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Manchu wrote:I think we must be misunderstanding each other about this “classic” thing because you keep pointing out that myself and others use it and insinuating that means something, although you are dancing around exactly what, when it has been explained many times that the reason is because the game was briefly called that when a number of us started playing it. Literally nothing more.

The only meaning I assumed you used it for was the same reason I did, to reference the normally hex-based game. Nothing else. That you used it was to indicate that you were specifically talking about said game and not the IP property as a whole, or at least, that is how I took it. I never stated in assuming that CBT should be considered as anything else by anyone.

If you think I am dancing around that, then that is based on assumptions YOU are making about what I said, and not actually reading what I said. I have danced around nothing, except having to keep going back to address this concept.

Manchu wrote:Battletech is a board game plain and simple. The miniatures are just a luxurious replacement for the counter chits found in war games, design-wise. From the very start until today the game has come with cardboard standees. The thing that made Battletech more than a simulationist war game are the notions of campaign play and mech customization, which are its RPG elements. There is no miniatures gaming “DNA” in Battletech.

Then you are ignorant. All wargames of the last century has a little bit of miniature gaming DNA in them. Battletech was NEVER a plain and simple board game. It was far too complex to be considered such, even by today's standards. And as miniatures became available, it stopped being a board game, plain and simple, but something more. As I said, though, I started with 3rd Edition (and was disappointed with the lack of miniatures in the 4th Ed box), so that may color my expectations.

Manchu wrote:But my main argument ITT has been that a lot of frustration around people trying Battletech involves their expectations versus what the game actually is. When it comes to AS, how the expectations are set by the marketing is really important.

Except a lot of the complaints about Alpha Strike ITT do not follow marketing expectations. Alpha Strike even utilizes all the stats from Battleforce, save for an adjustment in movement and points. I know this because Solaris SkunkWerks can make Alpha Strike cards for any custom machine, except they haven't managed to get the point conversions yet and so the PV they put in are still the Battleforce values.

 Manchu wrote:
Uh, I don’t think we will disagree there.

But my main argument ITT has been that a lot of frustration around people trying Battletech involves their expectations versus what the game actually is. When it comes to AS, how the expectations are set by the marketing is really important.

I think we mostly agree there.
Maybe the problem is that someone trying Battletech today probably has no similar gaming experience to compare it to. You can't say ” If you like Starfleet Battles you'll like this” because In terms of well known wargames its kind of the last of a breed.

I don't know if it's that hard to describe Alpha Strike. ” Fast playing Company Level Mech Combat” probably sums it up well. Hardcore CBT fans won't like it but they probably won't like it anyway.

 Charistoph wrote:
Battletech was NEVER a plain and simple board game. It was far too complex to be considered such, even by today's standards.

Won't comment on the rest, but that? That is blatantly untrue. "Too complex to be considered a boardgame"? What the feth I don't even.

I guess, by that metric, Advanced Squad Leader is not a boardgame either. Or Rise and Decine of the Third Reich. Or Europa Universalis. Or Air War. What the fething feth.

You don't have to be rude about it. These days we commonly distinguish between wargames, role-playing tables, board games, and other tabletop games. There's no real hard-and-fast classification at work, bit typically board games are tighter, less simulationist, and less sandbox-y.

As someone said earlier (Manchu, I think), there's a certain experiential factor at work in this wargame-type of board games than in board games that are less open-ended and more winning than whether they represent something appropriately.

 Charistoph wrote:

Then you are ignorant. All wargames of the last century has a little bit of miniature gaming DNA in them. Battletech was NEVER a plain and simple board game. It was far too complex to be considered such, even by today's standards. .

You're just plain wrong about that but I don't blame you for your ignorance. You have to be of a certain age to remember the way complex boardgames with and without miniatures proliferated in their own boardgaming universe. Technically they still do, though the rest of the gaming world has grown much more.

I'm not even quite that old but I had the good fortune to have an old gaming store that was stocked to the gills with these sort of hex based wargames and others often of dizzying complexity. Battletech fit perfectly into that meliue.

Sure it had minis and great art and perhaps an argument can be made for it being more than a boardgame but not based complexity.

Yep, the “wargame” tradition of board gaming has frequently been VERY complex. Albertorius gives a wonderful example with ASL. That is the “branch” of gaming Battletech descends from.

Eilif and others have usefully introduced another line of thought ITT that even AS is not necessarily a good fit for its own marketing presentation as a miniatures game.

When I think of Battleforce, I don’t think of the way Cmmdr Ed talks about AS, as some kind of “fast-play” style! To me Battleforce is more in line with the another game Albertorius mentioned, Rise and Decline. (At least wrt the planetary assault conception.)

Albertorius wrote:

 Charistoph wrote:
Battletech was NEVER a plain and simple board game. It was far too complex to be considered such, even by today's standards.

Won't comment on the rest, but that? That is blatantly untrue. "Too complex to be considered a boardgame"? What the feth I don't even.

I guess, by that metric, Advanced Squad Leader is not a boardgame either. Or Rise and Decine of the Third Reich. Or Europa Universalis. Or Air War. What the fething feth.

Eilif wrote:

 Charistoph wrote:

Then you are ignorant. All wargames of the last century has a little bit of miniature gaming DNA in them. Battletech was NEVER a plain and simple board game. It was far too complex to be considered such, even by today's standards. .

You're just plain wrong about that but I don't blame you for your ignorance. You have to be of a certain age to remember the way complex boardgames with and without miniatures proliferated in their own boardgaming universe. Technically they still do, though the rest of the gaming world has grown much more.

I'm not even quite that old but I had the good fortune to have an old gaming store that was stocked to the gills with these sort of hex based wargames and others often of dizzying complexity. Battletech fit perfectly into that meliue.

Sure it had minis and great art and perhaps an argument can be made for it being more than a boardgame but not based complexity.

Maybe you should go back and actually read what you quoted. I said, "Battletech was never a PLAIN and SIMPLE board game." I never made claim that it was the only complex board game, though I do argue that it was more than just a board game, even back in the Battledroids era, and I'm sure that most of the players of those games you mentioned were ever considered "plain and simple". I think it can safely be said that none of these were on the level of Candyland or Chutes/Snakes & Ladders, right? Instead, they followed the patterns of a lot of different wargames of the time.

Note that a lot of the first wargames used just tokens showing their organizational symbols to be used on a paper or cloth map (sound familiar?). In this, Classic Battletech/Total Warfare is actually closer to the original style of wargame than 40K, Flames of War, or Bolt Action are.

Yeah I gotta say when I think of board games things like BattleTech don't spring to mind. When I think of 'board game' things like the aforementioned Snakes & Ladders all the way through to Space Hulk come to mind. Or Zombicide. Or even Warhammer Quest (but to me that's pushing it as there's so much of that game that doesn't involve moving around on a board taking actions as a player).

 Charistoph wrote:
In this, Classic Battletech/Total Warfare is actually closer to the original style of wargame than 40K, Flames of War, or Bolt Action are.

You keep adding extra words to the name of this game.

Why can't you just call it what it is: BattleTech.

 Charistoph wrote:
Maybe you should go back and actually read what you quoted. I said, "Battletech was never a PLAIN and SIMPLE board game." I never made claim that it was the only complex board game, though I do argue that it was more than just a board game, even back in the Battledroids era, and I'm sure that most of the players of those games you mentioned were ever considered "plain and simple". I think it can safely be said that none of these were on the level of Candyland or Chutes/Snakes & Ladders, right? Instead, they followed the patterns of a lot of different wargames of the time.

I did. I still don't agree. I was playing Blue Max, ASL, Crimson Skies and many other "plain" and "simple" boardgames that look and feel the same as Battletech at the time.

I am not sure what your beef with boardgames is, why do you feel they are so inferior or cut and dry compared with miniatures games, but they're not.

Of course, if for you the only real boardgames are Snakes and Ladders and the like, well... yeah, almost no boardgame is plain and simple, by that definition.

I guess we should establish some basic history and vocab here. When we say board game, we aren’t referring to Milton Bradley but rather to Avalon Hill. In America in the late 1960s through the 70s, there was a boom in military-themed board games designed for committed adult hobbyists. This kind of board gaming, called wargaming (specifically, a type of board game focused on simulating military realities), goes back to the 1950s when Avalon Hill introduced the hex grid and the first wargame in the sense of our meaning, Tactics.

You could say this tradition goes further back to 19th-century Prussia, when the general staff taught officer cadets strategy and tactics by reference to an abstracted, rationalized, statistical approach they called Kriegsspiel (“wargame”). This sense of wargaming, as a scientific approach to actual military theory and practice, caught on beyond the German states in the wake of Prussia’s stunning defeat of France in 1870. Certainly, wargaming has been an increasingly important aspect of U.S. military practice ever since. I suspect the huge number of American men drafted into military service throughout the second half of the 20th century provided the basis for an interest in moving wargaming from an actual military exercise to a recreational activity.

In any case, Avalon Hill published a game titled PanzerBlitz, designed by Jim Dunnigan, in 1970 which represented a major watershed in recreational wargaming. Rather than dealing with strategic scope, PanzerBlitz focused on tactics including individual armored vehicles. PanzerBlitz also delivered an unprecedented level of technical detail in simulating these vehicles’ battlefield performance. Nine years later, Yaquinto published James M. Day’s game Panzer which zoomed even further into this detailed, tactical approach including the concept of facing. In playing Panzer, hobbyists took to replacing the diecut cardboard counters standard for wargaming with metal miniatures. I have never seen Weisman and Babcock discuss what wargaming designs influenced Battledroids but the parallels to Dunnigan’s and Day’s games are obvious.

The wargaming scene of the 1970s in the Midwest is where RPGs were born. Arneson and Gygax were keen wargamers. Without getting too far into the weeds, the key idea that would become roleplaying was that board game players could imagine themselves taking on an “in-game” perspective. TSR published D&D in 1974, Traveller by Marc Miller of GDW followed in 1977, and Weisman and Babcock founded FASA in 1980 and got started publishing materials for use with Traveller but pretty soon was handling the Star Trek license. This is the context for the origin of Battletech.

An interesting insight from Jordan Weisman himself about the genesis of Battletech:

One of the things that I tried to do with the game was create a hybrid. At the time, there were role-playing games and there were board games. What BattleTech tried to be was a board game that thought it was a role-playing game. We really immersed everything in the fiction. So you had these scenario packs that were actually short stories or character studies.

source

So I mean, you don’t have to take my word for it.

Interestingly Dakka annotates CBT with BT.

I noticed xd.

Good stuff Manchu.

We on this thread seem to go round and round regarding the origins of Battletech as boardgame. I think the takeaway should be that regardless of what ”boardgame” or "wargames" mean to the public today (30+ years later ) or to an individual (largely irrelevant), one can't really understand Battletech's origins without understanding it's placement in the military board "Wargames" community of the second half of the 20th century.

H.B.M.C. wrote:

 Charistoph wrote:
In this, Classic Battletech/Total Warfare is actually closer to the original style of wargame than 40K, Flames of War, or Bolt Action are.

You keep adding extra words to the name of this game.

Why can't you just call it what it is: BattleTech.

Already explained, and nobody properly countered it. Go back and read the explanation I've given several times.

Albertorius wrote:

 Charistoph wrote:
Maybe you should go back and actually read what you quoted. I said, "Battletech was never a PLAIN and SIMPLE board game." I never made claim that it was the only complex board game, though I do argue that it was more than just a board game, even back in the Battledroids era, and I'm sure that most of the players of those games you mentioned were ever considered "plain and simple". I think it can safely be said that none of these were on the level of Candyland or Chutes/Snakes & Ladders, right? Instead, they followed the patterns of a lot of different wargames of the time.

I did. I still don't agree. I was playing Blue Max, ASL, Crimson Skies and many other "plain" and "simple" boardgames that look and feel the same as Battletech at the time.

I am not sure what your beef with boardgames is, why do you feel they are so inferior or cut and dry compared with miniatures games, but they're not.

Of course, if for you the only real boardgames are Snakes and Ladders and the like, well... yeah, almost no boardgame is plain and simple, by that definition.

Because in the common vernacular of American English, "board games" are more with Milton Bradley than Avalon Hill (to use Manchu's reference). They are games that are played on a board. They were usually simple affairs that families or friends can play a quick game on.

Manchu wrote:I guess we should establish some basic history and vocab here. When we say board game, we aren’t referring to Milton Bradley but rather to Avalon Hill. In America in the late 1960s through the 70s, there was a boom in military-themed board games designed for committed adult hobbyists. This kind of board gaming, called wargaming (specifically, a type of board game focused on simulating military realities), goes back to the 1950s when Avalon Hill introduced the hex grid and the first wargame in the sense of our meaning, Tactics.

You could say this tradition goes further back to 19th-century Prussia, when the general staff taught officer cadets strategy and tactics by reference to an abstracted, rationalized, statistical approach they called Kriegsspiel (“wargame”). This sense of wargaming, as a scientific approach to actual military theory and practice, caught on beyond the German states in the wake of Prussia’s stunning defeat of France in 1870. Certainly, wargaming has been an increasingly important aspect of U.S. military practice ever since. I suspect the huge number of American men drafted into military service throughout the second half of the 20th century provided the basis for an interest in moving wargaming from an actual military exercise to a recreational activity.

In any case, Avalon Hill published a game titled PanzerBlitz, designed by Jim Dunnigan, in 1970 which represented a major watershed in recreational wargaming. Rather than dealing with strategic scope, PanzerBlitz focused on tactics including individual armored vehicles. PanzerBlitz also delivered an unprecedented level of technical detail in simulating these vehicles’ battlefield performance. Nine years later, Yaquinto published James M. Day’s game Panzer which zoomed even further into this detailed, tactical approach including the concept of facing. In playing Panzer, hobbyists took to replacing the diecut cardboard counters standard for wargaming with metal miniatures. I have never seen Weisman and Babcock discuss what wargaming designs influenced Battledroids but the parallels to Dunnigan’s and Day’s games are obvious.

The wargaming scene of the 1970s in the Midwest is where RPGs were born. Arneson and Gygax were keen wargamers. Without getting too far into the weeds, the key idea that would become roleplaying was that board game players could imagine themselves taking on an “in-game” perspective. TSR published D&D in 1974, Traveller by Marc Miller of GDW followed in 1977, and Weisman and Babcock founded FASA in 1980 and got started publishing materials for use with Traveller but pretty soon was handling the Star Trek license. This is the context for the origin of Battletech.

An interesting insight from Jordan Weisman himself about the genesis of Battletech:

One of the things that I tried to do with the game was create a hybrid. At the time, there were role-playing games and there were board games. What BattleTech tried to be was a board game that thought it was a role-playing game. We really immersed everything in the fiction. So you had these scenario packs that were actually short stories or character studies.

source

So I mean, you don’t have to take my word for it.

I have never heard of Avalon Hill as a board gaming developer more than Milton Bradley to the extent that Milton Bradley was excluded from the group before now. And yes, I was speaking of Kriegsspiel when I was talking about the history of wargaming.

And it seems like I was right in saying that Battletech was never a plain and simple board game, but intended to be something more.

As an interesting side note, Games Workshop started out making models for Dungeons & Dragons. Then they wanted to make large battles more possible, so what they worked on became Warhammer Fantasy Battles.

 Charistoph wrote:
And it seems like I was right in saying that Battletech was never a plain and simple board game, but intended to be something more.

You’re tilting at windmills. This is from my first post ITT:

 Manchu wrote:
The overarching point that you, dear reader, should have noticed by now is that Battletech is NOT a miniatures game. What it actually is, is a hybrid wargame/RPG.

Technically it's a Roll-and-Write.

 Manchu wrote:
I guess we should establish some basic history and vocab here.

*SNIP*

An interesting insight from Jordan Weisman himself about the genesis of Battletech:

One of the things that I tried to do with the game was create a hybrid. At the time, there were role-playing games and there were board games. What BattleTech tried to be was a board game that thought it was a role-playing game. We really immersed everything in the fiction. So you had these scenario packs that were actually short stories or character studies.

source

So I mean, you don’t have to take my word for it.

Great post and a great quote find to help buttress your argument.

 Nurglitch wrote:
Technically it's a Roll-and-Write.

I mean, dice are rolled and bubbles are filled in but I think roll-and-write usually refers to games like Yahtzee. Roll-and-write doesn’t really explain Battletech. It’s a decent wry joke to call BT a roll-and-write but you’d be hard pressed to really teach anybody what BT is by saying it is like Yahtzee.

From 'New to BattleTech' on the official BattleTech website:

Initially published thirty-five years ago as a tabletop board game, BattleTech has gone on to become one of the gaming industry’s most important and longest-lasting science-fiction universes.

And then slightly further down the page:

There are five ways in which people enjoy the BattleTech universe.

1. As a tabletop miniatures game
2. As a board game
3. As a roleplaying game (RPG)
4. As a reader of fiction
5. As a computer game

For the tabletop miniatures game, you're given a link to the Alpha Strike Quick-Start Rules, while for the board game you're given a link to the BattleTech Quick-Start Rules.

6. As a giant robot fetishist enthusiast

@Manchu: I wouldn't really reference Yahtzee as a modern Roll-and-Write either, but I've been doing a fair bit of thinking on the subject, but about the appeal of Battletech and the appeal of Roll-and-Write games in general, and I think you've hit the nail on the head about the experiential aspect. Maybe I would go so far as to sell BattleTech as Yahtzee, but with robots and explosions. I think it would depend on the person, but that's just KYC.

Manchu wrote:

 Charistoph wrote:
And it seems like I was right in saying that Battletech was never a plain and simple board game, but intended to be something more.

You’re tilting at windmills. This is from my first post ITT:

 Manchu wrote:
The overarching point that you, dear reader, should have noticed by now is that Battletech is NOT a miniatures game. What it actually is, is a hybrid wargame/RPG.

But it IS something more than a plain and simple board game. You have provided more evidence of that than in countering it. So who is tilting at windmills here?

And all things considered, it is played more as a wargame and miniatures game than it is as an RPG.

Mainly because by those metrics almost no boardgames are "plain and simple" boardgames.

Or, in other words, because it's a distinction without substance, that seems to be made in an attempt to give it additional legitimacy to something that does not need it.

It's certainly more complicated than common, mass market board games. It also needs more DIY to make it work, as it's more of an open-ended sandbox of rules rather than a specific out-of-the-box play experience with specific end-games and goals.

Did anyone really think I was calling Battletech a plain and simple board game?

No, the issue is it a plain and simple fact that Battletech is a board game. Weisman designed it that way. As Ghaz demonstrates, CGL sells it that way even now.

 Nurglitch wrote:
It's certainly more complicated than common, mass market board games. It also needs more DIY to make it work, as it's more of an open-ended sandbox of rules rather than a specific out-of-the-box play experience with specific end-games and goals.

Common, mass-market board games are, interestingly enough, outnumbered 100 to 1 by all the others. If one hears "boardgame" and (here, of all places) only hear "Monopoly, Cluedo, Snakes and Ladders, Trivial Pursuit...", well... boy do they need to broaden their horizons.

BattleTech is certainly a board game in that it's played on a board, but it's more like Warhammer in that it's a sandbox of stuff that can be used in games that you put together yourself. All the different 'mechs, maps, record sheets, and optional rules seems to place it in its own distinct sub-genre with Warhammer and so on.

On the score of Battletech being mistaken for a miniatures game, the basis for this goes back to the very beginning.

According to Weisman, inspiration struck while he and Babcock were trying to find distributors for FASA products at a hobby trade show. Because there were few dedicated game stores at the time, this show was more for the kind of businesses that sold hobby products along the lines of sewing, crafts, and scale models. While walking around, Weisman found a booth for a company called TCI, which was importing remaindered Japanese model kits based on designs from mecha anime like Macross. By miniatures gaming standards, these were quite large models, standing approximately 3-4 inches tall. But Weisman thought they would look impressive on the table and conceived of writing a game around them.

That game was, of course, Battledroids and the initial Battledroids set even came with two of these model kits, the Shadowhawk and Griffin. Unfortunately, the models could not really be used for the game considering they were too large for the hex map. So Battledroids also came with cardboard standees to use for the game. Nevertheless, FASA continued to sell these large models, imported through TCI, under the BattleTech name, although this was phased out because of production of smaller metal figures that could actually be used to play. All the same, FASA used these TCI models and 3D terrain to demo Battletech at conventions, going so far as to rip up the models with pliers and melt them with soldering irons to reflect battle damage, which of course got them the desired attention!

It was this partnership with TCI that led to the disruptive lawsuit in the mid 90s about the rights to the classic mech designs.

So although Battletech is a wargame, we would not have it at all without models. It was the models that inspired Weisman to develop the game in the first place and the models were used at conventions to make the game stand out. Maybe more importantly, perhaps taking a cue from the likes of Dunnigan and Day in the historical milieu, writing detail-oriented background information for the mechs is what led to the most successful aspect of Battletech all these years — its fictional setting, which has gone on to find a huge audience beyond the board game experience.

Albertorius wrote:Common, mass-market board games are, interestingly enough, outnumbered 100 to 1 by all the others. If one hears "boardgame" and (here, of all places) only hear "Monopoly, Cluedo, Snakes and Ladders, Trivial Pursuit...", well... boy do they need to broaden their horizons.

Yet if you go on to the street asking random people if they know of Settlers of Catan, Nemesis, Super Dungeon Explorers, or similar, you'd get a blank stare more of then than not. If you asked them to list the board games you know, more often than not you'd hear of Monopoly's group then the ones I mentioned, and most wouldn't even consider something like Battletech as part of that game group. This is what I meant by common nomenclature.

Nurglitch wrote:BattleTech is certainly a board game in that it's played on a board, but it's more like Warhammer in that it's a sandbox of stuff that can be used in games that you put together yourself. All the different 'mechs, maps, record sheets, and optional rules seems to place it in its own distinct sub-genre with Warhammer and so on.

Which removes a lot of that "plain and simple" designation away from the Battletech concept.

If I said to my family, let's play a board game, then pulled out the Battlemech Manual, gave each 2-3 record sheets, and a couple mapsheets, I'd get some very strange looks, even from those who are Catan fanatics.

 Charistoph wrote:
Yet if you go on to the street asking random people if they know of Settlers of Catan, Nemesis, Super Dungeon Explorers, or similar, you'd get a blank stare more of then than not. If you asked them to list the board games you know, more often than not you'd hear of Monopoly's group then the ones I mentioned, and most wouldn't even consider something like Battletech as part of that game group. This is what I meant by common nomenclature.

Good thing, then, that we're not on the street. If I were to go to speak with a muggle like my sister or my mum, I might have to explain that, much like everything else, there is a gradient of complexity in board games. But I was not. I was speaking in a miniatures games forum, wich if anything is more of a niche than boardgames.

Also, you might be surprised, taking into account that boardgames nowadays sell like crazy. Absolutely bonkers amounts, and they target all demographies, now.

If I said to my family, let's play a board game, then pulled out the Battlemech Manual, gave each 2-3 record sheets, and a couple mapsheets, I'd get some very strange looks, even from those who are Catan fanatics.

Lastly... how do you think most of us were introduced to Battletech? Exactly that way. And with exactly the same amount of previous knowledge you're stipulating.

Somehow, we managed.

I was introduced to it by a schoolmate in grade 6 because he showed it to our teacher and it's basically grade 6 math worksheets.