So what I did was just go to local stores and find places that were on board with Battletech. Then I created a weekly game night, which is campaign driven with me as the GM and everyone in 1 mech at a time. This meant that I can answer all questions for all players and run numbers and rules for people, and the campaign operations and total warfare XP progression keeps some people coming back.
This, like Geg mentions, scales to about 6 players before tablespace and GM access for each players turn time starts hitting the limit. So once people have the basic rules down in coop campaign play, the next step in scale is 'head to head' play as Geg put it... where people start playing lance on lance sized games versus each other.
This is 'competitive' battletech, though I understand Geg's careful usage of 'head to head', but regardless of what you call it, a 1v1 game with some sort of set guideline so that a group of 8+ people can be paired randomly any day of the week they can show up with no further preamble like 'what bv? what special rules? what era?'. I explain to my wife, for example, that the games im playing in MRC for their monthly '1 game a week' tournaments is my 'league game', because thats honestly what it is... we play 1 game each week as part of a larger series, with clear outlines, and an overall winner that receives fake internet points, and next month play something different to shake it up.
Each month a mission series, BV, and era is set, and people pair off to play games 1 a week minimum, with the leaderboard resetting each month. So people are free to pair up and play when they have time, but the end goal is to play more games of battletech/grow the community. Getting weekly participation for a weeknight/after work kind of battletech game means you need it to be snappy, short mission based affairs, at least for me. Something I can knock out in 3 hours or less, cause I got work still after all. That kind of 2-3 hour game, for us anyway, means a mission objective so we have a clear victory condition whenever the game ends, small maps (1 neoprene works great), and not too many units on the table.
'Tournaments', or other hosted events, are another great community building tool. This IMHO is just one of convenience/logistics. If you have an event set and scheduled, then people who arnt free most days of the week can still get 3 games of battletech once a month on a specific weekend, cause there is a scheduled event to gather the community around. Some places have Sunday or Saturday be the battletech event day each month, it just depends on the store availability. But a set event at a store on the calendar, with facebook or whatever posting, will get random people to stop by/make the hour drive to check things out when they wouldnt be able to make the drive for a single random pickup game. An event, with the mission/era/BV already set, allows people to just show up an play on the event day, without needing to know their opponent in advance.
IMHO this is all to avoid needing to communicate with a specific person to schedule things just to get a game in at a new place. Any given new person isnt gonna have the btech groups contact info already, so they have 0 way to communicate or set up a game at a random store they havent been to before. And they arnt gonna be likely to just walk into a store 4 towns over on a whim just to maybe see if that store has battletech players. So the store having an established battletech weeknight game or monthly event, that doesnt require someone to already know the players to show up, really helps.
