Hi all! I was unsure whether the rules were the appropriate subforum for this – if not, please kindly let me know. I've made a cheat sheet for a tournament for completely new players which I successfully used to teach the game in 40 minutes. Posting it here in case somebody would like to show Infinity to their friends Download it here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/k1rkqj5a2ri5qqa/skills-vertical-english.pdf?dl=0 Some info: This year I've run two tournaments for people who have never played Infinity, with 100 Pts armies on 2"x3" tables. No advanced rules, no secret Lts or Lt rules. Army units with few skills or equipment. I started out with an reworked cheat sheet based on an excellent one by Captain Spud (http://www.captainspud.com/?page_id=2660), and have now arrived at this one, which I will try in another beginner tournament in 2020. First, I went over the rough process in the middle lane, mostly explained the unfamiliar "declare first, roll later" concept and active/ARO, then I let people try for themselves. It worked surprisingly well, which is why I cleaned it up a little and provide it to you all. Cheers, happy to hear feedback if you have any!
I realise it's for introductory play but you shouldn't place the irregular or lieutenant orders next to the troopers that generated them, place them next to the order pool from the group that contains the troopers. That's a bad habit that you don't want to be teaching a new player right off the bat. I'd change the intuitive attack example weapon to a Chain Rifle since 1. smoke isn't a weapon and 2. you can't intuitive attack with any weapon that uses smoke ammunition. Discover + Shoot is not an "entire order" but instead is a combination explicitly allowed as a single order (the difference is important). There is no situation where you would ever want to declare idle, so there is no point teaching players about it in an introductory game (maybe as a "declaring an illegal skill results in you performing an idle" way, but the situations where that happens are incredibly rare).
Yes, but no worries – your feedback is very helpful! True! The number one reason for this simplification was: information overload – 30-40 minutes of learning rules is already on the high side, so I decided to drop all Lt special rules. In the tournaments, we did not use any special Lt rules, other than them having an extra order (and some scenarios where they were hunted). Here I decided that if any players would like to stick with Infinity, that they should be able to switch to the Lt rules (my assumption, I have not seen people switch in the wild). However, thinking about it now, I think it's not that much of an overload if it's just the secret Lt. I'll update it Very good point! (Mistake on my part when rewriting it from the original German) You are absolutely right. To simplify it, I decided it sort of plays like an entire order, and I see people declare "discover shoot" often. Maybe you have an idea how to improve it? That is true. The reason I included it is because I had two situations where it came up in the tournaments – one not reaching the engage and one not wanting to shoot a flamethrower with a G: Sync-ed PanO Militia bot. Hmmm, it's probably more confusing if it's on there and it's easily explained if not and these situations come up. Again, thanks so much for the feedback! Edit: @Cartographer Updated with your feedback
In my meta, at least, the myth that discover/shoot is an entire order is pervasive and very hard to uproot. Please please please don't help perpetuate it! People aren't declaring "discover/shoot" for simplicity, they're declaring it because they erroneously believe that's the correct way to declare it. I don't know where the myth came from, maybe it worked that way in N2? Also, it doesn't sort of play like an entire order. It plays exactly like a short movement skill followed by an ARO followed by a short skill. You declare discover, your opponent decides whether to reveal and ARO, and then depending on their choice, you might not declare BS attack as your second skill at all. Or you might BS attack a different model. Or discover a second marker. Sorry, I don't mean to sound snarky and I applaud your cheat sheet. I'm just endlessly frustrated by the discover/shoot myth, is all :-)
Ugh. After reading it now it's obviously wrong. Thanks for again pointing it out. It's basically an extra allowance to make an attack in case the discover succeeds. Don't know why people declare Discover-Shoots... I'll try to squeeze it into the Discover Skill on the sheet in the new year!
I think it's a common problem for new players to get into the bad habit of "I know what I want to do, so I'm just going to do it" and jump the order declaration sequence. The situation is probably complicated by the fact that the rules call Disscover+Shoot out specifically as a special maneuver (so the player may be expecting to declare it) when, as you say, it's just the strange exception that 'If you've declared Discover against a Camo marker, you can shoot, too."
From what I can tell, it seems to mostly be that people read the rule that says "you can do this" and then stop at that without reading the next paragraph which, in pain staking detail, tells you exactly how it's done. It's one of those things I have to hash out each tournament with at least one person
@Florian Hanke, you just made my life so much easier! I'm leading my own Infinity group, and I've been having a hard time figuring out a way to consistently teach everyone the rules so that they can play without needing someone to hold them by the hand. This makes a perfect cheat sheet to hand out to the newcomers. Keep up the great work!
I noticed that too, especially because almost everybody came from a wargaming background. So the "I move here and shoot your…" scenario was very common – so when explaining, Infinity's declare-play out "mind-game" is something I repeated a lot, and we played through quite a few examples. The good thing is that it's not horribly wrong when you declare too early and people tended to appreciate this more exciting sequence, so tried to declare correctly.
Yes, and in this case, I'd say the badly written rule is the issue. Exceptions need to be clearly marked, for example: "EXCEPTION: When the active player declares Discover as their first short skill, then they may still declare a BS Attack. If during resolution they succeed at their Discover roll, they may roll their BS Attack, otherwise it is canceled." I'm of the opinion that players are rarely the issue – it's usually the material they are given and need to work with. I'll probably just remove it from the sheet – Camo also works without this, even though it plays differently, but in the interest of not overloading brains and cheat sheets…
I am very glad to hear it, thank you! I hope it'll be as helpful for you as it was for us. And if you notice issues with it I am happy to update it.
Update: Added a version number, unified the font sizes, fixed some icons, added an asterisk to the conditions corner of Dodge, added Discover+BS Attack and added "with feedback by CB forum members".
I'm not so much commenting on your cheat sheet so much as commenting on the rules. The language they use is "Special Manoeuvre" instead of "Exception", but this particular piece of rules is one of few places where I would say the issue is the players and the players who teach the game rather than the rules. Whoever is responsible for writing the Discover+Shoot special manoeuvre made a great job of keeping it succinct and write out exactly how it was executed mechanically, the only thing missing is what they had to FAQ, which is that the attack isn't cancelled, only the burst allocated to the target which failed to be discovered. So in this case I truly believe that most people just learn the rule, know roughly where to find it, but just stop when they're satisfied it exists, and that we as experienced players need to keep our own bad habits out of it when teaching someone the game because new players might not ever read the rules we gloss over.
Thanks for clarifying. I guess I'm of the "If many people have problems with a rule, then the rule set needs an improvement" school, but I see your point as well (and I have to clarify that I too think the writing on how it's executed is very well done). Since we're now off-topic, I've included this piece of feedback, and this is not so helpful anymore to any people looking for a cheat sheet, I think it would be better if the "Discover+BS Attack" discussion moved elsewhere…?
That would be a fair request, though personally I'm not invested in it so I'll just wait for the next person who asks about the manoeuvre on the forums :p As for the actual topic, is this cheat sheet meant for newer players playing against experienced players or is it a newbie tournament? If the former you may want to find a way to include it, possibly as a footnote saying something along the lines of "a unit subject to Discover is a valid target for BS Attack by the unit doing the Discover, if the attacker succeeds their Discover also resolve the BS Attacks allocated to the target, otherwise those burst automatically fail".
I used it to run a total newbie tournament, where only total newbies played, mainly to introduce new people to Infinity. So I only included mostly common skills on the sheet and provided list-specific skills with each list (sadly quite a bit of material for each player, but it turned out to work). Thank you for the text suggestion! I had gone for a slightly shorter one: This text ignores that the BS Attack is not normally valid against a marker, so I'd like to use your input, but trying to shorten it down: "A Discover target is a valid BS Attack target by the activated trooper. During resolution the BS Attack is performed if the Discover is successful." I _think_ that includes all the important parts for beginners.
Looks better than my suggestion! For cheat sheets, brevity is better. The quirks can be left out, for when the curious or the corner case makes someone ask :)
Actually there are plenty of these. Sometimes you want to just force the opponent to just choose their ARO, as your troop is already positioned quite favourably. Also declaring Idle seems to confuse a lot of players, so it can be used as a mind trick to make your opponent more prone to making a mistake.
You *can* just declare Move and move nowhere. Strictly speaking idle isn't necessary for that, it is however clearer to do this by declaring Idle. That's how we teach it locally. The exception to this is IMM-1 troopers who need Idle for Reset + Idle / Idle + Reset declarations.
