valthonis wrote: Most of the boardgamers like the concept of Infinity, but not with the assembling/painting/collecting new units aspects.
Very true. That is why I didn't talk much about collecting aspect, instead repeating that you only need a starter and maybe a blister or two to play the game. Then I promised to paint starting force for everyone who bought a starter. This way 3 more boardgamers jumped into it.
Now it does require extra work painting but I make sure it is worth it for me too. See, I'm a bit of a narcisist, I want my miniatures to look all ooh-and-aah, but I don't have painting skills for that. So I use other people miniatures to practice
This way I get:
a) practice, without need to spoil my own miniatures, with my (still) average skills.
b) new players, who are more likely to jump into, if they know they don't have to paint if they don't want to,
c) brownie points for painting stuff for people for free.
I go as far as to to snipe good second hand deals on the web (I got Aleph starter basicly for half price) to lower people entry costs. Or I bring proxy miniatures, so they can test new units, before buying. Like I brought old GW minotaur for Caledonia player, and now he just bought himself his own Cameronian (that I'll get to paint :3 ). He is thinking about cateran and galwegians now...
And lo and behold, in time all of them get more interested, and bought more miniatures. And one of them found a latent passion for papercraft and printed and assembled a whole table worth of buildings, scatter and vehicles (so it's no longer me to do all the hard hobby work to get Infinity going
And now I have 5 other players, and 2 gameing afternoons a week - in a provincial town of 10k people with the nearest hobby store 40 miles away... (Granted, having a boardgame club there in the first place that I could hi-jack first for rpg and then for Infinity helped a lot
