You ladies of lubricity
That dwell in the bordello
Ha-ha ha-ha, ha-ha ha-hee
For I am that kind of fellow
- Patrick O'Brian, Post Captain
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The Beginner Box is a cute little set that's very cheap. It comes with two mechs, a fold-out hex map and a couple of leaflets, including a small set of "getting started" rules.
**
The biggest disappointment in all of this is the fluff. There are decades of material and backstory and whatnot to Battletech - but you'll find none of that here. There's one little foldout with a galaxy map, and barely any material at all to get a handle on anything. I don't understand how you get your hands on an intellectual property like Battletech and then make this little effort to immerse people in it.
If you want the opposite experience, there's the PC game Battletech, which does great job getting you into the fluff and everything - and then absolutely refuses to explain how anything in the actual game works, or provide any kind of manual. Is it a law of Battletech that you can have either the fluff or the rules explained to you, but never both? The game itself was all right; I wasn't really that impressed, and the hardware requirements were brutal for my poor laptop.
If you want the opposite experience, there's the PC game Battletech, which does great job getting you into the fluff and everything - and then absolutely refuses to explain how anything in the actual game works, or provide any kind of manual. Is it a law of Battletech that you can have either the fluff or the rules explained to you, but never both? The game itself was all right; I wasn't really that impressed, and the hardware requirements were brutal for my poor laptop.
I have been reading up on the fluff on sarna.net, though, and one thing I'll definitely say for Battletech is that it's not often you get to play a wargame as the telephone company. So I think purely in honor of that, I have to paint at least one mech in ComStar colors. As it happens, that means white, and as I found when I got back into painting miniatures with Star Wars: Rebellion, I love painting dirty white. So I've decided to paint the Wolverine that came with the starter box as a ComStar mech.
I am delighted to note that the Wolverine has been produced by, among others, a company called Bordello Military Goods, Inc. I wonder if the people responsible for that knew what a bordello is.
The other mech in the box is a Griffin, apparently originally from an early 1980s anime, but also Soundwave. Looking into the fluff, I find that like in so many other fictional properties, there's a girls' faction. I had a House Escher gang in Necromunda, I'll have a Magistracy of Canopus, um, lance? in Battletech. Delightfully, the uniform color for the Magistracy Armed Forces is turqoise and black, which I intend to fully embrace. Here's my first shot at a color scheme.
This Griffin represents my mechwarrior mercenary company, the 11th Riedquat Rangers (Electra's Own).
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My first proper Battletech experience, however, happened at our friendly local game store, which hosted a Battletech event earlier this month. I grabbed myself a Hunchback from the mechs on offer, and ended up facing an Enforcer.
I was given a record sheet, and we started rolling a whole bunch of 2d6s. I had some success firing my giant autocannon at the Enforcer, eventually destroying its left torso completely. The Enforcer's return fire knocked my mech down, but I got up again.
The rules were actually pretty simple, certainly with an experienced player to walk me through them, and actually kinda fun. Although my superior firepower was having an impact, I wanted to have an appropriately Warhammer ending and try the mêlée rules: my Hunchback charged in.
The rest of the battle could hardly have gone more dramatically: our mechs traded blows on the roof of a building, until my Hunchback punched my opponent's mech in the face, killing his pilot!
**
I very much enjoyed my first Battletech experience, and I'm going to try to play more. There's whole oceans of rules, fluff and miniatures to get into here, and the Epic player in me can't help but notice all these tanks and infantry and whatnot, all in a very familiar scale...
I very much enjoyed my first Battletech experience, and I'm going to try to play more. There's whole oceans of rules, fluff and miniatures to get into here, and the Epic player in me can't help but notice all these tanks and infantry and whatnot, all in a very familiar scale...
2 comments:
I recently played a demo game of a BT variant called Alpha Strike that removed the mech sheet with all its armour boxes and boiled it down to a single card and a single damage value (rather than firing each weapon). I've played old school BT and found myself gravitating to this new ruleset. It plays much much faster and it's way easier to control multiple mechs like a lance. You should have gotten some AS cards in your basic set since they game is kind of designed to force you to buy the basic box if you want the minis.
Yeah I'm pretty sure there's Alpha Strike cards in the box. I've never played any Battletech before, and I think I prefer the more baroque classic rules. I mean I picked up the Total Warfare book, and I'm simply in awe of the pages they've spent on skidding during movement.
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