Big Stompy Mech Battle – 23JUL2016

I have been fascinated by large, dangerous AFVs ever since I played OGRE and read the Bolo series. Of course a 28mm OGRE battle is probably too large for even me to contemplate (although a do have a platoon of the OGRE Macroture GEVs just in case); however, 28mm Battle Mechs are fully doable.

So about a lustrum ago, I bought the 25mm Steiner and Kurita BattleTroop platoons and finally managed to paint them a decade or two later. I also eventually bought the four different JoyRide Studios MechWarrior Mechs that include a MadCat II, Jupiter, Legionnaire, and Forestry Mech. I also found the 25mm Clan Elementals now made by Iron Wind Metals. I managed to get them into a battle or three using the Star Grunt rules, but it would be unwieldy for large numbers of Mech and Grunt style games. With Mechs de-activated and in moth-balls, they waited for their day in the future. This older post recounts those days – https://sfdfsfd.wordpress.com/2016/06/01/25mm-battletech-bring-on-the-mechs-01jun2016/

This summer, a friend mentioned SF gaming and wanting to do some BattleMech stuff. Being a 25mm man, I told him that I had the drugs he needed, but I needed to find some rules that were less detailed than StarGrunt. A bit of web-surfing turned up folks playing big stomping robots using the ArmorGrid Mech Attack rules http://armorgridgames.com/ and I was off to the races again.

So for Fathers Day, Number 1 son arrived and we gave the rules a test run using 6mm minis (some MechWarrior Dark Age clicks and OGRE tank and infantry miniatures). No pictures of our crude efforts were taken, but this convinced me that this simple system was our grail.

For our full-scale demo, I managed to buy some other clanking robots to go with my JoyRide mechs. These include the Raidar X Battloid, Excalibur Mk VI Battloid, SPARTAN Battloid Civil Defense Unit, Macross VF-1J Battloid Valkyrie, and a Gobot with a Bull-dozer scoop.

In this game, the infantry are dangerous, but fragile and the mechs are darn awesome.

There is not a lot of narrative to go with this battle, since the forces and the terrain are identical. That said, it was a lot of fun and pretty balanced.