Infinity
Sci-fi skirmish game by Corvus Belli, set in the Human Sphere. Best known for the ARO system, and for being really hard to learn but extremely satisfying once it clicks.
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"Infinity is probably my all time favorite wargame that I never get to play."
What is Infinity
Infinity is a 28mm sci-fi skirmish game by Corvus Belli, set in the Human Sphere. That’s a near-future where humanity has spread across the stars, split into rival superpowers, and is now being invaded by an alien empire called the Combined Army. Each player runs a small force of 8 to 15 very specialized models from one of the main factions, or from one of the dozens of “sectorial” sub-armies inside them.
Two ideas sit at the center of the game, and no other big skirmish game leans on them this hard.
The order pool. Every model on the table adds one Order to a shared pool at the start of your turn, and you spend those orders to activate models. You can pour every order into one specialist and run them across the board, spread them across the whole force, or anything in between. Lieutenants, hackers, and some specialists can make extra orders or take them away from the other player. Managing that pool is most of the game. You’re always paying for the activation you want.
ARO (Automatic Reaction Order). When your model does something in an enemy’s line of sight, that enemy gets to respond right then. Shoot back, dodge, hack, throw smoke, turn to face. Almost everything meaningful you do on your turn gets answered immediately, so moving across the table is a real decision, and the player whose turn it isn’t is making choices on almost every order you spend. This is the thing that makes Infinity feel different the first time you play it.
Around those two sit the things you’d recognize from any modern miniatures game: cover, suppression fire, true line of sight through 3D terrain, camouflage and stealth markers, hacking, smoke, airborne deployment, doctors and engineers, and a deep pile of skills and equipment. Two lists at the same points can play completely differently.
The first edition came out in 2005. The current edition is N5, released at the end of 2024, which trimmed and rebalanced a lot of N4 but kept the order pool and ARO at the heart of it. A standard game is 300 points on a heavily terrained 4 × 4 ft table, played over three rounds. The official recommendation is about 90 minutes, and real games (especially while you’re learning) run longer.
Why play it
Infinity is the skirmish game for people who want every decision to count. Lists are small enough that you know what every model on the table does, but the order pool means even a ten-model list gives you a turn full of choices. Which model burns the orders, which specialist you commit, when you spend the Lieutenant’s order, when you throw a Coordinated Order at the line. There’s no autopilot turn where you move everything six inches and pass.
The reactive turn is the part that hooks people. In most miniatures games the other player is mostly watching while you push your models around. In Infinity your opponent is right there with you on your turn, ARO after ARO, deciding whether to shoot, dodge, or wait for the next model coming around the corner. It’s the most interactive miniatures game I’ve played, and probably the closest a tabletop wargame gets to a real-time strategy game.
The setting carries a lot of weight too. Hyper-corporations, religious states, a lost colony, a pan-Asian empire, anarchist motherships, a friendly superintelligent AI, and an alien invasion led by an Evolved Intelligence that absorbs whole species. The miniatures are some of the best in the industry, and the look is anime-influenced sci-fi (very Ghost in the Shell, Appleseed, and Masamune Shirow in general) without being on the nose about it.
The other thing people undersell: the rules are free. Every rule is on the official Infinity Wiki, and Infinity Army, the official list builder, is free too. You can learn the game and build a list before you buy a single model.
The factions
Each Infinity faction has its own setting identity, its own look, and a way of playing that carries across its sectorials. The playable factions in N5:
- PanOceania. The dominant superpower of the Human Sphere. High-tech, rich, a little religious, and usually the “heavy infantry with the best toys” faction. The TAGs (giant mechs) are iconic.
- Yu Jing. The pan-Asian StateEmpire, the other superpower. Mecha-samurai look, flexible to play, with strong heavy infantry and a good spread of specialists.
- Ariadna. Descendants of a lost colony ship that crashed on the planet Dawn. Lower-tech, mostly camo and infantry, with an in-universe excuse to put French legionnaires, Scottish highlanders, Cossacks, and US Rangers in one army. Cheap orders, lots of camo markers, and brutal up close.
- Haqqislam. A faction built around trade, biotech, and the best medicine in the Sphere. Versatile mid-tier infantry, excellent doctors, and the Hassassin assassins.
- Nomads. Three motherships full of dissidents, hackers, and exiles. The hacker faction. The look runs from grimy techwear to cybernetic body horror.
- Combined Army. The alien invasion, led by the Evolved Intelligence (EI) and made up of the species it has absorbed. Big alien monsters, possessed humans, and tools the human factions don’t get.
- ALEPH. The Human Sphere’s official superintelligence, fielded as physical avatars and Recreations of figures from Greek myth. Achilles, Ajax, and Hector all show up. Elite and expensive.
- O-12. The Sphere’s international peacekeeping body, roughly the UN in space. A newer faction that plays like a high-tech intervention force.
- JSA. The Japanese Secessionist Army, which broke away from Yu Jing. Samurai, ninja, and yakuza.
- Tohaa. An old alien civilization whose warriors fight bonded to biotech symbionts, uneasy allies of humanity against the Combined Army. Still playable in N5, but the models are out of production.
- Non-Aligned Armies. Mercenaries, corporate security, and pirates who fight for whoever pays. Only sectorials here, like Druze Bayram Security, Ikari Company, and Dahshat Company.
Most of these have sectorials: smaller, focused armies (PanOceania’s Military Orders, Yu Jing’s Invincible Army, the Combined Army’s Morat Aggression Force, and so on) that restrict what you can take in exchange for unique units, links, and a tighter identity. Most veteran players play sectorials.
How to start
The fastest way into N5:
- Pick a faction. Browse the Corvus Belli store (our partner link, see above) by faction and find a look you like. You’ll be painting these a lot, so the look matters as much as the rules.
- Get a starter box. The cheapest way in is a two-player box. Corvus Belli has small Infinity Essentials: Start Here boxes for learning, and bigger Battle Packs, like Operation: Mazebreaker (ALEPH vs Nomads, 2026), with two forces in one box. If you already know your faction, each one has an Action Pack of about ten models.
- Read the rules for free. Everything is on the Infinity Wiki. Start with orders, ARO, the face-to-face roll, and the basic skills. You don’t need a hardback.
- Build a list on Infinity Army. Infinity Army is the official list builder. It’s free, runs in a browser, and stays current with N5.
- Play your first game small. N5 has an official 150-point beginner size on a 24 × 32 inch table, about 40 minutes. From there most people step up through 200 and 250 to the standard 300 once orders and ARO feel natural.
Terrain
Infinity takes a ton of terrain to play properly. The whole game runs on line of sight, and with ARO punishing every model that steps into the open, a sparse table turns into a shooting gallery where whoever goes first wins. You need a full 4 × 4 ft board packed with buildings, walkways, and stuff to hide behind.
If you’ve got a local club or store that already has Infinity tables, that’s great, you just show up. But if you’re trying to build a gaming scene yourself, or you don’t have a community to lean on, getting enough terrain for a full board is a big investment, in money and in hobby time. Budget for it the same way you budget for your first army.
I’ll have some guides on Infinity terrain setups coming in 2027.
How to get good
Get table time, and play with the wiki open. Infinity has one of the steeper learning curves of the big skirmish games, and a lot of that is just remembering what each model’s skills do and how they interact. Looking things up mid-game is normal even for good players.
When you want to push past the basics:
- Watch other people play. Robert Shepherd’s YouTube channel is where I’d start: battle reports, army reviews, and rules explainers. Watching an experienced player sequence their orders teaches more than rereading the rules.
- Play one faction for a long time. Most of the depth comes from knowing your sectorial cold: what every unit costs, what every skill does, what a good order spend looks like in the missions you play most. Hopping between factions slows that way down.
- Learn the missions. The competitive game is the ITS mission pack, which changes every season, and a lot of experienced players will tell you the missions decide more games than the lists do. Play the missions you’d see at a tournament.
- Build lists for the missions, not one army. Most wargames let you build one army and just rock out with it every game. Infinity doesn’t really work that way. Each scenario asks for different things, so you build your list for the mission you’re playing. At events you need lists that can score in every scenario on the pack, and ITS helps you out there: you bring two lists and pick which one to play before each match.
Organized play runs on ITS (the Infinity Tournament System), Corvus Belli’s ranked global circuit. You can play at sanctioned events in person, or online on Tabletop Simulator with the community Infinity mod through the Infinity Global League. Even if you never plan to compete, a local ITS event is one of the fastest ways to find regular opponents.
Community
Most of the Infinity community is online. The Discord that Corvus Belli’s own Start Here page points to is the busiest hub, Reddit is good for newer players, and the official forum is still around for deep rules questions.
Discords & forums
Infinity The Unofficial Discord
The big community Discord, linked from Corvus Belli's Start Here page
r/InfinityTheGame
Long-running Reddit community, good for newer players
Official Corvus Belli Forum
Still active for deep rules discussion
Infinity Global League
Discord for organized online play on Tabletop Simulator
Tools & references
Content creators
Social
The Hobbinomicon take
Infinity is the game I keep coming back to. At this point I have nearly a complete collection of Combined Army, and it’s one of the few full projects I’m holding onto through every purge.
The learning curve is real. For the first few games you spend more time looking up skills, and getting shot off the table, but still loving every second of it. Once the game clicks, no other skirmish game I’ve played has been as satisfying as Infinity is to me.
If you bounced off Infinity before because the rules felt like too much, N5 is a good time to come back. It cleaned up a lot of the friction that built up through N3 and N4, and the starter boxes make getting in easier than it’s ever been.
I sadly do not get to play this game as much as I would like, but once my kids get a little older this will be my main game hands down.
If you like Infinity, try
Other games in the directory that scratch the same itch.
Videos
More on YouTube →Painting guides
Recipes and schemes, paints named.
Tips for Batch Painting Unique Models
How to batch-paint a commission where every model is different — group by paint and material, not by armor panel. Plus a teaser of the Man Alone Prima Materia stone dice.
Painting References: Maximus (Infinity)
Reference photos, box art, and painting guides for Maximus, Optimate Hexadome Legend from Corvus Belli's Infinity.
Painting a Leather Belt
Day one of taking painting seriously—following Richard Gray's leather belt tutorial and discovering that competition-level painting isn't as impossible as it seems.
