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Has anyone tried or played this game yet? I saw a post for it on the discussions board and have been looking at it to decided to pick it up or not.

I have the game but have not played it yet. I'm setting up a game with my group (If you're in/near Chicago, come join us) using rebased mechwarrior minis for two weeks from now. I was going to use BTech minis, but once I got a few MW minis, I just kept acquiring.

It seems to be a good system. It's clearly trying to be a simplified version of BTech and I hope it suceeds when the dice start rolling.

Scroll to the last quarter of this thread...
http://theminiaturespage.com/boards/msg.mv?id=211118
...to see my observations on the rulebook.

As you can see in the thread above, I corresponded with the author, and the real selling points for me were. Customizability of mechs, plays in less than an hour, and easy to learn rules.

Boardgamegeek and Armorgrid's own forum have some reviews from folks who have played.

Looks interesting, for only a few bucks I might have to grab a copy.

Question for those that have it already...can you create your own units or do you have to use the ones they provide?

They actually don't provide you with any completely stock units.

In the main rules they give you stock chassis at 3 levels each for mechs, vehicles and infantry with fixed values for armor, heat dissipation, speed, etc. You take that Chassis and pick the weapons systems. Infantry are fairly fixed except for their support weapon, but there's a separate section with guidelines for creating your own custom mechs and vehicles. That section gives you starting chassis that are much more bare bones and gives you much more variabillity in terms of heat dissipation, speed, armor, weapons, ECM, etc... It's a neat system, but it should be mentioned that it's nowhere near as detailed as Battletech unit creation.

A few notes about replicating BT and MW designs in "Mech Attack!".

1) It will never be able to fully replicate all BT Mech's weapon loadouts as there are a maximum of 4 weapons systems per mech. Twin linked weapons count as one system and this helps, but there are some mechs that you will still have to disregard a gun or two. Still as I've started to stat up MW clix, it's prety easy to stat them up as WYSIWYG since many BT and MW designs don't actually show all the weapons systems the fluff/rules say they are supposedly armed with.

2) The number of weapons allowed per vehicle is limited. I discussed this with the designer and fudging the design rules so that troop carrying capacity can be exchanged for an additional hull weapon can mitigate some of this, but like mechs, some of the larger MWDA vehicles I have are so bristling with weapons that I may have to "forget" a machine gun or two.

Sounds good. Im actually looking for something a bit simpler than BT, so this may fit the bill nicely.

Go for it, it's on sale for 20% off right now. For $6.30 how can you go wrong! http://armorgridgames.com/

I just stated up 10 mechs. Took me a bit under an hour. 10 more mechs in-progress rebasing that I'll stat up tomorrow. By the time the group gets together to play on the 4th, I want to have 4-6 squads of 5 mechs based, stated and ready to go.

I know this post is a few days old, but I broke down and bought the game since it was on sale, and wanted to share my thoughts.

First, on the idea that it plays faster. This is only partially true from what I have experienced so far. There is 4 attack rolls per mechs if they have 4 weapon systems, and then 4 location rolls. Mguns in mech attack, like Btech SRMs or LBX weapons require lots of individual rolls. So while there is a cap on how many weapons a unit will roll, 4 is still plenty of rolls when you have several units. The 1d10 the system uses is easier than the 2d6 hit locations that btech uses.

Second, I really like the armor grid, and since that is the games namesake that makes sense. However, I dont like the critical rolls all that much. Basicly you fill out the grid, but then roll completely randomly once you punch through the grid in a certian spot. I think if you hit areas that coresponded to the grid I would like it more--so 1 would be the right arm, and 10 would be the left arm.

Finally, about ranges and hitting your target. In my opinion, perhaps the main reason that the game plays fast is because the board is designed to be small--saying the range is within spitting distance is somewhat an understatement, and without some serious cover attacks have a very very good chance to hit. Compared to battletech, with longer range and harsher to hit penalties, you cant help but not slam on your opponent.

Quick example, 2 heavy mechs standing off against each other will hit on 2's! See, a stock heavy mech can probably deal ~14 damage boxes a turn with no heat issues without trying to hard, and comes with 80 such boxes. So in 7 rounds, if one of the mechs isnt dead, its crippled and soon will be dead. Now, 7 rounds isnt all that fast, but at the same time unless both opponents are constantly moving out of range of each other I dont see how it will last much longer than that, unless they cripple each others weapons leaving them with nothing to attack with.

Final thoughts: The range issue makes this game less realistic and more in the 40k realm of weird science, where a foot soldier in less than 4 moves can be out of range of weapons... seeing as a modern cannon can hit out to 4000 meters, that means the infantry can move over 1000 meters/round. Range aside though, I can live with units being pretty easy to hit with futuristic targeting systems, and the armor grid is a fun way to track damage. Paper models are much better than 2d tokens, but still not as good as proper minis.

Definitely want to recommend this game, glad I bought the rules, but the game needs some tweaks before its ready for mainstream.

Thanks for the review Devian.

Range has always been an issue in tabletop games. I never liked the way BT had the mechs in one scale and the terrain/range in another.

40k is probably the worst Ive ever seen for unrealistic ranges. The only things that need range in a 28mm tabletop game would be very short range weapons like pistols and thrown grenades. With a 6 foot table being only about 400 feet in scale even the most basic rifle would be able to hit anything on the table...never mind larger weapons. On the flip side things like artillery wouldnt even be able to track and hit targets at that close of a range, so they would be pointless.

I also agree on the ease of hitting...if a M1 Abrams moving at 45 mph can hit another tank (aprox 8 feet tall) that is also moving, at several thousand meters range, then 40 foot tall robots in the far future should all but be guaranteed hits for each other. Battletech was the worst of this...since the modifiers stacked up so fast that all but the slowest movement and shortest range was a guaranteed miss.

Thanks For the review DevianID,
You make some good observations.

I think most folks will be tempted to see the armorgrid as a a grid of the miniature when actually its an abstracted way of representing the different types of damage done by different weapons and not corresponding in any real way to the positions of armor on a mech. Even with the abstractions, I agree that it might be good if the crits were fixed. I'll have to wait til I play the game to decide on this one.

How long did the game you played take and how many units did you use? Reading the rules, it does seem like their are a fair number of dice to roll for each mech. However, I doubt that a 4 on 4 mech battle (farily standard for Battletech) will take anywhere near as much time as in Mech Attack as in BT.

I'm divided on the range thing. Even the fluff of the battletech universe itself is almost as bad as 40k in the rediculously short effective ranges for weapons. I guess that MAttack is trying to do the battletech thing in this regard, but it does seem a bit "off" to me.

Hope I'm not coming across as overly-defending a game I haven't even played. I have a friend coming over to play a couple of games this saturday. I'll try and post up an AAR.

Had a friend over for two games of Mech Attack yesterday. I have to say that I like the system. We used rebased Mechwarrior clix figures on a 4x5 table with a fair amount of terrain.

First game was 5 mechs vs 5 mechs. Each side had 2 heavy, one medium and 2 light mechs. As we bumbled our way through the rules it ended up taking around a bit over 2 hours until one side had lost 3 mechs.

Second game gave 2 mechs a tank and two infantry units to each player. This game took a bit over an hour until my opponent conceeded.

A few observations.
-Once you get the hang of the damage charts, play moves along pretty well, but it takes a bit of getting used to
- Combined arms seems to work quite well. Troops are fragile, but they're also cheap, and troops on both sides actually managed to do some damage to mechs and vehicles.
-Though combined arms worked well, Mechs are still clearly the kings of the battlefield, both in staying power and offensive capability. My opponent and I were both pleased with this.
-As has been mentioned, weapons ranges are short. I compensated for this by putting alot of terrain on the board and it helped alot. My friend commented that the ranges seemed much longer when you had infantry on the board as they really gave a sense of scale to the ranges, which are still short, but didn't seem quite so rediculous especially when compared to the short ranges of BT fluff.
-One other function of short ranges of weapons and movement rates (running range is half of amost any weapons range) is that a fair amount of moves were aimed at running around behind the enemies mech to get the to-hit bonus. This is a double edged sword as it makes folks think carefully about mech placement and facing but also isn't terribly "realistic".
-Alternating unit activiation is a very nice feature. The first game took as long as some 40k games, but because I wasn't waiting through long opposing turns, it seemed to move much more quickly.
-Even when a mech has had nearly all it's damage removed, rolling critical hits can sometimes become a cycle of roll, reroll, reroll, etc. with the mech still standing at the end. We made a house rule that any mech taking 6 crits from one enemy unit during one activation was a headshot and the mech was down and this worked well for us.
-The layout of the mech record cards could be tweaked a bit. You have to write extremely small to get the info on the card. Having the cards in doc format so as to be able to print of statted cards would be really nice, but it's all PDF's right now.

Overall, it was a good experience. One of my prime hopes was for a fast play experience. Even as we got the hang of therules, it wasn't quite as fast as I expected, however I think that a lance v lance battle by players with a few games under their belt could probably conlcude in well under 90 minutes, and that's good enough for me. Even though hitting targets is quite common, I liked that mechs can take a fair amount of damage before going down. Also, the unit creation did yeild some very flavorfull mechs. A mech with lots of amor, but fewer guns played very different from the lighly armored mech that bristled with guns.

My friend also enjoyed the game enough that he bought a batch of MWDA figs off me for himeself.

Future plans for our use of this game include trying larger combined arms games as well as possibily introducing house rules for jump jets, flamethrowers and larger tanks (tanks only go to medium right now). I'll have some pics later. Feel free to ask any questions about the gameplay.

Our group has played a few games of this in an arena style with each person getting their own heavy and playing last man standing wins.

We did make a few tweaks to the rules to make things a little faster but we got 2 games in (a 6 player and a 4 player game) in under 2 hours and that included teaching the rules and building mechs.

As mentioned before there can be a lot of dice rolling but if you use different color dice you can declare the firing order of weapons and roll everything at once. Machine guns are the only weapon that require multiple damage rolls so you can roll all of them together as well.

We'll be running another arena event next week and trying out rules for flame throwers and an overwatch mechanic as well.

I saw your senario over at the ArmorGrid forum. Looks pretty cool.

I made another thread for my friend's blog post about the game described previously.

http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/0/332228.page

Pics included!

As an example of time, a light+heavy versus the same, including teaching the new player most of the rules, was completely done in 40 min. The second game was done in 30 min since he knew the rules.

Range versus movement continues to be an issue. A light mech can move 10 inches on a rush, and a laser shoots out to 10 inches. Thus a light mech can move as far as some weapons can shoot. Compared to the modern world where a tank can move 200-300 meters and shoot 3000 meters and mech attack is lacking a bit there.

Also Mech attack has heat as a balance mechanic for lasers, which do their damage in a straight line but use double the heat. My opponent complained that heat, as implemented, was practically no penalty at all compared to the potential of lasers to cut right into a mech.

Essentially, over heating by 6, the max, causes you to lose your next movement 20% of the time, lose your next shot 30% of the time, lose both your movement and your shot 10% of the time, take 1d10 damage 10%, or take 1d10 damage that may kill you if you are already near dead 30% of the time. So, while 1d10 damage is not fun, considering even a light mech has at least 40 armor, if you are not already heavily damaged then 1d10 damage will do nothing to you at all. Thus, the penalty to dealing damage that overheating by the max possible will cause is the 40% of the time you wont be able to shoot next round. BUT you just shot 100% more lasers than someone who is heat neutral. Thus, over time you will fire 60% more lasers total than someone who is heat neutral.

A simple house rule is that excess heat is NOT lost, but continues to add up, and can not exceed 6 heat extra. This puts a hard cap on what mechs can do, and excess heat can stick around for a long time. Will have to fiddle with this.

More good observations.

As to the range thing, I actually ended up liking the ranges for the exact reason you dislike them. As you point out, the extra speed of the light mech allows it to get out of range of many weapons systems. With lasers being as potent as you describe, it greatly increases the survivabillity of the very light mechs that are so vulnerable to laser fire. Though it is of course quite "unrealistic" short weapon ranges do fit quite well into the Battletech fluff.

As for the Lasers, your numbers do make sense, however, we didn't find it a problem. In the second game, my opponent began to push his heat on a few of his mechs. It did give him more firepower, but he was forced into scan or standby often enough that I didn't find myself at a disadvantage. I also designed some of the mechs to be heat neutral when moving and shooting all weapons. I'm not sure how I feel about this as it does result in mechs that have fewer weapons to exploit, but having t balance heat, movement, and firing is one of the defining characteristics about the BT universe.

The power of lasers and several other points of the rules do mean that this is a game with a few areas of areas for exploitation by WAAC players but thankfully our group doesn't tend to lean that way. I'm pretty happy with rules as written for club gaming, but there are a number of tweaks that would have to be ironed out if this was to be run amongst competetive gamers.

Lastly, it also helps that we're using MW models and statting based as close as possible to the models appearance rather than game advantage. Some mechs do end up with better stats than others, and some wind up with less-than-optimal weapon loads, but it greatly avoids min/maxing and seems again to fit in with battletech mech designs that often are idiosyncratic and less-than-optimal.

Thanks for giving our game a try... and I'm glad you guys are enjoying it. There are some really good comments and ideas here. I thought I'd chime in and give some explanations and thoughts behind the game.

Range - My primary goal was to create a game that is relatively simple yet tactical and strategic... I wanted to avoid creating another Mech "simulator". Making the ranges a tad bit on the short side allows movement to be a significant tactical element. It also prevents players from rushing ahead and firing on the first turn before their opponent has had a chance to maneuver. Dance of Death anyone?

Heat - While I think Heat is an important element with any good Mech game, I didn't want it to be a major factor... it's there for flavor really. It's designed to be simple and easy to implement... and more annoying than deadly (unless you're already severely damaged).

Lasers - They are deadly... but I feel the heat does balance them. Also, a Heavy Laser is the only one that can penetrate a stock Light Mech's armor in one shot... but shouldn't a Light Mech have a healthy fear of Heavy Mechs? (^_^)

I really enjoy your ideas and suggestions. I am open to better ways of doing things... most of the changes in version 1.5 were player driven.

Nice to see you post here ArmorGridGames!

As for range, its not so much that I dont like the range as it is that range has been significantly decreased for the games sake as opposed to simulator sake. Its as valid a design choice as any, especially as the goal is not a realistic sim but a fast and fun game. That said though, with movement so high and heat less of an issue in our games running around the enemy for rear shots with all your weapons was perhaps a bit too common. If heat was more of an issue then the 2 heat for rushing would really cut back on your firepower.

As for lasers, again its down to a heat issue. Lasers are balanced by their extra heat, but heat itself is not balanced well. For example, if you over heat by only 1, you have a 40% chance that the heat doesnt impact you in any way.

I would consider having heat carry over each round as a must. Then put a hard cap of 6 heat over. Either that, or harsher penalties for heat, like -1 move for every odd point of heat over, and -1 to hit for every even point of heat over. Thus, if you are 5 over heat you suffer -3mp and -2 to hit. This way, even if you do roll a heat result that does not hurt you in any way (like 1d10 damage on a fresh mech with 120 armor), you still have heat penalties to deal with.

Very interesting ideas... I would like to counter one point though. You said that going over 1 heat has a 40% chance of having no effect... My thinking was that going over 1 heat has a 60% chance of a negative effect. Granted, a fuel cell explosion on a Mech with full armor is not that scary... But it does reduce your armor.

One of my design goals was a simple core game engine that could be enhanced with optional rules.... Allowing players to adjust the complexity of the game to their liking. There are a few optional rules in the current version, but I plan to fully utilize the optional rules in version 2.0 when we get to it.

Heat did originally carry over in the first version of the rules... But was simplified due to player feedback. The current incarnation fits better with the simple core design goal. That being said, your comments point to an excellent optional rule that can be used as a tool for players to adjust the game to their liking. I like to keep things simple, so I'm thinking the optional rule might simply state that un-vented heat does carry over. This would allow you to push your Mech when you need to... But dangerous if you do it repeatedly.