For Christmas I got a big set of robogear (the base game and a half-dozen additional vehicles) for Ork conversion fodder, but the boy and I tossed together a pair of the vehicles and built some terrain and duked it out using the robogear rules! He wanted the Spider, and took a I Tornado (the close combat arms on a tank amused me). The little guys that come with it are quite fiddly to assemble so we just grabbed a couple
40k guys for our infantry -- he had 4 space marines and I grabbed 4 orks to represent 1 of each infantry type. My vehicle cost 10 points more than his, though, so I left my 'rifleman' behind to even the points.
We used 'real firing' rules for our vehicles and basically completely forgot about their virtual weapons (not that mine had any except the claw and buzzsaw that never saw close combat action). I'd like to try it again with pure virtual, but this was really pretty fun. Our vehicles approached the scenery in the middle and started firing at each other... I got a lucky turn where I landed 2 shots for 7 total points. He missed 1 and the other only hit for a whopping 1 damage. Then he discovered that the 'real firing' weapons would pretty much always knock down an infantry unit, so he started picking off my poor orks. I moved my sniper out and took pot-shots at his infantry, with some success and continued to fire my 'real' weapons at his spider -- I completely biffed my next turn though and fired both missiles high. My infantry managed to put a wound on his sniper and 3 on his machine-gunner before his spider wiped them out completely -- he was able to take advantage of the posable legs to hike up the spider's butt to make shooting over the terrain easier.
Then I finally killed his spider with a salvo of real missiles (at which point I accidently broke it off trying to rotate it where it didn't want to go -- oops!). He started plinking me down while I took out his infantry, and in the epic finale it was Machine-Gunner with 1 wound left vs Tornado with 3 wounds. I've still got 2 real shots left, plenty to take out the machine gunner if I go first. Initiative... he wins! The critically injured machine gunner takes aim, and his first shot at close range is a hit! The Tornado has a single wound left, but the machine gunner gets 2 shots instead of one -- I've got partial cover but the dice are not in my favor and the last thing my poor Tornado hears is the DAKKADAKKADAKKA of the enemy machinegun.
I'm definately going to use a bunch of these parts for conversion fodder, but I'm really thinking about either leaving several of the vehicles 'stock' to play as intended or back-porting the conversions either with custom rules or just "counts as".
Although the infantry dudes are a little fiddly, they're actually pretty well done for a 'board-game' style game. Each guy has 2 sets of arms (sniper/bazooka and rifle/machinegun), twistable waist and a wound marker in the base. You don't need glue except to attach the sniper's shoulderpad and it's really not necessary. Of course I don't figure this out until after I glue one of them together, but s'all good
. The vehicles also clip together with no glue (which is good, since I may build them all stock to play a few more games before breaking them down to cannibalize for my orks).
Once we decide how we want the terrain to look i'll probably take it apart and put it back together with glue so we can get rid of the clips and then use it for either killteam,
40k, or robogear. It's modular, but the clips are kind of brittle (they seem to be made of a different plastic than the vehicles and infantry) so we broke a bunch of the 3-way clips.
I suspect as a wargame it will be better with virtual firing rules rather than the 'real' firing (the rulebook offers this option), but it was fun and amusing for a casual game, so we may just keep playing that way until we lose all the little plastic missiles.