annoy or interfere with anything.

*Being French, I will have to purchase the Jeanne d'Arc figure*

Once I got to the rules, the addition of a few pics featuring step-by-step descriptions and instructions was enormously helpful in understanding how to do things. The PDF's available online are for people that are like, smart. Apparently, I am not, cuz I came up a lil' shy of understanding the mechanics. Everything came together as I read the rulebook, though, and I was all like, 'Oh, now I get it.'

The rules themselves are pretty clear. After spending a few weeks with the labyrinthine mess that is the 40k rulebook, this is a tremendous relief. I'm currently in the process of, ummm...processing them, but so far, I like what I'm seeing. There's a level of sophistication that pleases me. There's a lot of cool stuffs on display here, game mechanics that tickle my fancy (you don't wanna know where that's located), like cyber-warfare, thermo-optic camouflage, medics to revive downed troopies, orbital insertions, and oh-so-much more. All of it is presented incrementally, beginning with the basics- turn sequence, movement and shooting and progressing to the more advanced stuff.
Despite the fact that the game includes all of these things, it isn't weighed down by nearly a hundred 'special rules.' Every action and interaction that takes place in-game can and often does feature several possible modifiers, however, so it looks like there's a fair-sized learning curve.
I don't think I'm gonna mind...

The final part of the book is taken up by army lists featuring unit statlines. Yes, both this part of the book and the fluff part take up more pages than the actual rules. Huh. Don't know what to say 'bout that, but it is what it is.
Sadly, there is no index. I hope to see one in the expansion and campaign book....
Cuz yeah, I'll prolly buy 'em.
:)

Sigh....gotta go to work in da AM, so I'll stop here. There's a small chance I'll be up late reading.
Heh.


Until next time, folks- Exit with catchphrase!

- SinSynn