Kickin' It Old School

Got to play one of my all time favorite miniatures games of all time this past Saturday at the Gopher. Battletech. If you're unfamiliar, Battletech (btech for short) is a game where you try to kill your opponent with a giant robot. Try to find one un-fun thing about that statement, I dare you. I've been playing it off and on for about the last 15 or so years and have yet to see a game where I didn't have a blast. Hell, one game I even had two. But in all my years I've yet to see btech do one major thing, catch on to the masses. As much as I try to preach it's funness (hehe I made up a word) I'm only one man. I've chatted with players all over the nation and all I can ever find are small maybe 5-6 member strong pockets of resistance, and they are strung out over quite a bit of distance. So why, if it's so much fun, doesn't it catch on. Couple reasons mainly. One, competitiveness. As much as I may not like to admit it, a competitive game brings more people. Like I said, I've talked to people all over the place, played with people all over the place, and not one of them plays this game to compete. It's a fun game, just for fun, and at the end of the night if you didn't have fun, then you probably were in the bathroom when the one guys mech fell over, critted it's self and blew off the leg of the other guys mech, trust me it was hilarious.  It's a win/lose for me, I love playing games just for fun, but on the other hand it's the competitive players that drive games. You look at games like 40k, Warmachine, Hordes, Warhammer Fantasy, they are all games that have a very competitive base to them. You can play them for fun, but the WAAC players will always be there ready to crush your "just because" list. Second reason: Speed. Btech ain't fast period. The four games I named above, all can be played in a relatively short amount of time say around 2 hours. Btech, you're lucky to get 3 rounds done in 2 hours. I've played games as long as 36 hours (though that game we had been drinking heavily and were using WAY too many mechs and vehicles). The game I played last night started at 6 roughly and I had to call time at 1030. We had only 6 mechs (3 per side) so I consider that one a quick game. If it had been allowed to continue it could have gone on probably another 2 hours, so you're looking at 6 and a half hours for a SMALL game. I've been to cons where there are only two btech games scheduled per day because that's all you're gonna get. This is the real killer. When you're looking at taking as much time for one game as an entire 40k TOURNAMENT it represents a large investment of time for anyone but the most die hard for the game. Kind of a side note to the time issue is the rules set. Nearly everything you can think of in the game is in the book. Want to kick a mech underwater? There's a rule for that. Want to know what happens if your mech skids into another one accidentily? There's a rule for that. The main rulebook for btech is nearly the same length as the 40k rulebook, but when you take out the fluff, the btech book has nearly double the rules, and all those rules take time to look up and that's one of the reasons it takes so long to get through a game. Another reason it takes so long, is because after you do something cool in the game you must spend at least 20 minutes talking and laughing about it like it had been years since it happened instead of minutes. It's a rule, look it up. I think it's in one of the FAQ's. So then with all of these problems, why do I still love it so much? Were you not paying attention at the beginning? It's giant robots shooting lasers at each other! And I'll continue to support it and try to drag as many others into the madness with me. Ok, this went on a little longer than I wanted it too so I'm making a separate post for the actual game.