Last year, the game that made me sort out a load of 6mm terrain was Adeptus Titanticus.
This year? Well, it’s the classic game, the one that’s been going for over 40 years in various forms: BattleTech. After our first game back in January, the Regular Opponents have decided to go all in on it. I received a box of them for my birthday and, after getting them painted earlier last week, we were all definitely feeling a touch excited about getting some mechs clashing on the board.
With Friday being a Bank Holiday in the UK, we decided it was time for a proper game using the full-size rules, adding in the heat mechanic to fight off the jetpack joyride of the last time we played. After a short snap of frantically building terrain on my lunch break (I was working the holiday due to taking a sizable chunk of time off at the start of the year for some reason) and a relatively quick drive over to the Dastardly Regular Opponent’s, we got to Mech-Warrioring. Time to run the video that mentally plays every time someone mentions BattleTech to me!
Now, we didn’t use ALL the terrain I’d made, mostly because we were relying on the hex-based grids so covering up might cause some issues. However, the industrial grey portions definitely helped to break up the board, as well as giving us some cool surroundings to play through. These double-sided sheets were from the box games and are a pretty good starting point to get you playing without needing 3D terrain (although the Creative Opponent came away from this looking up neoprene mats after we kept shuffling the baseboard around).
The teams were simple – The Dastardly Opponent and I would take on the role of the noble Inner Sphere defenders while the Creative Regular Opponent wheeled out the Clanners he had brought. The balance was very much “bring what you have” but it definitely didn’t feel unfair while playing. The Clanner mechs have some nasty little tactics and interesting setups that made them fun to play against.
Of course, it probably didn’t help that going into the game all of us were not particularly used to playing the game. I had only played an intro game while the other two had flirted a little bit with some solo games. This meant there was a lot of flicking back and forth to understand the stranger rules (still not quite sure what I should have been doing with my EW suite) but the core fundamentals we picked up pretty quickly.
Now, let’s talk about the fact the three of us had different devices sitting in front of us while we were playing. While usually frowned upon in tabletop games, for BattleTech running a tablet or laptop for your character sheets seems vital. We were using Flechs Sheets, which is such a cool piece of tech to make the paperwork side of Battletech much easier. As well as having basically all the profiles on record (making it easy to tweak our lances), the ability to just casually add damage and heat to see the effects definitely helped us keep focused during the game.
Seeing as we managed to play for about 4 hours and the time just flew by, I think the game worked out pretty great! For saying that none of us really knew how our mechs were going to play, we soon got into scraps and had a great deal of fun. I was lucky that my lance was mostly hidden from the Clanners by a building and a large hill, meaning that the Dastardly Regular Opponent got hit first by most of the light mech swarm. I had to work my way around the terrain before getting stuck in, meaning a few turns of gently trekking around while my ally was getting ripped to shreds. That said, first blood did go to the Inner Sphere as one of the light Clan mechs got ripped to shreds.
In contrast, my fight eventually became focused on the big boy – the Kodiak assault mech. With 40 points of armour on the torso portion, I ended up getting in a slugging match with the big boy. He had managed to get to the water source and used it to vent as much heat as possible every turn. This meant my Hunchback got absolutely shredded on the way, losing armour on various parts but still pushing forward., In return, I almost managed to crack the armour open as well as the Gauss cannon on my Victor inflicting a critical hit. If we’d had some more time, maybe we might have caused just a little more damage on each side, with lots of mechs looking not particularly happy by the end of it.
Battletech definitely takes a bit of getting used to but it’s a really fun game that nails the feel of these big walking machines slugging rounds at each other, chipping off chunks of armour until a round finds something important inside. I can see us playing a lot more of this – both of my Regular Opponents are definitely looking at the recent Kickstarter and sweating slightly, as well as already being itchingly close to getting some of the existing sets. As for me? I actually really want to learn to play the lance I have – people have definitely said some positive things about its construction, and even after one game I can see there is some handy variety that should work together. If I actually knew what I was doing, it might work out nicely for me
Although the clanners do have the Mad Cat…
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