1974 is an important year for the gaming hobby. It is the year that
Dungeons & Dragons was introduced, the original RPG from which all other RPGs would ultimately be derived and the original RPG from which so many computer games would draw for their inspiration. It is fitting that the current owner of the game,
Wizards of the Coast, released the new version,
Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition, in the year of the game’s fortieth anniversary. To celebrate this, Reviews from R’lyeh will be running a series of reviews from the hobby’s anniversary years, thus there will be reviews from 1974, from 1984, from 1994, and from 2004—the thirtieth, twentieth, and tenth anniversaries of the titles. These will be retrospectives, in each case an opportunity to re-appraise interesting titles and true classics decades on from the year of their original release.
—oOo—
BattleTech infamously began life as
BattleDroids. Originally published by FASA Corporation in 1984, for the second edition it would be renamed
BattleTech because George Lucas and Lucasfilm claimed the rights to the term ‘droid’. It was also infamously, the game of ‘big, stompy robots’, but as
BattleTech, it would go on to be so much more. In the forty years since its publication, this has included numerous expansions to the core board game, numerous supplements adding rules and detailing the background to the game, several ranges of miniatures—both plastic and metal, over one hundred novels, a cartoon series, a collectible card game, and multiple computer games. These options have allowed fans to enjoy the setting in numerous ways, sometimes without even playing the core game, but the franchise has always been about the play of the boxed game that is
BattleTech. This is a review of the second edition of
BattleTech, published in 1985.
BattleTech is a turn-based multiplayer game, played on large maps marked with hexes and terrain with players fielding twelve-metre-tall humanoid armoured, fusion-powered combat units, weighting between ten and a hundred tons, called BattleMechs, or ’mechs. These are not robots, but are controlled by human pilots who will manoeuvre across the battlefield, exchanging fire from lasers, autocannons, missile-launchers, and the dreaded PPC or particle projection cannon. If close enough, they may even punch or kick each other, and if they have jump jets, launch a risky death from above attack. Over the course of a battle, a ’mech will build up heat due to movement and weapons fire, and if it cannot bleed off enough heat, the excess will impair its targeting systems, impede its movement, and potentially cause any ammunition it is carrying to explode or the ’mech to simply shutdown. Each unit is represented by one figure, an illustrated—front and back—cardboard piece that slots into a plastic base, and a record sheet. Each record sheet contains information about the amount of armour a ’mech has, how many weapons, and where the armour and weapons are located, as well as being used to track damage suffered and its location, ammunition used, and how much heat it builds up from one turn to the next.
BattleTech: A Game of Armoured Combat carries the description, “In the 30th century, life is cheap, but BattleMechs aren’t.” The box contains forty-eight playing pieces depicting the various BattleMechs, twenty-four plastic holders for them, one-hundred-and-twenty unit insignias for the game’s various armies and mercenary units, a forty-eight page rulebook, two full-colour card maps, and two six-sided dice. The forty-eight playing pieces are an inch high, whilst the maps measure twenty-two by seventeen inches, are marked in one-and-a-quarter inch-wide hexes, and are both identical. Each hex is roughly a hundred feet across. the game is designed to be played by two or more players, aged twelve and up. The basic unit in the game is a lance of four ’mechs, so with twenty-four plastic holders, it is possible for six players to field a lance each, two players to field three lances each, and so on. It is also possible for a player to control just a single battlemech depending upon the circumstances, such as a duel or a roleplaying situation.
The black and white rulebook covers everything that the players need to know about playing
BattleTech. This includes its rules—going from basic training to advanced gunnery, expert and optional rules—as well details of fourteen different ’mechs. These range in size between 20 and 100 tons, and include the Marauder, Phoenix Hawk, Warhammer, Stinger, Locust, and BattleMaster. Many of these are regarded as classics even today, though lawsuits over who owned the rights to use their images, taken from various different Japanese anime, including
Dougram,
Crusher Joe, and
Macross, would result in FASA Corporation withdrawing their original appearances and all art associated artwork from the game. These would be labelled as ‘the unseen’ by
BattleTech fans, and were missing from the game for many years until a legal agreement was reached that allowed many of them to return.
The rulebook also contains the setting to
BattleTech, which is explained in sidebars which run down each page. The setting is the Inner Sphere, a region of interstellar space surrounding Earth with a radius of roughly five hundred light years. It contains some two thousand settled worlds, reachable by both Faster-Than-Light travel and communication. Beyond the Inner Sphere lies the Periphery. In the thousand years that mankind has had Faster-Than-Light travel, no signs of sentient, alien life have ever been found. In the early thirty-first century, several hundred years after a civil war that saw the collapse of the Star League, the Inner Sphere is dominated by five Great Houses—the Capellan Confederation ruled by House Liao, the Draconis Combine ruled by House Kurita, the Federated Suns ruled by House Davion, the Free Worlds League ruled by House Marik, and the Lyran Commonwealth ruled by House Steiner. Each house claimed the right to be First Lord of the Star League, but none could agree as who was right, and in a series of Succession Wars, the houses have battled each other into technological decline. In that time, the battlemech has remained king of the battlefield, each house fiercely protecting the few battlemech manufacturing facilities each possesses and suffering from a decreasing capacity both to produce new ’mechs and repair them. A battlemech pilot is akin to a knight of old and many ’mechs are handed down through families. The last thing that any pilot wants to suffer is a loss of his mech and his becoming one of the Dispossessed. As well as presenting a history of the Inner Sphere and details of the five great Houses, the rule book also describes numerous mercenary units with their own histories and relationships to the Houses, plus the Bandit Kingdoms of the Periphery.
The background, essentially a ‘feudalist future’, provides reasons and rivalries in what is an age of continual war, that can explain the whys and wherefores of any battles that the players want to stage. If perhaps the rulebook is missing anything, it is some actual scenario ideas that the players can simply set up and play.
In terms of game, the players will roll for initiative and then alternate the movement of their battlemechs. A battlemech can walk, run, or jump—the latter requiring jump jets—which determines how many Movement Points it has to spend on crossing terrain. The terrain can be open or rough ground, cliffs and bluffs, light and heavy woods, and water. The heavier terrain costs more Movement Points to cross. Once movement has been completed, the players take it in turn to declare their attacks for their battlemechs and then roll for the attacks. Battlemechs are equipped with an array of different weapon types and sizes. Lasers can be small, medium, or large; short range missiles launchers fire volleys of two, four, or six missiles; and long-range missile launchers fire volleys of five, ten, or twenty missiles. Plus, there are an autocannon and the PPC. The different weapons have their own ranges, damage inflicted, and heat generated. Rolling to hit is based on the range and is modified by the gunnery skill of a battlemech’s pilot, the movement of both attacker and defender, terrain and cover, and lastly, any ongoing effects of heat for the attacker. The attacking player then rolls the dice, aiming to roll equal to or higher than the target number.
The location of successful hits is determined randomly as the targeting systems of the Inner Sphere are poor. This includes individual missiles for short range missiles, but groups of five for long range missiles. Damage is first deducted from armour in a location and when that is gone, from the internal structure. Critical hits on the hit location roll can bypass armour and automatically do damage to internal structure. Any damage to the internal structure has a chance to inflict damage to weapons or ammunition in a location, to the engine or gyro in the torso, to actuators in the arms and legs, and even the pilot himself on a headshot. Critical hits have severe consequences. Damage to a weapon will destroy it, ammunition will explode causing more damage, damaged actuators and gyro make the battlemech more difficult to operate, a damaged engine will increase its heat output and if it takes more damage cause it to explode and possibly kill the pilot, and head hits can also kill the pilot or knock out an important component. In the meantime, if damage exceeds the amount of internal structure, a leg or arm can fall off or be destroyed. Excess damage can also be transferred to other locations.
Lastly, as well as tracking ammunition use, a player must track the heat a battlemech generates from movement and weapons use as well as damage to the engine. Each battlemech comes with ten heat sinks which will bleed off a certain amount of heat, and more may be fitted, depending upon the design. Excess heat is retained until it is bled off via the heat sinks, meaning that a battlemech will probably need to firer fewer weapons and move a shorter distance to do this. One part of play is thus managing heat from turn to turn. Rushing into an engagement all guns blazing is likely to generate far too much heat, limiting tactical options in subsequent turns. Most battlemechs have an optimal range for its weapons so working within those parameters will also help in heat management. This is in addition to making the best use of the terrain to gain cover or if necessary, standing in the water to work off excess heat!
Rounding out the rulebook are expert rules that allow a battlemech to twist its torso as a reaction to change its firing arc, make physical attacks—including picking up a blown-off limb and using it as a club, charging, and setting fire to the wooded areas. There are also rules for battlemech design, enabling a player to create his own and then test them out on the field of battle. It is just four pages long, and even includes an example, but expands game play in a surprising direction, enabling a player to experiment beyond the fourteen official designs included in the game.
Physically,
BattleTech: A Game of Armoured Combat is a good-looking game. It might only use cardboard standees, but they are attractive and they look decent on the very nice maps. The rulebook itself is in black and white and whilst packing a lot of detail into its forty-eight pages is easy to read and understand. This helped by examples of the rules throughout.
—oOo—Trever Mendham reviewed
Battledroids in ‘Open Box’ in
White Dwarf Issue 66 (June 1985). He said, “Overall, this is a well-written, easy-to-understand set of rules. Much of the design is clearly specific to robot combat and succeeds in capturing the flavour of this sort of battle. As it stands, Battledroids is a very good robot combat system, but very little in terms of ‘game’. The production value leads one to expect more.” before awarding it an overall score of seven out of ten.
In
The Space Gamer Number 75 (July/August 1985), Aaron Allston reviewed the original game in ‘Featured Review: Battledroids’. His initial reaction was that the game was one of “…[G]iant
Japanese robot combat.” and was surprised to discover that it was not, feeling that its “…[F]uture-era “dark age”” was “…[F]leshed out far more than is necessary for a boardgame.” He then said, “But none of it feels like the Japanese cartoons. Rules such as beat buildup and weary campaign background are just wrong for the genre. It’s rather akin to designing a roleplaying game where the characters have superpowers and skintight costumes - and then run about performing political infighting and corporate takeovers a la
Dallas or
Dynasty. As the Japanese models and cartoons become more common over here, more and more buyers will be purchasing this game expecting something like the source materials, and they’ll be disappointed as I was. They’ll have a decent enough game on their hands – but they may not want to play it.” However, he was more positive in his conclusion: “My recommendation? Buy Battledroids if you'd like a giant-robots boardgame that has nothing to do with the Japanese cartoons. It’s a decent game. You won’t throw away any of your other games to play Battledroids fulltime, but you’ll be adequately entertained.”
BattleTech was reviewed in
Adventurer: The Superior Fantasy & Science Fiction Games Magazine Issue #7 (February 1987), alongside the expansions,
CityTech, which added urban terrain, infantry, and armour, and
AeroTech, which added aerial and space combat. Ashley Watkins made some comparisons between
BattleTech and some of the anime titles that were the source material for game and overall, had few reservations, concluding that, “Battletech has a real science fiction flavour, and it’s not often that the elements of playability and background come together in an SF game. So get Citytech for the combat rules, Battletech you want to design your own mechs, Aerotech only if you want the variable geometry mechs, or want to play the space game. This game could well become a cult classic and I highly recommend that you give it a look.”
Dale L. Kemper reviewed
BattleTech and
CityTech in ‘Game Reviews’ of
Different Worlds Issue 45 (March/April 1987). He countered some of the criticism of the game not being Japanese enough by saying, “Battletech surpasses other “Japanese robot”-type games on the market for the simple reason that its universe makes sense. The Battlemech vehicles in the game (many which resemble those from such Japanimation shows as Macross and its Robotec U.S. variant) are piloted military units with strengths and weaknesses. They resemble walking tanks alot more than they resemble the shape-changing robots popularized in the latest cartoons. Certain tactics will aid Mechwarriors in various situations and others will not. Practice and skill outweigh luck in this game.” Before moving on to look at some of the expansions, he concluded that, “All in all Battletech is a good introduction to the universe of the Succession Wars. It should whet your appetite for more and FASA plans on giving it to you. With all the addon games and rules, Battletech will be around for some time to come.” and awarded it three-and-a-half stars.
Steve Wieck reviewed
BattleTech in
White Wolf Issue #7 (April 1987), continuing the trend of reviewing alongside the supplements Citytech, Aerotech, and MechWarrior. He awarded
BattleTech a rating of eight out of ten and said that, “If the true test of any game is its playability, then Battletech is a good system. It is extremely easy to gamemaster and fun to play, at an hourly price that eventually beats the movies.”
Space Gamer/Fantasy Gamer Number 78 (April/May 1987) returned to
BattleTech when Scott Tanner asked the question, “Feeling overwhelmed by the number of products for mechwarrior gaming? Here's
a survey of FASA Corps. BATTLETECH products.” in ‘Infotech on BATTLETECH’. He concluded his description of the core game with, “Battletech is a good game which stands on its own, but lacks
in two important areas which the next two supplements cover; warfare in an urban environment and air combat.” The article also contained descriptions of
CityTech,
AeroTech, and
MechWarrior.
Battletech was reviewd in ‘Role-Playing Reviews: Tickets to the stars’ in
Dragon Magazine Issue #131 (March 1988) by Jim Bambra alongside the
MechWarrior roleplaying game. He said, “The BATTLETECH game is a brilliantly conceived and presented game of robotic combat set in the war-torn universe of the Successor States.” before concluding about the game, “The BATTLETECH game system requires tactical thinking and detailed combat resolution, without becoming too mechanically complicated. Add in the background which appears in sidebars throughout the book, and you have a very good game rich in depth and technical information.”—oOo—
From the basis of
BattleTech: A Game of Armoured Combat has spawned a rich and detailed setting supported by numerous games and editions, as well as miniatures and more, but what has made the
BattleTech franchise what it is today has to start somewhere. Returning to the original game and there is a pleasing elegance to
BattleTech: A Game of Armoured Combat that is easy to grasp and play. What you might play is as another matter, for whilst the background is excellent, the issue with it is that not much is made it of in the rule book. There are no scenarios or suggested battles and had there been, that would have drawn the players into the game and setting. That said, there are hooks here and there in the background that can be developed in scenario set-ups, especially in the descriptions of the mercenary units and the bandit kingdoms.
BattleTech: A Game of Armoured Combat is still a very playable and enjoyable game with flavoursome combat and a good background.
The forest stands on the edge of the village fields or not far from the town walls, but it is somewhere to be feared. For under that canopy there is dappled light at best, darkness at worst, and something lurks there, ready to prey on the peasantry and add one more misery to their lives. And now, as if to justify those fears, something has been stolen. A child, or a coin purse, or a lover. In response the peasants have banded together and the bravest of them all will journey deep into the forest in order to retrieve the stolen item from the thieves that hide amongst the trees—the fae! This is the set-up for To Elfland and Back, a minimalist storytelling roleplaying game published by Planar Compass, best known for the fanzine of the same name, which takes Old School Essentials, the retroclone from Necrotic Gnome out onto the Astral Plane and beyond. To Elfland and Back is about as simple as it gets—a motivation for the players and their characters, character creation in four steps, fast mechanics, and a set of encounters that will develop through play. It can be played through in a single session, requires no more than a pair of six-sided dice, and offers a reasonable degree of replay value.
