Pyrrhic Victory

So today I wandered down to the local hobby shop to participate in a little game of Battletech.

Battletech is one of the oldest "giant stompy robot" games and is probably the brand leader in that particular genre. I used to play it a bit back in the day and while I sat in on a demo game with a friend a couple years back, it's really been years since I've played.

The guy running the event has a nice batch of mechs and he's also got some great terrain set up. He (and his girlfriend apparently) spent a lot of time crafting GHQ Terrain Maker tiles so you could play a 3-D game without worrying about the measuring tape. There were eight of us (about three of whom had recent play experience) and the idea was that we'd pair off into groups of two and fight to the nuclear explosion. The survivor would then square off against the next guy to win his fight and so on until one stood supreme.

I was playing a heavily modified Huntsman which is a 50-ton run-and-gun mech. It was fairly speedy, had jump jets to fly around and had a couple of medium pulse lasers, an AC10 and a PPC -- so it could fly around and hit you with the lasers or it could stand still and hammer you with the PPC or it could fly around and shoot everything and then shut down from all the heat it generated. Pretty standard. My opponent was in a lighter mech who was even speedier and had fairly accurate medium lasers but no heavy punch (or at least no heavy punch that wouldn't force it to slow way down).

The basic problem revealed itself almost immediately: my opponent was just fast enough that win or lose initiative (and he usually won), he could control the range and if he won (forcing me to move first), I had to move carefully, or he'd jump in behind me and take shots at my vulnerable rear facing. His shooting was accurate but didn't do much damage whereas my shots were less accurate but could really put the hurt on if they connected.

So we spent a long time jumping around like fleas while taking pot shots at one another. He got a lot of hits, but he never hit the same spot twice so I was in halfway decent shape. I only hit him every now and then, but I kept scraping through his torso armor. We played pretty much the entire game scouring away at each other.

Then I screwed up a piloting roll, fell over, and snapped off my left arm. I was pretty sure that was about it, but I staggered to my feet and chased after him. Determined to end this one way or another, I charged in close, let fly with everything I had left and obliterated him. I won. I was a wreck, a one-armed, skeletal assembly shambling across the field, but I'd beaten my opponent. So now it was on to the next free guy.

It turns out the next free guy was the only one left. Me and my guy took so long to finish that everyone else was out except for the finalist. We both took a turn to cool off our engines. He was holed up in a castle (built strictly as a tourist attraction) and looked to be tough to winkle out. But he had taken on at least 3 other mechs and was in as bad a shape as I was.

There was only one thing to do -- go balls out and finish this.

So I moved into range and we traded shots. My salvo ripped him to shreds and his return fire returned the favor. We both went up in nuclear fireballs. So...a satisfying end? Well, it was fun and I got a story out of it. I think the only winner was the pilot who went unconscious and was declared eliminated since he at least woke up to find himself the loser rather than everyone else who just flat-out died. In any event, we packed up the game and retired for beer and lunch.

I still don't know about this game. It's all about the mechs to the exclusion of everything else and I feel like there's a few steps in the hit/damage process that could be consolidated to speed things up. But it is a well-supported game and has enough opponents that you could get a game together every so often.

I did really like the terrain the guy had set up. I was surprised to discover that the tiles were just that -- tiles and that you have to paint/flock them to be whatever terrain you want. Considering all the work you have to go through to get the tiles put together, I wonder why you wouldn't just go the distance and buy sheets of blue foam and cut them into hex shapes yourself. In any event, having a bunch of them put together could make for some really nice hex-based games (either hex games converted to minis or free-forms mini games on a hex grid).