Infinity: Defiance & Beyond

Infinity has, for many years, been my absolute favourite miniatures range. I could buy and paint the miniatures and never even play a game with them (my brother, who is my primary adversary in any game, would probably argue that is exactly what I do). I just love the style of the miniatures, the art, the lore, everything.  As a setting it ticks just about all my boxes.  I have accrued a sizable collection over the years and rather than going in deep on a particular faction I tend to just buy the basic forces for each faction so that I can have lots of different games and also to enable me to introduce friends to the game as well.  I am not a competitive gamer and I probably never will be so approaching the hobby in this way allows me to exercise a bit more of my creativity as I get to build and paint lots of different styles of miniatures. However, due to other projects and commitments, so many of my Infinity miniatures are unpainted – there’s always something else demanding my time and for several years now it’s pretty meant that I haven’t necessarily painted miniatures that I wanted to paint, I have painted the ones I felt I had to paint.

So for 2022 I decided to make that change and Defiance represented the perfect vehicle for doing so.  Here was a boxed game, entirely self contained that could be easily defined as “complete”.  At the same time all the miniatures are fully compatible with the wider Infinity games, they have stats and profiles and thus represent a way of adding to my existing Infinity collection and getting some painted forces for the skirmish game also.  Because the link between the two games, what I intend to do is paint up releated miniatures along with the Defiance miniatures.  So when I paint the Shasvastii miniatures from the core set, I will also paint up the Shasvastii from Operation Wildfire.  Likewise I will try and paint the O-12 miniatures from Wildfire when I get around to the Outcast expansion box.  By doing this I expand my Infinity collection whilst also getting a nice, fully painted sci-fi dungeon crawler.

Now, I am not convinced that I am going to hit the target of 2022 for the whole set.  I tend to really take my time with Infinity miniatures, so there will be questions I have to answer about whether I am prepared to sacrifice some quality for some speed in order to complete the game.  I also have a second project that I am working, very much a passion project, painting a psuedo-historical army that I can use in Saga.  So we will see how far we get.  I am certain that the core set will be completed, not so sure about all the add-ons and expansion.

Also, as a final note, the first few entries are essentially playing catchup.  I did start working on this in January but for some reason I didn’t start a project.  I think probably because I was already running the other project and it just seemed like effort to run two.  However I am going to give it a whirl.