Spanish miniature wargame maker Corvus Belli is calling 2026 the "Year of the Crow" - it's the firm's 25th anniversary, and it has every reason to crow about its successes. It's a remarkable milestone for any business, especially in an industry that chews up and spits out promising companies without remorse. In this article we're looking back on the growth of Corvus Belli, from its origins making historical miniatures, the launch of its hit sci-fi wargame Infinity, up to the present day and its rapidly growing fantasy skirmish game Warcrow.
Corvus Belli has always been a company owned and operated by creatives. Founded in Spain by three friends in 2001, the firm started out with just the sculptors Fernando Liste and Carlos Torres, and Pilar Rivero, united by a passion for gaming and miniatures.
Corvus Belli's very first releases were 15mm scale historical figures for games like De Bellis Antiquitatis: Roman infantry, Celtic chariots, Carthaginian war elephants, the works. The company name was chosen as an homage to the Celtic war goddess Morrigan, and might simply have been "Corvus" if the matching web domain wasn't already taken.
In 2002, CB launched a range of 28mm scale fantasy models, perfect for roleplaying, under the name 'Warcrow'. There's little to connect these figures with the studio's recent wargame of the same name, but it was an early indication that the team wasn't going to hang around making historical minis for long. Another key early team member, Fernando's sister Begoña Liste, joined this year as an administrative mastermind for the growing firm.
The origins of Infinity
It's difficult to say when exactly development on Infinity began, because it started life as a heavily modified Dungeons and Dragons game run by friends of the team Gutier Lusquiños and Alberto Abal. The CB team spotted a real opportunity to take the incredible setting and make a game from it: there hadn't been a really successful skirmish level sci-fi wargame since Games Workshop's Necromunda in 1998. And for the sculptors on the team, it was an excuse to make original minis with an anime aesthetic.
Alberto Abal and Gutier Lusquiños both joined as full time staff to work on Infinity. The game ultimately released in 2005, and as Fernando Liste puts it, it was "the universe and game that made our company truly viable".
Infinity's rules were unlike anything else. The distinction between 'active' and 'reactive' turns meant that players were always part of the game, giving them opportunities to respond and mitigate the worst impact of their opponents' moves. The flexible order system, which allows players to split their activations however they like between models, allows for very unpredictable gameplay, with a single model able to 'go rambo' and achieve the mission objective by gobbling up their entire fireteam's orders. The system has been finessed since then, but a game of the current N5 edition - like the battle report below - is built on the spine of the very first edition.
Infinity's origin as a D&D spin-off is still evident in its rules, most obviously in its use of D20s instead of D6s. It's also one of the most flexible and expressive wargames, with a range of skills and sci-fi gear that wouldn't look out of place in an RPG. Models can move and shoot, of course, but they might also be able to hack an enemy mech so it ejects the pilot, or detect a model hidden by thermoptic camo using only their sense of smell, or disable a power-armored model by covering it in instant-setting glue, or lay mines, or fire a deployable signal repeater across the map and use it to fry an enemy hacker's brain…
Over the years, some player characters from the original RPG campaign have made their way into Infinity as special characters. Carlos Torres played "Cuervo" Goldstein, while Alberto Abal took on the role of Bran do Castro, both of them ex-criminals, but with different pasts, one a former Jewish independence fighter, the other the orphaned child of political pariahs in a Nomad cityship who went on to serve in a suicide-squad style convict unit.
Infinity's setting is unique. It's set in a transhuman future where recognisable ethnic and religious groups from earth have become radically new societies in space. A mysterious disaster meant that although Europe, America, and Russia were the first to colonise an alien world, their settlement developed far slower than any others; then, what remained of the European Union was subsumed into the new superpower PanOceania, an alliance including India, Brazil, Chile, Indonesia, Australia, and New Zealand. It's this kind of foundational detail that means Infinity has Catholic space knights in power armor, and they just happen to be in the same faction as the Sikhs.
There are hidden depths beyond Infinity's anime aesthetic. The game has a real sense of fun, with concepts like dog soldiers (sci-fi werewolves), clones of historical heroes, and very obvious pop culture references in the mix. The Combined Army - the menacing alien faction impinging on human space - isn't just an interesting background threat, but part of an ongoing space opera plot - another big difference from Warhammer 40k, which in 2005 was completely static. And the faction of Haqqislam remains a standout to this day as one of very few explicitly Islamic factions in a sci-fi wargame: it debuted at a time when Islamophobia was rife in Western media.
Despite Infinity's roots in RPGs, it would also prove popular with competitive gamers as well. Corvus Belli launched the Infinity Tournament System in 2010, complete with prize support for participating communities - this competitive mission pack is now onto its 17th season.
The firm has always been been supportive of its community. Coder and Infinity fan Jesús Uve launched Infinity Army around 2010, a web application that provided army lists, model stats, and a roster building tool for players to easily configure their forces. Corvus Belli gave it their seal of approval in 2012, and have been supporting it as an official component of the game ever since - and Uve has since joined the company as a game designer, designing the board game Aristeia and leading on design for Warcrow.
One sign of Infinity's growing success was the wave of firms that started to make terrain for the game. The battlefields of Infinity were where laser-cut MDF terrain first took hold, resulting in a huge variety of multi-story cyberpunk buildings with interestingly placed stairs, balconies, overhangs, and shop signs. Whoever worked out that laser-cut colored plastic makes for perfect holographic adverts, we raise our hat to you.
Infinity breaks out
Infinity ticked over to a revised second edition in 2012, which consolidated the rules and new models that had joined the game over the previous few years. It also began to push the metaplot forward with a series of expansions, which were all playable in narrative campaign packs.
Second Edition also added two defining elements of the game via the Human Sphere expansion. Sectorial Armies are subfactions that draw from a limited pool of troops, but benefit from access to Link Teams, highly-coordinated subgroups of soldiers who need fewer orders to activate and benefit from acting in concert. The benefits and trade-offs of Link Teams have been rebalanced across subsequent editions, but there's an undeniable cool factor of seeing a tight spec-ops unit advancing up the board as one.
If anything slowed the adoption in America and the UK, it was that the first wave of sculpts ranged from good to janky, and none of the team writing the game were native English speakers, resulting in already detailed rules further confused by inexpert translations. Third edition - aka Infinity N3 - released in 2014, and completely changed that.
The models that released alongside third edition were a night and day improvement over everything that had come before: at the time, they were simply the most detailed sculpts in any wargame. The rules were more streamlined, slightly more focused on gameplay over strict simulation, but just as importantly the translation was much clearer.
The most visible change was the addition of the Tohaa, a new alien faction not allied with the Combined Army who used unique bio-engineered wargear. The Tohaa are long-term enemies of the Combined Army who had maneuvered humanity into their foe's path to buy themselves time - they've since had a substantial impact on Infinity's evolving plot.
2014 was also the year that Corvus Belli launched the first Interplanetario, an annual convention complete with painting contests, grand tournaments for Infinity, and opportunities for fans to meet the creative team. Almost 10 years on from its debut, Infinity was solidly established in the pantheon of great miniature wargames.
To Infinity and beyond!
N3 was a long-lasting edition, but Corvus Belli hardly sat on its laurels in the years that followed. In 2015 it collaborated with RPG designers Modiphius to develop the Infinity tabletop RPG, based on the 2D20 system. The Kickstarter was hugely successful, and stretch goals funded 17 expansion books on top of the core rules, creating guidebooks for every faction in the game, campaigns, and more besides. In 2018 physical copies were finally available on general sale, reconnecting Infinity with its RPG roots.
2017 saw Corvus Belli's first major board game project, Aristeia, hit shelves. Aristeia is a popular combat sport in the Infinity universe, where teams of grandstanding gladiators battle it out in a high-tech arena. A boardgame adaptation of this sci-fi spectacle gave Infinity's designers a perfect excuse to cut loose with their silliest and most fun ideas (including a really blunt reference to Kung Fu Panda). While support for Aristeia lapsed around about the time a certain unpopular disease made everyone stay indoors, Corvus Belli hasn't given up on it - a revised edition, called Hexadome Legends, is in the works right now, and there's already a free demo for a videogame adaptation.
After Aristeia, the firm turned to Kickstarter to produce several massive board games - the sci-fi dungeon crawler Infinity Defiance in 2019, massive mech-vs-monster TAG Raid in 2021, and fantasy dungeon crawler Warcrow Adventures in 2022. These have all been opportunities for the designers to stretch themselves in different ways, whether that's by releasing its biggest models ever in TAG Raid, or developing rules concepts that would later find a home in a new wargame…
The fourth edition of Infinity arrived in 2020, along with a new, more beginner-friendly variant of the game, CODE One. A lot of Infinity's complexity comes from the incredible range of options open to players when they build their armies, and the sheer detail the game puts into making sure sci-fi gizmos work just right - if you want to know what happens when a model in an invisibility suit reacts to a self-destructing robot teddy bear drone by deploying an EMP mine, Infinity has rules for it. CODE One went back to basics and focused on the core systems that make Infinity compelling: the flexible order system, interactive reactions, and core sci-fi tools like guns and hacking devices.
Warcrow returns
The Kickstarter for Warcrow Adventures in 2022 was actually the first public taste of a much bigger project, which had been in the works behind the scenes for a long time. It arrived in 2023 and introduced players to the world of Lindwurm, a planet where the passage of the strange star Warcrow makes the forces of magic grow strong, leading to eras of turmoil before it finally leaves the heavens. That was just a prelude, because in 2024 Corvus Belli launched the first two-player battle pack for a new fantasy wargame, simply called 'Warcrow'.
Warcrow is played with small forces, just like Infinity, but it's a far more streamlined game, with pools of custom dice that quickly resolve whether models hit in combat and which special effects they can apply to their attacks. Though Lindwurm is a high fantasy world, complete with magic, elves, orcs, dwarves, and more, the model designers have a deep love of historical weaponry and armor - design lead Carlos Torres is even a proficient medieval swordsman - resulting in armor that would actually work.
Just as the Infinity universe has a lot going on under the glossy anime surface, Warcrow's takes on familiar high fantasy tropes are carefully reworked. This was really obvious with the 2025 release of the Scions of Yaldabaoth, magically attuned elves who are heavily into body modification. They may look like a daemonic faction, but they're not -their perspective is certainly different, but they're as capable of being good or bad as any other sentient species.
2024 ended with a bang and the release of the fifth edition of Infinity. Corvus Belli capped off plotlines that had been developing for over a decade in the Endsong expansion for Infinity N4, which saw the Combined Army's forces finally smash through humanity's blockades, an underhanded plot by the Tohaa almost destroy a capital world, and foundational assumptions of the setting overturned. It opened the way for some incredible new plotlines, like the new Next Wave faction which was released in 2025 - new human forces serving in the Combined Army, led by survivors of one of humankind's most elite units.
Infinity is all about asymmetric, guerilla warfare, and in 2025 Corvus Belli deployed some unusual tactics of its own to gain ground in the miniature wargaming market. The Corvus Nest is a new incubator program to help content creators make more and better videos, podcasts, and articles about Infinity and Warcrow, with mentorship from industry experts and early access to media materials. That's backed up by a new affiliate scheme open to content creators with any size of audience, to help support their work through affiliate sales.
This brief history skips over thousands of developments, big and small, in lore, game design, miniatures, manufacturing techniques, plus tie-in novels, comic books, even Joy Toy action figures. Corvus Belli has changed a lot from its scrappy origins, but at its core it's still led by a group of nerds united with a shared love of miniatures and gaming.
As for what's next, CB has already teased a little of what's on the horizon. The sixth Warcrow faction, Mounthaven, will bring a full army of dwarves to the game - and this year will see the return of Aristeia as Hexadome Legends. Somewhere in the future is an animated Infinity TV series, the videogame Hexadome Tactics, another mysterious videogame that Corvus Belli has only hinted at so far, and we've no doubt there's oodles of cool miniatures in the works. We absolutely can't wait.