N3 Helper Sheet for (teaching) beginners

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!

 

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

 

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 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".

 

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…?

 

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.

 

Thanks!