I've been playing since 2017, but in the three years I've played I have seen a slow but steady increase in the size of communities, at least in Australian ITS events. The recent Cancon tournament had more players booked than ever, although due to fires or other reasons people had to cancel and I'm not sure it was in reality. The coming Novacore tournament is shaping up to be massive, with 150 players (and a large waiting list!!) In your part of the world have you found this to be the case? Has the player base grown? I'm sure with defiance and Aristea! and especially Infinity Code 1 Corvus Belli is taking things in the right direction, regarding player base growth, and company growth. What do you think?
Stockholm is growing. Not a lot the past few years, but we're seeing new people. Most of all, we're better connected into a greater Swedish meta and there's groups growing in a few communities in other cities that can be reached by car for tournaments.
Seoul, it's prospering - 10-20 people regulary visiting LGC, over 100 players in our Kakaotalk. So far its considered to have the best community (and I am telling you this is great thing), nice cohesion between members, and several events done by oldbies lured many new people to the game. Now we're looking for tournament places.
I've got a lot of lapsed players. Lots of people in my meta play 6-7 game systems and infinity being so complex, is often the one that gets neglected. People pick it up for the global campaigns but we're waiting on C1 to reduce the rules burden here
In Paris / France, it's not a huge growth but it's pretty stable with a few people joining or leaving the adventure. There was big growth with N3 and I hope Code One attract a lot of new people. If I think the game is good, I will try to promote it here.
in my local area in Australia, the store i play at i rarely see let alone get matches of infinity outside of the monthly ITS tournament. however i hear its sister store in Newcastle (which is out of my reach) is where they all congregate.
If you're talking GG Newie, nah: there was literally no Infinity there when I last went in. GG Maitland might have a little stock, but mainly it's a venue that hosts tournies run by @deltakilo, not one that primarily sells stock. The Newie crowd mainly plays out of the Legions club where Novacore is played, at a GG down the Central Coast or at Maitland. Store wise, in Sydney GG Town Hall and GG Top Ryde both don't stock much Infinity either. Both would, I think, benefit from Code 1 and being able to stock and sell newbie friendly SKUs to walk ins / demo players. Both those stores host weekly / fortnightly games (respectively)+ occasional tournies on top (I don't think @Dropkill has restarted the monthly tournies he was running out of GG Bella Vista now that Drop Bears has moved to GG Top Ryde). The way the Infinity market for experienced players works in Australia means that there's not much sense holding more specific stock, as TSI and, to a far lesser extent, CC have too big a market share. I don't know what it's like outside those metas, but my memory was Jolt in Canberra didn't hold much Infinity stock either. I don't imagine it's much different though. Edit: oops I thought this was the Code One thread. Sydney area and Newie is growing with a solid 'baked on' core in all three cities, but it's lots of people who play a couple of games but can't keep up with the density of the rules so drop by the wayside. The area can support a monthly 20 person + tournie and occasional bigger ones. It's at the point where we probably need better coordination between Newcastle / Sydney / Canberra metas to avoid small tournies canabalising players from bigger ones.
Pretty much dead in the us outside of some small pockets. If you have a group that plays you just pray no one moves. Hope c1 can turn it around to at least warmachine or fow like level in the us
Interesting. That's really not the impression I get from the forums. I get the US is a big place and the more well known Americans tend to be from bigger east / west coast metas. Whereabouts are you from (ballpark)?
Btw, one thing we started with a friend and that attracted a lot of new player (or actually had a lot of new players that already had mini to actually play games) is to have a "rendez vous" every two weeks at the same local gaming store. If people see you play the game, they get attracted by it and you had new people to your local community. But it doesn't mean they will play in tournaments. If they describe themselves as narrative player I try to get them play narrative missions from the CB website with a spec-op getting XP.
In my local area (Poland -> Krakow) infinity has some difficult times. And there are some reasons for it Two main competitors for Infinity (in my opinion): Games Workshop and short-time-sudden-scirmish-random-stuff (some sytems which suddenly appear and in same manner suddenly dissapper and noOoooone plays it ... for my area those were Dropfleet commander, Black seas, Fallout warfare, Runewars: miniatures game etc.) . Infinity is difficult to teach, difficult to play, may take long time to play if players unexperienced (though I've been playing for sometime already, but still I think slow and play long :( ), has forever beta-version rules (when suddenly some stuff appears not to be described well in rules) and it spoils fun for potential players who played some simple stuff from GW. Also important notice, if LFGS owner\selller do not like system personally - I doubt he'd choose to work with Corvus Beli. CB products need more time to teach, more money to invest (in terms miniature per dollar), to organise tourneys and to be a judge you need to make a mini PhD in Inifinty and it is soooo much more difficult to get new stuff, arrange selling and\or make returns Comparing to Games Workshop. In my area every shitty-crappy gaming table top store has GW product, while CB products rather tend to disappear from stores. Since release of N3 (oh, that short boost of so many new players, including myself :)) I've observed only decreasing overall number of players. And I think that Infinity pretends to be not what it is. It is Very challenging, Very hard, Very fiddly skirmish game which should not be shy about it, as after people are discovering it true nature they may stop playing it. At least this is my opinion what happens to infinity players when they switch game.
I suspect that this kind of feedback has been ubiquitous across many locales, which is what lead them to develop Code One. The barrier of entry imposed by the rules is massive, so this will hopefully remedy things.
Oh we are a vocal bunch so hitting outside our weight class. Yepper Philly, DC, Houston, Pacific Northwest and Chicago Wisconsin kind of. I unfortunately live in the death of all games except magic and gw south. TN specifically and i drive 3 hours to play the games I like ...which are not gw and MTG.
We've had big growth in the community in SE Michigan, US. The greater Midwest/Northeast community has been growing as well due to the efforts of a number of people. Been a lot of cross group tournament travel in the last year. This definitely is not the case.
There has been significant growth since I started a year ago in the Michigan/Ohio region of the U.S. @Forbino1 has been bringing the tournaments and @theangrycan has been uniting people all over. Somewhere along the way we went from 4-6 people a night to as many as 16 and even our regular tournaments can get 20 sign ups or more. Now we have @gregmurdock and @TheMercWithaMouse Those guys know what's going on!
Well, we started in with 4 here in Santa Fe, NM in 2018. Up to 7 regulars, and an 8th maybe, almost every Monday eve. Albuquerque is doing pretty well too. Also, had a friend come out from NC last rumble. Rumble was his 1st 5 games. He's since wrangled 5-7 players back east, and they have a decent group going. I believe their 1st tourney is end of April. Its not crazy growth, but its gaining momentum.
It's been a real struggle to get people interested in Infinity in my area (County Durham, North East England). Lots of people say that they seriously like the miniatures and the awesome terrain you can use but don't want to step out of their comfort zone (40k). Another problem is the complexity of the rules being a major hurdle for potential players but I'm hopeful that when I'm armed with Code One it'll be much easier to encourage players to take the plunge.