Battletech

I tried something new (to me) yesterday - Battletech!

It looks like we have a few closet Battletech nerds at our club, and one of them proposed a game. A couple of us decided to give it a try as hangers-on.

Since we had learners, plus people who hadn't played it in years, we kept the game simple - Darren ran it, whilst Caesar, Colin, Bailey and myself played two mechs each - one light and one heavy. We played as two teams - Caesar and I ran some red ones, whilst Bailey and Colin ran a quartet of ones that weren't red.

To be honest it was something of a learning exercise for two of us, and an exercise in revision for the others, so we played fairly slowly, but I think we picked it up fairly quickly.

Here's out mechs making their initial advances. One of ours wasn't actually red, thanks to a last minute substitution. In the distance can be seen our opponents.

Into range, and the shooting starts, albeit not very effectively. The different dice next to the mechs show the combat modifier their move gives them, with the colour denoting the type of movement (red for running and blue for jumps).

And the white dice were for walking; obviously the better option if you want to hit what you're shooting at. 

My little mech got stuck right in, firing its lasers and missiles at anything it could whilst hiding from counter-attacks behind hills and woods. 

Caesar's smaller mech suffered a small setback when the opposition blew off its right leg. It spent the rest of the fight unable to get up.

I jumped my small mech into a nice position behind Bailey's small mech, and avenged Caesar by shooting off its right arm. The one with most of the weapons on it.

By this stage we were running out of time - there's a lot of tables and number-crunching to get to grips with - and called the last turn, which is a shame because we were just getting to the point where some mechs were starting to suffer issues with overheating and might have had to calm down their combat activities for a turn or so in order to cool down. 

However Last Turn Syndrome prevailed, and with nothing to lose I ran my smaller mech straight at one of its heavy opponents, and unloaded every weapon I had at it, overheating be damned! That close its unpleasantly large and powerful weapon was less effective or, at least, far less likely to hit me, thanks to it having trouble tracking moving targets at close range. I inflicted damage, but those big mechs have a lot of armour.

And that was it. We had a good time playing this, especially those people like Caesar and Colin who had played before and were getting right back into it, glowing with nostalgia. For me it was fun moving around big stompy mechs, although I felt that the game would be more fun with some giant reptiles using atomic breath  weapons as well. Mechs need monsters ...