After the initial, "Roll dice and make explosion sounds" attempt at getting my kids interested in BattleTech, I finally got a chance to sit down with my son and try something approximating a REAL game of alpha strike! Now, the little guy is a couple months shy of turning 5, so I was a little worried about adding too many rules or turning up the complexity to a point where he couldn't keep up. Turns out I shouldn't have worried so much as, other than calculating to-hit numbers for him, he did fine with measuring out movement, jumping and basic terrain. However, in an abundance of caution I started out with what I want to call 'Brutal Tech'. No TMM, No Melee, and no jumping. Just pilot skill, woods and short/medium/long ranges. Also, I kept it small with a lance-on-lance encounter, and I only ran three mechs to his four. For terrain we cleared out an area on the living room floor and threw together a little 'map' using these toys the kids already had called Magna-tiles. Basically, colored plastic squares and triangles with rare-earth magnets in the edges. They are a little blocky, but come in perfect colors for woods and water, and it is super-easy to throw together random buildings. We ran out of green triangle though, so some of the 'trees' are Blue and Orange, so...Sci-Fi? Anyway, here was our first map:
Round one was mostly closing. The boy was playing with the Alpha Strike Command Lance mech pack and I was using the Assault Lance pack without the Atlas, and by the second round the little booger pulled out some beginners luck and started to land a couple long-range shots on my Grasshopper. Playing without TMM made hitting at any range a real possibility, and I had forgotten that his mechs had credible long-range firepower, while I had a couple of 0*'s! My Victor was hoping to play a little game of hide-in-the-woods on one side of the map to show him the advantages of cover and to-hit mods. The other two mechs did their best to advance while keeping cubist-monument-alpha between them and the enemy. The boy's general strategy was originally going to be to move his Cataphract and Raven around behind the building at the bottom of the picture, while the Cyclops and Catapult moved up through the woods. However, that lasted about a turn before bloodlust got the better of him and he ran them both up the middle so he could roll more dice! At the end of turn three, I managed to concentrate fire and drop the overly aggressive Cataphract, but the armor on all three of my mechs was damaged or gone entirely.
Turn four got bloody fast as the range modifiers were even less of a factor. Poor Mr. Victor just couldn't survive the absurdly lucky fire from the Catapult, and was actually the first of my mechs to drop, despite my hope he would be the last. Lesson learned: wood's don't help much in BrutalTech! Meanwhile my little munchkin was doing his best to flank my Grashopper while his raven picked my blackjack apart.
By turn five it was pretty much over. My Grasshopper finally managed to do something other than absorb damage and dropped the raven, but the the Blackjack couldn't manage to put the catapult down, and the almost-pristine cyclops continued to vaporize structure and leave the 'Hopper a barely-functional, limping mess.
Since he was really getting into it, I figured we would play it out to the end, and to no one's surprise he slagged the poor Grasshopper without any trouble. He was pretty happy with his win, and I was happy with how well he picked up all the rules. I tried to take a picture of the victory-fist-bump he was trying to give me, but it ended up looking like I was a terrible looser trying to punch a four-year-old...which he found hilarous.
Since he did so well, I decided to add more of the standard rules back in for a second game. TMM, Melee, and Jumping all went back in. I'll try to do a write-up of that game later, but for now let's just say that I think he was pretty happy to have Melee back in and understood the rules well enough to use basic tactics because at one point this happened...
Yep...He's going to be a gamer all right!
