Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
Every hobby masks a more obscure, more intense version of itself. You skydive? I BASE jump. You’re into craft beers? I homebrew. You play Magic: The Gathering? I play Flesh & Blood. No matter the pursuit, you can always be outdone by someone who does it more than you.
One of the few hobby spaces one would think immune to that pressure is Warhammer. A game that costs thousands of dollars a year and takes up untold hours to both prepare and play must be about as extreme as you can get? There are countless miniatures games that are more obscure, but, as someone who’s watched Warhammer players consult their army spreadsheets mid-game more times than I care to count, it can’t get more than that, right?
Apparently it can. Infinity, from Spanish publisher Corvus Belli, has a reputation for being one of the most intense tabletop miniature systems out there. The PDF rulebook is well north of 100 pages. The figures are metal, which is harder to work with than the plastic favored by most other at-scale publishers. While you can find Warhammer players at any local game store, Infinity players have to work to find their people. Those who play Infinity are dedicated in extremis.
Operation Sandtrap is the starter box for Infinity N5, the newest edition of the core ruleset. It includes two small armies’ worth of minis, a booklet with scenarios, two sets of D20s, and flatpack terrain. The idea is that two interested players could pick this set up for a fairly reasonable price and jump right in. Well, after a bit of arts & crafts, at any rate.
There are two ways in which to approach this review. The first is as a review of the system as a whole, but I won’t be doing that. I am not positioned well to review Infinity in toto. The system has so much depth and breadth to it that doing so would require that I spend dozens of hours playing in order to learn all of the ins and outs. I can’t afford the time to do that, nor do I have the inclination, for reasons that will become clear momentarily. The second option is to review Operation Sandtrap as a product within the confines of its stated intention. This is a starter set, and I am indeed a starter. That’s the approach we’re going to take. Unfortunately, Infinity: Operation Sandtrap, as a starter set, fails on just about every conceivable level.
Arts & Crafts
When my copy of Operation Sandtrap arrived, I spent about two hours working with my friend Travis to assemble the minis. I went into the experience giddy. I love an arts & crafts project. The figures for Infinity look extremely cool, favoring a hard sci-fi aesthetic that separates them from other systems I’ve seen. Warhammer characters are cartoonish, with large hands and exaggerated posing. The Infinity figures are gunning—so to speak—for realism. My enthusiasm didn’t last.
Casting the figures in metal has two advantages: it keeps costs down for the manufacturer, and it heightens the tactile experience of moving minis around the table. This adds to the game more than you might imagine. The downside to metal is that it is harder to work with: glue has a harder time adhering, the tolerances between pieces are looser, and it can be difficult to tell what is and what isn’t part of the actual cast rather than an extra bit of superfluous metal.
While each figure comes individually with all its pieces sealed in a bag, there were no instructions to guide me through assembly. Travis did a lot of the leading there. He also provided assistance with drilling, which proved necessary for some of the trickier bits. When you have a big enough arm and a small enough joint, the weight of the arm can be enough to keep it from ever fully sticking to the rest of the figure. The solution for this, I have learnt, is to drill a hole into the figure and insert a bit of metal wire. Again, there were no instructions.
Gluing the figures onto the bases was also difficult, since they have such narrow feet to balance on. All of the figures came with a peg as part of the cast. Given that the bases don’t include holes for the pegs, we clipped them off. There was a whole lot of swearing, but we got it done. I put the manual in my bag to read overnight so we could play the next day.
It Wasn’t a Manual
Only, it wasn’t a manual. It had a few scenarios in the back, but otherwise the booklet was full of lore. It didn’t have so much as a single rule. There wasn’t even a QR code or a provided weblink. In disbelief, I checked the box again the next day. Nothing. I went to the internet, and I searched for the rules. I found them, but I was astonished to see that the PDF was 176 pages. After some digging, I discovered that Corvus Belli has quick-play rules available that they recommend for people who are learning the game. That’s great, but why did I have to find those myself? Isn’t this the starter set? Shouldn’t it include, at the very least, links to everything you need to get started?
The final insult added to the injury, the quickstart rules are not written for someone who doesn’t know how to play the game. They’re written for someone who already knows how to play the game, but is trying to streamline the ruleset. These are very much not the same audience. Terms are introduced and go unexplained for multiple pages. The descriptions of things as basic as turn order are unclear and require multiple passes to decipher. We discovered as we were reading through the rules that the figures need to be oriented in a specific direction relative to the bases. There was nothing to indicate that in the box. At the very least, if the bases had had peg holes in them, it would have been implied, but that’s not the reality.
Considered as an introductory box, Operation Sandtrap is, frankly, a real [redacted – ed.] of a thing. While Corvus Belli have put together a beautiful presentation, with minis that look so cool that I find myself wanting more of them, the publisher has done as little as possible to help themselves and to help any hypothetical new audience. The only instructions in the box—THE ONLY INSTRUCTIONS IN THE BOX—are for the flatpack terrain assembly. Nothing for the minis. No tips. No tricks. No, “Hey you should prime these before painting.” No piece of paper saying, “The orientation of the figures on the base matters.” No rule set, full or otherwise. No link to a rule set. And when you find the rules, you’re met with a “beginner friendly” document that isn’t friendly to beginners.
I recognize that a beginner box for Infinity has, inherently, a different audience from a beginner box for Warhammer. One is a niche product. The other is, well, still a niche product, but less of one for sure. It can be presumed that people sniffing around an Infinity box are already going to have some fluency in the language of tabletop miniatures. I accommodated that by playing with a Worlds-level Warhammer player, and even he agreed with all of these issues. “It may be,” he said, “that they’re trying to keep some mystique around the game, so that only people who are really serious about it are interested.”
Given how friendly and thoughtful the team at Corvus Belli was about choosing what product to send my way for this review, I don’t think that’s the case. I think this box is meant to invite people in. Instead, again and again, it slams the door in your face. Infinity: Operation Sandtrap is a missed opportunity.
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