Sad news, friends.
The saddest of news.
I'm no longer allowed to memorialize the sainted Myndo Waterly within our yearly event. Something something Word of Blake were the baddies all along yadda yadda nuclear warfare and chemical weapons et cetera et cetera. It sounds like heretic Comstar spreading misinformation again to me, but whatevs.
At any rate! My printer was/is down for a bit so I had to get a little more creative with force building this year. Using the ASForceBuilder and the Alpha Strike cards packaged with each Force Pack, I threw together six pretty solid Clan Stars. Sean is bemoaning all of the Clan games lately whilst his beloved FedSuns languishes unused, but we'll be making up for that shortly.
Game one was a Star v Star match up with me and Sean, where he ultimately triumphed. One of the biggest gripes for me, with Alpha Strike, is that it really isn't super tactical if you're just doing straight up deathmatches (as the next game showed) so it mostly just comes down to "if I hit one more attack roll than you, I'll probably win" sometimes. Especially in games where Clan 'Mechs are prevalent, there's almost zero reason to worry about survivability & instead focus on full-ass glass cannon existence. At least for pick up games and one-offs.
Coincidentally, though, as I've pointed out numerous times, a lot of 3025 or before 'Mechs (things w/o XL engines, even stuff like the Mackie) really out perform Clan machines on a point by point basis, barring their generally much lower damage profiles. A certain banned Turkina variant can wipe out a 0 skill, 107pt Widowmaker in one shot, but can't do the same for an AS7-D Atlas, and that's wild to me.
Next, we did another large team game, though a little more conservative than 2023's. Because we had a brand brand new player, I stepped back to play a coaching roll for this one. A domed colony on Smoke Jaguar-held Modred, the lone moon orbiting the planet Port Arthur, set the stage for a Binary vs Binary match up. Jamie (Nova Cat) and Rachel (Cloud Cobra) stormed in on the north side of the field whilst Sean (Smoke Jag) and Kilcoin (Ghost Bear) tromped in on the south. We weren't necessarily trying to make anything narrative per se but we did keep discussing like the strength of the domes & examples from BattleTech fiction where certain factions intentionally ruptured things like that to kill people (coughcoughDraconisCombinecoughcough). I didn't do any normal spiel about the billions of years of BattleTech history or factional information stuff either, just felt kinda cool to add those narrative bits on a mapsheet we were getting to play on the very first time.
Since we'd never played on this map, there were a few line of sight questions that came up, and quite a few dead-type zones due to sub-levels versus levels. Overall though, it was super cool seeing the smart way people were using cover or taking advantage of an initiative win to cut out entire sections of the enemy force from being able to attack. And having a Gods-eye view of the game where I was plotting out how and where I'd move then watching what everyone did instead made it just as enjoyable as if I were playing. Once 'Mechs were able to see each other though, the damage started racking up and even though there were the usual metric tons of misses, the bodies were hitting the floor after a few turns. Sean made really good use of a crater and at one point, it was just a trio of 'Mechs in a hole in the southwest corner of the map.
We also kept Jamie up well past her bedtime so I stepped in at the very end to finish the last couple of turns, where Kilcoin and I killed each other's last standing respective 'Mech. 20 total crash & burns leading the game to a draw lmao. Not saying it -doesn't- happen in Total Warfare but it definitely is more common in Alpha Strike. So by that point, at least 25 'Mechs had died for the night (I think it was more like 27-28 but who keeps track of that kinda thing).
Last game of the night, also on a newer map (fungal forest?), we got a little silly. BattleTech is designed to be two sides squaring off, or a massive free-for-all, so it plays weird when you have three forces competing against each other. For this one, Sean, Rachel, and I each had a Star to hunt each other down across the hills, holes, and fields of the mushroom kingdom. In true Superior Mario fashion, we decided that the three "if you end up here, you die" mega deep levels would count like the teleportation pipes, with a roll on a d4 determining where you came out (three holes on the map, plus using '4' like a "you're lost until next turn" thing). It was ridiculous, and also I got hard targeted, so my Jade Falcons didn't last long. But it was fun trying to figure out how all hexes on the mapsheet worked. Of course, I remembered weeks after the fact (right now in fact) that the Mappack: Alien Worlds actually had a sheet with special rules for the terrain with it buuuuut that's okay! We rocked it out.
By the end of the night, we were pushing 40 war machines down, and Sean walked away with 2 wins & a draw, so not a bad night of gaming for him.
We already have the next event lined up for near the end of July, and it looks like at least some of the crew will be returning w/more new people coming aboard.
And you knooooow that means I'm like, itchy itchy scratchy scratchy for more narrative games, more campaigns, more throwing the 1000+ pieces for this game I got onto the tabletop etc haha.
Sean did also bring a piece of Thunderhead Studios/GF9's hextech terrain and now I kinda want to get more just for the 3D aspect of the battlefield. I do prefer to mapsheet play, even doing Alpha Strike, but it looks super cool to have 'Mechs hugging up against buildings. And I can 3D print some of the smaller pieces in the Thunderhead collection (I should have bought the tree STLs when I had the chance though) so shouldn't be too hard to fill up a table someday.
