First Impressions: BattleTech

 Daddy Warbots

BattleTech is one of those ancient grandpas of old-school wargaming which always gave me pause. Its nascent first edition ("Battle Droids") was published half a decade before I was alive. There is such a tremendous amount of history in the development of the game, not to speak of over three decades of continuously updated lore-- I felt I needed some degree in archaeology to even start figuring out what the game is, what it was about, and why it had such enduring appeal.

I'm not sure what caused me to turn a corner and hurl myself face-first into the game, but I think it was a combination of a) a friend's Golden Retriever-esque enthusiasm, b) the relatively low cost-of-entry on Catalyst Game Lab's A Game of Armored Combat boxed set, and c) a global fucking pandemic.

So what's going on with BattleTech anyway? I'm gonna skip the behind-the-scenes frippery (how the IP rights get tossed around like a football, lawsuits over the creative designs of some 'Mechs, etc.) mostly because that stuff deserves its own post. Also because I don't want to. I'm my own boss here, no matter how much I'll degrade myself for even the hint of social media approval.

What you need to know, from the get-go, is that BattleTech long ago ceased to be just one thing. It started off as a fairly traditional hex-and-chit style wargame; it has since evolved into a hex-and-minis wargame, a traditional tabletop wargame, a pair of RPGs, a series of video games (tactical mech fighting, turn-based strategy, PvP arena shooter), and more. So choose your poison, I guess. This blog article (blarticle) will be about the hex-and-minis wargame.

A Universe of Possibilities So Long As Those Possibilities Involve Giant Robots

The setting of BattleTech fascinates me and not because it is well written. It isn't not well written, at least not all the time. I mean they've got Michael J. Stackpole writing their novels and he's one of my favorite Star Wars Expanded Universe authors.

Rather, the setting fascinates me because it's deeply invested in a kind of material culture; what exists in this universe is well-defined. Often excruciatingly well defined. The in-setting technology is scrupulously tracked and updated with efforts to keep it coherent within the parameters of itself. They didn't have to do this, by any way of looking at it-- the premise is space-feudalism with multi-story walking artillery. You don't have to pretend that makes sense. But BattleTech has such a sincerity and straight-faced enthusiasm for its subject that I found myself suckered in.

You can break the setting down into four major eras.

1. The Succession Wars - The galactic hegemony of the Inner Sphere falls apart, and a bunch of successor states slapfight each other to see who will be top-dog. They do this like four times in a row. No one really wins.

2. Clan Invasion - Some folks who left the galaxy when that hegemony fell apart, return. They've since gotten really into some Klingon-esque "blood and honor" bullshit and, consequently, want to beat the bejesus out of the entire Inner Sphere. They do a pretty good job.

3. "Jihad"/The Dark Age - The galactic AT&T, which is a religion, is unhappy with the outcome of the Clan Invasion and expresses that dissatisfaction with lasers, nukes, and 'Mechs. Most everyone beats the bejsus out of them and gets a galactic service outage for their trouble. Make note of the weird use of the word 'jihad' here, I'll come back to that.

4. Il-Khan - This is the current era and in many ways resembles Clan Invasion 2.0; it's also incompletely written. Catalyst Game Labs' recent Kickstarter has, as far as I can tell, promised to flesh this part of the setting out.

On the whole the setting plays out like some version of Dune as written by a Cold War fetishist in their bunker. It has the feeling of a tipsy uncle at a holiday party who is excited to tell you about a history book he just read and feels extremely qualified to regurgitate; as the use of the word 'jihad' up there might indicate, maybe Uncle Victor could use a more nuanced view of things though.

That's one of the main things which I felt hold the setting back, for me. As fiction written thirty-five years ago, there's some shit in there which just hasn't aged well-- "jihad" is a word with very specific cultural connotations. Its further a word whose specific cultural connotations have been broadly and repeatedly misunderstood, often with an Islamaphobic lens.

It's not the only place where BattleTech has plucked out cultural items as though they were mere aesthetic cargo, either-- the Draconis Combine falls squarely on the 'excited white guy with a flea-market katana who once read part of the Hagakure' side of the How Badly You're Gonna Fuck Up Japanese History & Culture spectrum.

The setting is replete with cultures and nation-states which evoke recognizable ones-- and those are the weakest parts, to me. At best, they feel like homage to cultures these writers clearly have affection for. At worst, they feel like they were written with one-hand and a national anthem droning in the background. Especially for a setting which seems deeply invested in a kind of nu-feudalism (MechWarriors as an ennobled warrior-caste through most of these cultures), the nationalistic elements are weird to me.

In conclusion-- the writers of this setting took themselves very seriously, but you don't have to.

Battle of the Bell Curves

Now let's finally turn towards the game. I had the opportunity to play with my brother, my father, and my cousin's boyfriend, and we tried out a scenario from the Game Of Armored Combat boxed set I linked above. The boxed set seems like a really good introduction to the game-- a 56-page rule booklet, some handouts, record sheets, minis, and hex-maps.

The miniatures paint up nicely

The gameplay has not changed overmuch through the decades-- errata here, streamlined there. Tweaks and edits, not major edition changes. The underlying paradigm is largely untouched from the early 80's.

These 'Mechs are walking battleships. Massive, ponderous war-machines stuffed with more ordinance than common sense. Your job is mostly to manage their heat; while trudging around accrues nominal heat, discharging your bevy of lasers and boombangs will see your 'Mech end up hotter than a young hot Christopher Walken.

Remember when I said not all wargames are about war? This one isn't. This one is about management. You manage your speed, balancing how your movement fucks with enemy targeting even as it disrupts your own. You manage your ammo, hoping to deplete a couple missile-bins before a critical hit causes them to explode inside you like an undercooked gas-station burrito. You manage your facing, to present whichever side of your 'Mech has the most armor (or the most weaponry).

Record sheets will be the bane and boon of your existence. They're tremendously useful once you learn how to read them. Until then, they're emblematic of a game design ethos which only considers streamlining in the sense of fictional aerospace craft rather than player-facing complexity.

This is your god now.

Now, I'll say we had fun. The scenario we played had each of us controlling a single 'Mech; I was tasked to lumber my 85-ton assault-class roboboi past a picket of three lighter ones. The asymmetry was interesting-- I outclassed each individually, but the demand that I keep moving and the fact that I was outnumbered/outmaneuvered kept my attention firmly split.

The whole thing took a little over 2 hours, and while it was the first time playing for all involved, we had a) read the rulebook, and b) are not exactly novices in these kinds of games. Managing a single 'Mech wasn't so straightforward that I was hankering to manage four or five (the more usual size of a game of BattleTech). I'm fairly certain that's going to be A Big Ask if I want to get these same players to have another go. It's likely I'll give Alpha Strike a try, as it promises a bit more abstraction than BattleTech is interested in.

That said-- I like the crunch. When I said that this is a game invested in the material culture, the lack of abstraction is what I mean. It may be process-heavy, but this is a game which will tell you what happens when your 'Mech's leg actuator gets destroyed. It has rules for your ammo cooking off, for what happens when your pilot gets concussed. It asks a lot of you, but it gives back as much as it can. Its output is tremendously tangible, tremendously grounded in terms that you can easily understand (even if the mechanical input process is not particularly elegant). The devil is in the details, and this devil makes some of the details downright sexy.

My 'Mech won the scenario, but only just. Its right leg and arm had been devastated as my opponents harried me like a wolfpack trying to hobble my movement. I'd wasted precious time earlier by dumping all my weaponry into a single opponent-- freeing up a lane of escape but nearly shutting down from the massive heat-dump. In refusing to abstract wherever possible, the game kept me busy and invested. It was a lot of fun.

Neat game. Check it out.

Afterthoughts: Dune

 Dune You Have The Time / To Listen To Me Whine

I am a rare breed of Dune fan, in that I am very excitable about a series I have remarkably little knowledge of. I've read many of the novels, but at the time I was young and all those paint chips I ate almost certainly warped my knowledge.

Further, I saw the movie adaption by David Lynch which was so formative to my personality that on any given week I am at least twice as majestically sweaty as Sting was in that film.

The boardgame is something of an odd duck. It was published in 1979 by Avalon Hill, having only been recently rejiggered from a Roman historical theme to that of Frank Herbert's celebration of dusty invertebrates. It remained out-of-print for a long time (briefly reflavored by Fantasy Flight Games as Rex: Final Days of an Empire).

Only recently has Gale Force 9 re-published it with some spit-and-polish. That's what I played. As usual, I shitposted about it on Twitter as I did so.

Part 1: Wormtime

Part 2: Time for Worm

Part 3: W O R M

The Game

Dune is a game about information. Like most games about information, this means it is largely a game about deception. The boardstate is appropriately cloaked in layers-upon-layers of misinformation, despite how transparent a lot of stuff is.

I'm getting ahead of myself.

The core gameplay loop is that each player controls a faction with a vested interest in controlling the titular planet Dune (properly, Arrakis); if a single player controls three of the cities, they win.

Battles between troupes of troops is carried out with a kind of wagering system that can be frustrating for someone like me, whose sense of math and calculation is as reliable as a Sapho-stained mentat's ability to kill the chill vibe at a party. That's a little Dune joke for ya, just some Dune humor to spice this blog post up lmao I'm so good at this writing thing.

Pictured: A kanly-duel over who gets to compliment my writing first

But really, it can be annoying. You're wagering four things:

1. How many troops you're committing to the fight. Any troops committed will die.

2. How much spice you're committing to the fight. Spice boosts the effective strength of any committed troops, but is similarly lost.

3. Which leader from your pool you're committing, ranging from nincompoops to nightmarishly competent generals. Helpfully, leaders only die if they're specifically murdered and will otherwise survive a loss.

4. Treachery cards to either protect your own leader or try to murder the other.

From that vichyssoise you eventually get a total strength. Higher strength wins. Loser loses all their troops and the territory.

But fuck me are there a lot of factors that go into figuring out what you're wagering-- what's the maximum strength they can achieve? What leader are they likely to commit? How badly do they actually need the territory? How much spice is in their bank to boost their strength? What treachery cards do they have, or more importantly, not have? Will they commit their Super Special Cool Soldier guys (the Sarduakar and Fedaykin)? There's a lot going on.

This might sound like a condemnation-- it isn't. While the process isn't what I'd call elegant, it doesn't exist in a vacuum. The game is not these calculations. The game is about finding out the information to make these calculations easy.

Every faction has access to slightly different information. House Atreides are the only ones who will reliably know what treachery cards each player has. The Bene Gesserit can compel their opponent to commit certain types of cards.

And this extends to other parts of the game as well. The Fremen know where the planet's storms move (and therefore which territories are dangerous to hang around in), the Harkonnens have a decent knowledge of which leaders are prepared to stab their player in the back.

The strategies each player pursues is informed by the information they have--or can easily have--which makes analyzing someone else's move an act of Byzantine interpretation. Knowing the special rules they're using only helps a little-- you still don't know what hidden information is informing their maneuvers.

An Aside About Cool Stuff

Above I'm only describing one specific segment of play, but there is so much going on in this game. Everyone is playing the same game and a different game. Remember what I said about a player winning if they control three cities? Not entirely true.

The Spacing Guild wins if no one else controls three cities.

Except the Fremen win if they control their ancestral territories and deny control of the other cities to the major houses.

Except the Bene Gesserit win if the faction they predicted wins, at the time they predicted they'd win.

Let those nuggets settle down in your mustard sauce. Imagine the kinds of cold-blooded Machievellian information-brokering those goals could provoke in a player. Are the Bene Gesserit allying with you in good faith? Or are they trying to help you win, so that they win, so that you lose?

But Is It Good?

I don't fucking know, why are you asking me?

When I played War of the Ring there was a particular sensation which I'll call 'Getting Punched In The Crotch' that I associated with it. Very frequently I would aspire to move a certain army to a certain territory, or assault a certain stronghold-- only for my opponent to slap down a card that said some variant of 'lmao get fucked scrub'. It was unsatisfying because there was no way for me to know what Crotch Punch was coming, but it happened so regularly that I knew a Crotch Punch was likely.

My initial instinct is that Dune had something similar going on-- a treachery card could pulverize my army, a miscalculation could see my entire plan to take a city collapse. What distinguished the experience in play, though, was that while Dune takes pains to make a lot of information hidden it is never strictly inaccessible.

Someone at the table knows. Alliances can be formed based solely on the desire for/need for certain information. Information is as much a currency in the game as the spice tokens which pepper the board like cocaine dust above a day-trader's lip.

Where in War of the Ring I eventually gave up trying to plan for Crotch Punches--hurling my armies and ambitions at the wall to see what survived--in Dune I tried to do my homework. Because I could do my homework.

The caveat, of course, is that it is still homework. It was mentally exhausting for me to constantly and with well-deserved paranoia try to evaluate whether what I knew was sufficient for the plans I had. As satisfying as it was to be right, it was an uphill climb to get there.

Still. The game is pretty dope, check it out.