Sunday 2 May 2010

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.
   

2 comments:

  1. My son and I have whole MW armies. I lovingly painted a red, blue, green and yellow army for him using MW minis I had purchased in Perth.

    We lost interest for two reasons. First, the game kept getting more and more complex with every issue of new machines. The devoted players seemed to be able to home in on a rules weakness very quickly, so playing in the local tournaments was a wash.

    Second, I am partially colorblind and the combat dials quickly became Greek to me as I could not reliably distinguish between shades of certain colors.

    Sad. But we still have the armies.

    Steve

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  2. Ignore the colours and just play with the plain vanilla numbers would be my suggestion. Having now played three games I've come to the conclusion that the game is flexible enough to be played with a fairly loose interpretation of the rules. YMMV.

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