MechWarrior

Last weekend I visited my godson and his sister and played another game of MechWarrior, which is relatively easy to pick up and play even if one has not played for a while.

Compare to the two previous times the biggest change is in my godson who is now elven, nearly twelve and growing up.  These are the things that happy memories are made of.

 

Compare the above shots to these, here and here.  Oh yes, I've gone blond in my old age.

Pastry cat made by his mum.  Yum, yum.  Hungry work playing games you know.

  

Young MechWarrior

  

Last time I saw my Godson Dylan he asked me to play a game of MechWarrior with him, which I duly did. It is amazing how rusty one gets with even a simple set of rules, but after a couple of turns most of it came back for both of us.

It reminded me how much I enjoy playing games, and how little I get to play them.

I emailed my gang of players asking to tell me dates for the next game that suits them. Not heard anything back yet. I'm also really excited to see that Ogre 6E from SJG is good-to-go too. I see this new edition very much as a Xmas present for me, and perhaps when Dylam comes to visit I will introduce him to Ogre too.
 

Colossus Class Tripeds

Usually when I put up a picture, like these MechWarrior Colossus Class mechs, I tend to chat about the models, which I will, but this time I will also be going off on a tangent. So no change there then I hear you all say!  

For the Classic Battletech  players these models epitomise all that was wrong about MechWarrior. First they are tripods and how silly is that? Second it was just another example of how Whiz Kids were just running roughshod over all that was sacred in Battletech by breaking the construction rules. Third, MechWarrior was a game with stupid clicky bases and silly rules.  

Anyway Whiz Kids produced four variants of the Colossus class mechs. My two favourites were the the blue Poseidon and orange and red Ares variants. I especially like the Ares, as the colour scheme really appeals to me, maybe  because it looks like camo for a hot dessert (sic) environment (sic after the event obviously one with jam and orange in it)? Anyway, I stole the idea and modified it slightly as the basis for my Republic of the Sphere units BattleTech scale mechs I've painted, which will no doubt get a blog entry of their own in due course.  

Anyway, I liked the Ares so much I decided I would have to make a BattleTech scale one, and I've been working on scratch building one for a while now. The trouble is time. I, like everyone else, am really busy everyday that ends in a Y, and I have so much to work on in my spare time that there really isn't enough hours in the day to do everything I want. 

So I like everyone else tends to prioritise what has to be done, or needs to be done first. In this case making and painting models for my Operation Sandbox campaign. However, as I mentioned previously, during the first game we talked about the Colossus mechs as part of the game, and this happened because I had my model of this mech on my work bench.

House Liao & Bannson's Raiders

  

Been busy doing nothing, but busy all the same this last week what with health checks and arranging stuff to go back to work after being ill for so long. The good news is that I've been building and painting stuff and working on a new campaign, which will start next week. 

I've therefore been thinking about how to run the campaign and decided that it will be quite free flowing and use various rule sets to portray different aspects of the game that the players will find themselves facing. So, for the really big battles I will be using MechWarrior Clix. It is a quick system that allows one to play out medium size actions, say up to a Battalion's worth of mechs, vehicles and infantry etc on the table. Fortunately over the last year I've built up quite a collection of clix models.

At the start of this piece are a few of my Brannson's Raiders, a mercenary unit that has connections with House Liao. I have a full Company of mechs with supporting forces to go with them.

Above is a picture of some of my House Liao mechs, and again I have substantial numbers of mechs and support forces for them. That is one of the things I love about the MechWarrior Clix game system, you can put a lot down on the table and just get on with getting it on. The funny thing is though, that it's highly unlikely that the players in my campaign will have to face these guys, but you never know when you have an open ended campaign where the players get to make their own sandcastles in the sandbox.

MechWarrior Born

  

Well I've just got back from visiting my God children in Brighton. I went because it was their mum's birthday, so I took a bunch of MechWarrior figures down with me for Dylan.

We played, starting with just one mech, vehicle and two infantry bases each, using the Solaris map to begin with and simplified starter rules. After getting the hang of the basic introductory rules, we introduced some more rules, like facing and indirect fire etc. Each time we played a new game we added a couple of new rules for Dylan to learn. We also played on the garden table, and on the floor of his bedroom. So Dylan also knows how to either count hexes, or measure the movement for his mechs.


By the end of the weekend we were fielding up to 6 mechs, with a bunch of vehicles and infantry in support. We also added pilot and equipment cards for the last two games we played. Dylan was quite keen to play. It probably helped that I had given him the Robotech DVDs the last time I visited, so he was all primed for giant stompy robot mech action.
   

Clan Jade Falcon

       

There are two things on needs to know about Clan Jade Falcon. The first is that they are a Clan force, and the second that they are called the Jade Falcons. Please excuse the Black Adder referential joke, but that pretty much sums up what I knew about the Falcons when I acquired some MechWarrior Clan mechs.

As a diehard in the wool (!?) OSR BattleTech player, the Clans have a lot of baggage for me, which is doubly ironic given that I got the chance to write and design the stats for a whole bunch of Clan mech designs on the 3055TRO. However, the rules for MechWarrior clix game focus on combined arms command & control, which means that the disparity in tech between the Clans and the Inner Sphere forces is less intrusive. That is not to say that Clan tech is less superior, as quite frankly I don't know, as I've not played enough games of MechWarrior, or spent enough time taking apart the mechanics of the game to say.

What I will say is that the Jade Falcon "totem" mechs look way cool, which is enough for me at this time.
 

Republic of the Sphere

  

As I said, when I first started buying MechWarrior: Dark Age/Age of Destruction miniatures, my only interest was in gaining enough infantry and battle-armour figures to fill my needs for BattleTech. In the process I acquired a small Republic of the Sphere force, which you can see below. After reading some of the tie in novels I've come to appreciate the RotS and after playing a game of MechWarrior clix I've come to really appreciate the game mechanisms, which make for a quick fun filled game.

The big thing about BattleTech and the MechWarrior universe is the richness of the background. Up until quite recently I was very much an Old School Retread, having started with the game back in dawn of time. Measured as 25 years of my life having passed by. A long time indeed. Back then it was the end of the 3rd Succession War and the beginning of the 4th, which of itself was quite a big shake up from a post apocalypse Mad Max universe, to one where new battlemechs were being produced and large wars became a possibility. However, the invasion of the Clans was for me a step too far. Twenty years later the Clans are integrated much better into the universe and the game.

After the Clans came other stuff, like the FedCom Civil war. I like civil wars as a background for generating conflicts, because it allows for factionalism and politics. I missed most of the fun though, since I had fallen by the wayside and only came back for the Jihad. A name to strike fear into one, and certainly an apt description for a game of conflict. I love the way that the über weapons that the Word of Blake have such appalling consequences, which seems to me to make for a balance of sorts, but the promise to return to the roots of BattleTech in a future Dark Age really intrigued me.

At the beginning of the Dark Age we have a universe which has been Balkanised by the previous century of warfare. I especially liked the setting for the game in the impending breakup of the Republic of the Sphere. The premise being that after a number of years of peace and prosperity the interstellar communication network goes down, which reduces everyone to only being able to communicate at the speed of the jumpships. Law and order breaks down as a result of fear and opportunism.

The RotS is split into 10 districts called Prefectures, which were formed of planets that had been seceded at the end of the Jihad by the major powers of the Inner Sphere. This means that each prefecture has a mix of their former factions citizens who do not necessarily think that being ruled by the RotS is a good thing. These groups form factions that are effectively in revolt as they take advantage of the loss of centralised control. A very clever way of setting up conflicts in the game universe.

So we get to see the introduction of proxy forces like the Dragon's Fury, the Storm Hammers, and the Swordsworn, which represent House Kurita, Steiner & Davion interests in the RotS. In addition, we have Bannson's Raiders, a mercenary unit funded by a wealthy RotS magnate, and some Clans too (Steel Wolves & Spirit Cats). Finally, we have the Highlanders who are a RotS faction in their own right, but loyal to the RotS. Really, what more can you ask for when setting out to fight games in a time of war? You have reasons for fighting, opportunities to fight, factions to fight with and for me this really works.

I understand that a lot of the old time BattleTech fans rather disliked the abandonment of the classical House politics they were use to, but for me this future was fresh, and allowed new players to get in on the action without feeling that they needed to know 20 years of in universe history. Of course now, with the closure of WhizKids, MechWarrior has been left high and dry, but I'm a firm believer that it is the players who make the games live, not the the publishers. So long live MechWarrior: Age of Destruction.
   

Northwind Highlanders

  

Here is a selection of the largest of the three MechWarrior: Dark Age/Age of Darkness forces that I acquired when buying infantry and battle-armour figures for my BattleTech support regiment.

I actually now have quite a few more since I took the above picture, as quite frankly buying MechWarrior Booster packs is, I imagine, a little bit psychologically like taking crack cocaine. You get the rush of the hit and then afterwards you want another hit again.

As those of you who have been following this blog know, I only bought a load of MechWarrior infantry figures so I could make up squads of infantry for playing BattleTech. Little did I know then that I'd get bitten by the bug that is MechWarrior frenzy, and I've just played my first ever MechWarrior Dark Age clix game this weekend. Clive and I set up a training game with 200 points per side. We each had a battlemech, two vehicles and three stands of infantry. Including reading the rule book through from cover to cover, It took us a couple of hours to play the game from set up to finish. By the end of the game I had got my head around the order that the stats were on the dial, after initially confusing myself with the order that the damage and attack values were placed on the dial.

The combat dial is a fabulous idea, because the information density is high, while paperwork is low. However, MechWarrior is not BattleTech, well no surprise there as one is spelt MechWarrior, and the other BattleTech. Seriously though, MechWarrior is actually a Command & Control game, whereas BattleTech is a game of battlemech dueling. When I get around to playing BattleForce Quick Strike I will be able to compare all three systems and feedback here what I like. So to sum up. MechWarrior has some really interesting game mechanics, and a nice balance of play from the game mechanisms. I'm really looking forward to playing another game sooner, rather than later, and I'm even more motivated to buy stuff.