Battletech: Alpha Strike

Daren hosted a game of Battletech: Alpha Strike last night. This is a fast-play set of rules designed for larger games than regular Battletech; it has a lot less detail but as a consequence plays much more quickly. It also drops the hex-grid in favour of a regular tabletop. That said, we used Darren's huge modular hexes for some of the terrain, so that confused things for a moment.

Here's the terrain - we had a large city on a third of the table, and some countryside on the other, with an objective in each. There were four of us playing, with Darren adjudicating. Here you can see Stuart setting up his mechs.

We played as individual players, each of us running eight mechs aside from Caesar who had a force of lighter mechs and had twelve of them. I set mine up on the edge of the city.

A showdown along a street with some of Caesar's mechs.

Stuart started his mechs out in the countryside, whilst Caesar, Ed and I all started in and around the city. This allowed Stuart to easily take the one objective. Stuart's force was also behind hills and woods relative to Caesar and Ed's, and behind an entire city relative to mine. So he remained relatively unopposed and somewhat out of the fight.

Meanwhile I found myself opposed by both Caesar and Ed, being stuck between both of them. My chunky mechanical monsters put up a decent fight but were somewhat outnumbered and, I confess, out-manoevered as well.

Combat in Alpha Strike is brutal. A mech can fire at one target in a turn, rolls to hit on 2D6 and does a certain amount of damage depending on range. Mechs have a series of armour boxes, then some structural boxes. Losing armour has pretty much no additional effect (there's a small risk of a critical hit), but each time you lose structural boxes you take a critical. Lose all your boxes and you're destroyed. Some small mechs have fewer boxes total than the amount of damaged dished out by the larger ones, so  will die to a single hit.

My three mechs in the street could soak up a fair bit of punishment, but one survived for a couple of turns on its last structural hit and Caesar's continued inability to hit it.

A view of the battle in the city. Whilst Ed and Casar took the odd shot at each other, most of it was blue and red shooting at olive-drab.

Stuart reminds us that he has some mechs as well.

Red mechs advancing on the city.

We fought them in the streets and we fought them on the rooftops.

OK, here's a shot of Start's mechs, who had been bogged down by terrain and blocked from effective shooting at anyone else. But when we called time they were the only team to actually hold an objective.

There was a fair bit of chrome in the game which we didn't play, but we certainly gave the basics of the game a good outing. They really do play a lot faster than Battletech, at the expense of a lot of the fiddly detail that I'm sure some aficionados enjoy. The main thing is that we got to rampage around the table with big mechs and shoot at each other, and that made for a great evening. 

Thanks to Darren for organising everything, Ed and Caesar for teaching me the ins and outs of recording damage and Stuart for providing a lovely static diorama at the other end of the table.