The Strange Parallels of the two Fantasy Infinity's
(I needed to infodump about Warcrow and Eldfall Chronicles so I did that over on Bluesky but I kind of hate how the formatting of that site ruins longform posts so congrats tumblr, you get my recycled thoughts here, but with some better formatting)
So to preface this, I need to really repeat that I'm not making any accusations of plagiarism and that I love both of these games for different reasons but that this entire thing was prompted both by me getting back from NOVA having played a lot of Warcrow before finally assembling my much delayed box of Eldfall minis and by the insanity creeping in as Steam refuses to let me buy Silksong.
Good, let's jump into this.
First, I have to play some catch up because 99% of you will not know a single thing I'm talking about here. I'm not going to explain miniature wargaming to you, I'm going to expect you to figure out that out on your own, but otherwise let's talk about some games that ended up sharing the title of "Fantasy Infinity"
These are Warcrow, made by Corvus Belli, and Eldfall Chronicles, by Freecompany.
So the first thing the majority of you will probably wonder is "What is Infinity?"
Infinity is a miniature wargame (at skirmish scale, meaning less miniatures than a typical wargame) also by Corvus Belli set in a scifi world with deep political intrigue that pulls from various genres of scifi with the most over across the board being cyberpunk and military sci fi, with some factions dipping heavier into those two themes than others, along with alien invasion and mecha. It's anime inspired, but largely it's about playing a small team of operatives on black ops missions against an enemy team set in an odd cold war/proxy war kind of setting where you're playing the people doing the most important jobs compared to the actual battlefield fights that occasionally erupt.
It's highly lethal and uses a d20 system where you roll under your stats but above your opponent to perform actions as they react to you going through all your activations in a turn before they get to go. It's carved out a niche for itself under the giant shadow that is Warhammer with a much smaller model count but with more complicated rules on average for each individual model. Typically you're referencing a wiki of skills, weapons, and effects.
Corvus Belli has been playing with a fantasy setting for a long time now and last year they finally managed to deliver on it with Warcrow.
Thing is, Warcrow is extremely different of a game. The lore is written similarly, with several factions scattered throughout its world that all have strong virtues and vices that have a grounded rationale behind them despite the high fantasy tones. Magic was gone from this world for a long time and people developed their own history in a realistic way. I can't stress enough how reading the lore books for Infinity and Warcrow feels similar to each other.
AS for gameplay, they couldn't be more different. Using small units ranging from 1 to 4 models, and ditching the d20's it goes for a set of custom dice and its own measuring system based on 15mm increments (with front to back movement compared to exact measurement), the game uses a dicepool system where you roll dice that are colored based off how "good" they are (with some units wanting worse dice for the symbols on them when they roll) and compare the pool to your opponent's counting successes against each other and activating abilities off the symbols in the pool. It's also an alternating activation system and far less vertical because of how it plays and is far less crunchy on average.
I've gone to bat for the system multiple times as it works in practice despite being something that makes a lot of wargamers upset, as it produces an easier game feel and lets you offload a lot of mental math for at a glance evaluations. Anyways, the game feel ends up closer to Marvel Crisis Protocol, Star Wars Shatterpoint, or Star Wars Legion rather than Infinity, and that is off-putting for a lot of Infinity players.
Meanwhile Eldfall Chronicles is actually the I Go Then You Go, d20 roll-under-but-higher-than-opponent, individual model activation and reaction system with a lot of keywords on both models and weapons with far more stats on a single model to look at (and verticality to its gameplay). The actual execution ends up feeling very different, but it's far closer to Infinity than Warcrow ends up being.
So I often end up seeing a lot of Infinity players who pop into Warcrow looking to see if it's for them only to bounce off because they were expecting the same transferable skills that going from 40k to Age of Sigmar or Horus Heresy has than what Warcrow is going for.
But the point of this infodumping is about the weird similarities that I reflected on while looking over the two games.
Starting with the fact that both of these games launched crowdfunders for a board game version of their games that uses the core gameplay of the skirmish game in the board game, with models from the board game being useable in the skirmish mode.
Note, Warcrow actually started out by crowdfunding their board game, called Warcrow Adventures, before the skirmish game and due to delays ended up releasing after the skirmish game whereas Freecompany used their crowdfunder for effectively the second release wave of their Skirmish game, so it's kind of reversed here.
Funny thing ended up happening though where Warcrow's first boxset ended up being called Winds from the North while the board game for Eldfall ended up being called Northern Winds.
Again, jumping ahead of the plagarism witch hunt, if I remember correctly, despite Winds from the North releasing before Northern Wind in the end, Northern Wind's crowdfunder predated it by almost a year or two, but apparently Winds from the North's marketing was in development for awhile. So just an odd coincidence that made my life harder as I had to remember what was called what while I waited for my minis to arrive.
If that was the only similarity, I wouldn't make a post this long or explain this much, I'd just toss these two images up and laugh about it. What makes this funny is the other things.
Both of these games are advertised as narrative experiences over competitive ones, meaning their rules are meant to tell stories over being focused on tightly balanced gameplay. (I have my issues with Warcrow's overall execution of this due to how a large amount of the more narrative rules are relegated to tutorial missions and a one off downloadable one for a single faction, but I'm giving the benefit of the doubt that they're waiting for the final 6th faction to release before putting out a product intended to fit the whole game with a campaign).
In both of these games, you're limited to a rather strict and rather low point total for the genre, with Warcrow standardized at 250pts that usually puts you at 6-8 units total, almost always running under 20 minis per side most times, while Eldfall has a 85pt total standard and results in an extremely small number closer to 3 or 4 minis per side.
List building in both games feels like you're under pressure and forces you to make cuts very early and very often to the point that people have wondered if the total will be raised as the games expand.
Also of note is the fact that both games have modes where you hunt monster NPCs for points, hoping to score the last hit and win the "kill". Warcrow does this in its campaign missions but otherwise tends to have more standard skirmish style missions while Eldfall has this as an evergreen mission type complete with multiple monster types to fight and several rudimentary flowcharts to run them. This game also includes missions such as ambushing your opponent or hunting a bounty on one of their guys in particular as the main goal.
Both also involve using stats uncommon for typical wargames to actually negotiate at points, with Warcrow even having a midgame persuasion roll (Eldfall instead has a more "typical" payment negotiation and reputation mechanic).
Going back to the board games, we have our last odd similarity and the reason I ended up reflecting on this so much, as I went to NOVA with a team of goblins from the Warcrow Adventures board game only to sit down and build out the Northern Winds box the week afterwards: Both of these games used their board games to drop an "evil" faction in the game that utilizes undead as well as a goblin faction.
Again, cutting off any drama stirring here, Warcrow had dark elves with a penchant for fleshshaping and the goblins in question are a subfaction within the larger Scions of Yaldabaoth faction serving what is effectively a drow. Meanwhile Eldfall's evil faction were Oni who raised skeletons and ghosts and the goblins were more traditional and a completely separate faction.
Still as I was reflecting on building these, I saw on Warcrow's reddit yet another lost Infinity player who was wondering why this "fantasy Infinity" didn't seem to resemble what they were expecting and all of this hit me at once, making me want to reflect on it (and no other reason. Just accept the payment already steam. Let me play my bug game!)
