The Pleasures of Mechanized Mayhem

 

As a young teen, I made it a point to set the VCR to record Robotech every morning before going off to school. When I got back in the afternoon, my dad and I would sit down and watch it together. If it was sci-fi TV, my dad was interested, and I have many fond memories of watching everything from the original Star Trek series with him to Space: 1999 to Battlestar Galactica. 

Incidentally, I was never a Transformers fan, however. It aired when I was 14, not long after I abandoned buying and playing with toys, and even at that age I could discern the whiff of bullshit wafting off a TV show crassly designed with the primary purpose of selling expensive plastic junk. Given that my dad and I never watched that show, it was bemusing to learn that in recent years my dad has gone to the theater to see most of those Michael Bay monstrosities. As a car guy, a sci-fi fan, and a bit of a brawler in his salad days (accumulating five broken noses and a punctured ear drum for his efforts), the idea of cars turning into giant robots duking it out must have pushed his buttons in a way that I should have but didn't anticipate.

In addition to Robotech, like many young guys my age with such proclivities, I did become mildly obsessed with anime in the mid-1980s, especially things like Mobile Suit Gundam, Bubblegum Crisis, and Appleseed. Basically anything with mechs and battlesuits (of course, Akira, Captain Harlock, Vampire Hunter D, and other anime also fueled my imagination, but they pushed different buttons than the anthropomorphized machines of destruction). Robotech and other anime felt like the antidote to the childishness of Transformers. Unsurprisingly, I think the first local BBS I dialed into with my Commodore 64 was dedicated to anime, and it eventually led me to a fellow enthusiast's house from a much more affluent family than mine who owned a laser disc player and had parents who would spring for the $80-$100 discs from Japan. More often than not, though, I had to suffice myself with learning about anime in magazines, and I still have the first issues of Japanimation and Animag that I studied and scrutinized at the time. The paucity of anything anime-related in those days was real on this continent.

Alas, Battletech the game came along just as I was starting to enter my decades-long gaming hibernation. With college, previous gaming friends began to scatter geographically, and other interests began to take precedence. Playing in bands and writing music, launching zines, writing about movies and music, working on a creative writing masters, drinking, chasing girls. Passions worth pursuing, to be sure. But in retrospect I wish I had found ways to keep gaming as a part of my life beyond lugging around multitudinous boxes of unplayed games through most of my adulthood. They felt like a reminder of a time in my life I couldn't hope or fathom might return, and in one of those great transitional upheavals--a divorce after 17 years--I parted with almost all of it.

So, when fellow Scrummer John Sears suggested we give a game of Battletech a try on Tabletop Simulator during the pandemic, I was keen to see what I had missed. It was a lot of fun, and blew the dust off some of those memories of watching anime as a kid. Of course, playing a tabletop game online is approximately 50% as fun as doing so in a room with friends, so I was excited once again when John proposed to set up an in-person game for us in Scrum Hall last month. 

Battletech: Alpha Strike

Fortunately, we played the simplified Alpha Strike version of the game, because my mind isn't 16 years old anymore, and my fun comes less from the pedantry of mastering rulebook minutia than it does from knocking models about on a pretend battlefield and chucking a bunch of dice.

To be honest, a lot of the particulars of our battle escape my memory a month out from our gathering, but I know we did have five players divided into two teams: Rich, Francesco, and I ran a bunch of mechs and ground vehicles on one side, while John and Walt did the same from their half of the table. While the narrative is now lost to me, the objective was to kill half the mechs on the other side to win, or if necessary, to force a draw by destroying the ammo/fuel depot in the center of the battlefield. (I think Walt posted more of a blow-by-blow after-action report on his blog, so I'll link to that at the end of this post for the curious.)

The photos below should, however, provide a flavor of the proceedings and an appreciation for the lovely models and terrain John brought for us all to play with that evening. Most of these photos are by my wife, but a few here and there are from possibly any of us in attendance as I tend to scavenge shots from the other players' social media accounts (for that, gentlemen, I beg your indulgence and forgiveness).

In the end I will say that I had a great time, and felt like I didn't embarrass myself, keeping John on his toes for a few rounds as we vied over a strategically important hilltop perch looking out over the rest of the battlefield. I can't say I had a masterplan, per se, but I thought on my feet well enough throughout our little hilltop drama so as not to leave my comrades vulnerable to what would have been a devastating vantage point for John to secure.

A bird's eye view of the battlefield before the mechs arrived to fight.

The depot that could be destroyed to secure a draw if one side seemed in danger of losing.

Rich, Francesco, and John (l-r)

Joe and Francesco (l-r)

Rich, thinking it through.

John and Walt (l-r)

Next time I'm wearing a goddam hat.

Cha-cha turns to Ellen: "Can I fight the little robot men next?"

Numenera Role-Playing Game

Earlier in the day for our first game, Rich was good enough to introduce us to Numenera, an RPG I had heard reference to but knew very little about. As usual, Rich's game mastery skills make him one of the most enjoyable GMs I've played with over the years. The world of Numenera, however, is exactly the kind of setting I would have disliked in my youth--I always chaffed when I picked up a fantasy novel and then half way through it was revealed that everything was built upon some future post-apocalyptic version of our own world, with magical artifacts actually being bits of old technology from our modern world.  Back then I would have been pissed that somebody got peanut butter on my chocolate. Now, I actually enjoy those tropes, and they didn't detract from our one-shot wanderings in the strange environs of Numenera. And in the end, who really cares when you're sitting at the table with a bunch of fellas whose company you look forward to every month, and wish you got to see more often.

Post Script

As promised, here's a link to Walt's after-action report for the Battletech game.

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