At this point I have talked about several books and assuming your following the guide, you are roughly caught up to where I am myself. Now I’m by no stretch of the imagination an expert in all things Battletech, in fact, for all intents and purpose I’m a complete wet behind the ears noob. That said, I firmly believe the best guides come from novices, as experts and long time vets can very easily overlook the fact that as new players, we really don’t know jack shit and you can make no assumptions of any kind about what we may or may not have come across or experienced in the game.

With that in mind the question for this guide is where does one go next. At this point we have experienced the core set, we have familiarized ourselves with the rules and the universe, we have experienced some parts of the campaign rules, tech bits about mech creation and are delving deeper into the nitty gritty of the game. If you think I was confused when I started, from this point things really become very fuzzy as the fork in the road has many paths to choose from.

From what I have gathered however there is a core question when approaching the game of Battletech that you have to answer which can and will close many of these paths.

The question is, do you want to get into the combined forces gameplay or do you plan to stick with Battemech vs. Battlemech games exclusively.

To answer that question you have to understand what it means. There is a book you have probably already considered getting called Battletech: Total Warefare. This book includes many of the rules you have already available to you in the Battletech Manual, however it also includes the rules for many other types of units in the Battletech universe including things you may already have seen mentioned in other books like tanks, infantry units, battlesuits, pretty much everything from flying saucers to a guy on the ground with a rifle. These units can be incorporated into your matches/scenarios & campaigns to create a more full fledged science-fiction warfare experience and a great deal of the source books available for the game make the assumption that this is something you have done.

If however you choose to go the purely mech vs. mech route and desire to skip all the existential stuff, it does take a few of the source books off the table as again, quite a few source books in Battletech work under the assumption that you are using the Battletech: Total Warefare rules.

I will from this point in the guide talk about some of the books available in general and note any books that do or don’t make this assumption.

Exploring Battletech Source Books

I truly believe that setting information enhances the experience of Battletech more than any rulebook and while I think many of the core rulebooks which expand the game are great, there is kind of a point of saturation which can cause you to lose focus about why we all love Battletech to begin with. Giant robots fighting it out in a exhaustively detailed science-fiction setting. It’s not just about rules and in fact, because the game is extremely long even when using the most basic rules, adding more complex rules that require more reference can really bog down the experience. Setting books however are just that, fluff and Battletech has some really good stuff.

My favorite books so far, the ones that I love to read and put a grin on my face and inspire me to play the game are the Historicals, in particular some of the origin stories about the Battletech universe. My favorite reads so far are the Historical Liberation of Terra I & II books. While applicable in game terms as a book to be used for the creation of campaigns, this really is largely a fluff book, one that speaks to the origins of the Battletech universe, those early year wars that set the stage for the universe. Its like watching episode I of Star Wars and seeing how it all started. I don’t know if the vets would agree with me, this certainly is a preference thing but if your like me and you love setting source books, these are really great. Definitely lots of information here to run entire campaigns around, though I would argue, you read it just to read it like a good book. The Historical Reunification War is another great example of these types of book (haven’t read it but I’m excited to, it appears to be along the same lines as the Terra books). These books don’t really make any major assumptions in terms of the depth or level of rules you use, in fact, it doesn’t even fully commit to whether you are using Alpha Strike or the Battletech Boardgame.

If you have gone the Battletech: Total Warefare route, one series of books I can recommend is the Turning Point books. These are a kind of campaign book which sets the stage of key moments in the Battletech history and puts you behind the drivers seat of larger forces with very specific campaign scenarios. Very detailed information outlines the story behind the conflicts and each has unique challenges for players, all under the belt of a Campaign Operations style structure but all the math is done for you including unit selection if you would like. You get your army, you get your background information and you get your campaign missions. Its all very self contained reminiscent of the starter books, but on a larger scale including all of the various forces described in the Total Warefare book. What I like about these more than anything is that they are short and to the point and largely self sufficient, making them easy to absorb. I really wish they made more of these types of books for strictly Battlemech battles, but it’s worth pointing out that it would not be too tough to adapt these scenarios to be just that, in fact they sort of intend you to as part of the setup can be to create random forces on each side using a random creation table or build them using one of the point system approaches (tonnage, credits etc.). You could simply omit any units that are not mechs for the turning point campaign, though, its clear that doing so may create some oddities with some scenarios which have been balanced with specific forces in mind. Unless your a cannon nut however this isn’t a big issue.

These books use the Chaos rules Track system, which at this point should be fairly familiar to you. Each series is set in a different era so while you could stick to the Succession Era, with these books you could easily explore other eras of the game. Now like many source books this one includes plenty of references to map sheets you may or more likely may not have. Its an unfortunate part of these books that they don’t include the maps you need to play the scenarios, one really wishes they would. You will have to seek them out on your own or use proxies.

I can’t really recommend (or not recommend) any specific books, though their layouts appear to be the same and Catalyst Games has offered a free one as well as some previews of some the ones you can buy. Its worth noting that these books are dirt cheap for what you get at 5 bucks a pop, probably the most value you for the buck of any of the source books as they save you the obscene amount of time it would take to create your own campaigns. One thing that is not fully self-contained is that you will need record sheets for the units you will use, but these are relatively easy to come by for free with the 3rd party software and internet at your finger tips.

The next books I would not recommend though must be mentioned because arguably I think the Battletech community would recommend it are the Technical Readout books. These books are a resource for fluff detail on all of the units of a particular era, giving both the background information and the point of the book of identifying which units are available to be used in a particular era. It makes sense that you need this information but there are online resources that provide the same thing in searchable database and personally I found that as a fluff/setting resource they where kind of generic. Its interesting enough to read about the history of your favorite mech, but I didn’t really see them as either necessary or particularly useful books as either setting books or rules books. They where kind of meh to me, but I will admit this is all opinion and zero fact, It seems to me at least that in large part the community for Battletech considers them a very necessary books to own for the game.

The Conclusion

I think Battletech is a great game, a nostalgic trip down memory lane of a game that has lived almost unchanged for 35 years. There is a ton of resources available to the game and one could easily get lost in endless source material, in particular the back story of the game that is about as elaborate as any I have seen.

Sadly however despite this being a very fun experience of exploring an old game with fresh eyes there are many issues with Battletech that make it difficult to recommend.

The first and perhaps biggest issue with Battletech is that its origins as a game made in the 80’s with minimal updates really show through in light of modern game design and modern miniatures game. This is a fairly hefty ruleset built around a tactical game that is ultimately very simple and relatively shallow. Its like playing checkers with a 300 page rulebook, a complicated game, but that complication does not result in a deeper tactical experience, just a very complicated resolution of the rules.

There are many great concepts in the game, in particular the zoomed in cockpit experience, location based damage models and a fairly interesting manipulation of dice roll modifiers via positions and actions taken. The weight of the rules to resolve these concepts however are too demanding with far too many sub-rules and exception based rules creating a metric ton of bookkeeping and administration. The really big offender and result of all this is that the game just takes too long to play, in particular in how it compares to the tactical depth of the game. The average play time of even the most basic Lance vs. Lance game (4 mechs vs. 4 mechs) will take in excess of 4+ hours to resolve and this is just the starting point for the game.

To me personally this is explains why the game lives in relative obscurity despite being based on a fairly noteworthy franchise. Gamers and science-fictions generally know about Battletech, this is not some niche setting, this is a well known and beloved universe. It’s unfortunate that the core game on which the whole thing is founded on is rather lackluster at least in comparison to modern games.

So what is a gamer to do, what is the recommendation here? The answer to me is fairly straightforward. Buy the Box Set and try it. Its a relatively cheap game to get into and you can make a pretty good assessment from this core set alone to determine whether or not its a game for you. I personally think, as has been the case for years, that modern games will look at this game and note that while based on a wonderful setting with some great concepts and ideas going into the mechanic, it is unfortunately a game terminally stuck in the 80’s. What this game needs more than anything if it is to compete and really join the miniature table top game world is a serious revision focused on modernizing the rule set, not necessarily to simplify the game, but to streamline it and most importantly greatly expedite gameplay.

There are some great alternatives to Battletech that I can recommend, first and foremost is Warmachine. Many of the great concepts and ideas that have gone into Battletech appear in Warmachine which is a far more modern and tactically rich game that is also about giant robots. Grant it, its a very different setting but I would argue just as rich and interesting as Battletech.

Dust Tactics is another game that features giant robots in a alternative universe tactical war game, also an amazing and very modern design that is far more tactically interesting with half the rules weight of Battletech.

At the end of the day, like any miniatures game, the gamer must choose and you would be doing yourself a disservice if you did not investigate Battletech as a option for your table top, but from one gamer to another, as cool as the concept is and as wonderful as the setting is, Battletech: The Game of Armored combat gets a pass from me. It just doesn’t have the modern nuts and bolts I’m looking for in a game and it’s long play time that offers too little tactical depth results in a game that doesn’t have a good time investment vs. tactical depth ratio.

In the last article we have covered the basics of battletech and if you have followed the guide you have a firm understanding of the rules of the game, you have a fair amount of context about the setting and you have a source book that covers the Succession Wars era of play including all of the Mechs from that era to use in your miniature battles. This should be enough to create some very memorable and varied games for you and your friends.

At this point you may have already reached out beyond this guide and began exploring some of the material and resources available in Battletech, I’m sure it’s all very tempting. That’s the wonderful thing about Battletech, it inspires the imagination and gets us thinking in grandiose scales as we envision playing out epic long running campaigns on huge battlefield in the historical context of a rich science-fiction setting. Well if that is where your brain is at there is plenty of great stuff waiting for you but as this guide endeavours to introduce the game slowly and in a logical manner, I don’t believe we are quite far enough along to start digging quite that deep into the game as tempting as it may be.

Creating some variety

Battletech is a great game, but once you have played it a few times, you will note that there really isn’t much of a balancing mechanic in the game. If you simply choose “the best 4 mechs” for your lance and play games that have the basic “kill everything” winning condition, you will start running into balance issues even if you use some of the basic balancing features like tonnage of mechs for example. Not all 50 ton mechs for example are created equal, in fact if you read your Succession War Technical Readout a bit more thoroughly you will realize that this book covers a pretty wide range of mechs ranging from some of the most effective, to historical duds. Battletech is a living breathing world and its filled with engineering success stories as it is with failures.

Battletech doesn’t really try to be a balanced game in the classic sense, in a way, its more of a role-playing game in that its intended to be run with unique stories and in the context of a tactical game, using unique scenarios based on historical events. To get some interesting variety for your games you really need to reach out to some of these stories on which scenarios are based which will give you both some interesting tactical challenges as well as some great historical story context for your matches.

Unfortunately most of the resource for Battletech make the assumption that you are using some or all of the core resource books that really expand the ruleset and push the game away from just straight mech on mech action and into the combined warefare rules which are found in the Battletech: Total Warfare rule set. It’s a great book and we will get to it in this guide, but now is not the time. This ruleset complicates the living shit out of the game and if you take it on too early you will find yourself confused and frustrated. Besides you didn’t get into Battletech to push infantile troops around, you got into it to have giant robot fights.. am I right?

That said there are a couple of books, though not based on the Succession Wars, but that come close enough that they can be used and since the point of moving through the content is to keep increasing options and variety, its ok that you don’t match the eras of play exactly to the sources you currently have. Especially with these two great books that I recommend which are The Sword and Dragon starter book and The Wolf and Blake Starter Book. Both are self contained starter books that give you everything you need to run the story-mini-campaign in your home game within the historical context of the periods they represent and both are exclusively focused scenarios on Mech versus Mech, Lance versus Lance action.

Now there are two caveats here, these starter sets were designed with selling specific miniature sets which are not the Box Core Set. Catalyst Game Labs is clever that way, but as already mentioned a couple of times, the miniatures are just place holders, the characters sheets are the mechs and so its as simple as using your miniatures as proxies and printing out the included Battlemech sheets for these campaign scenarios.

In these scenarios you will be using a designated force, with designated pilots all balance to create some very challenging and fun scenarios. Of course the best part is you get to experience the battletech universe from the drivers seat, giving you a chance to re-write a piece of Battletech history. In these mini-campaigns you will manage your forces, make campaign decisions and battle it out in key moments of the conflicts. It’s great fun!

Reading through this material you will be introduced to the basics of Battletechs campaign systems, new mechs, special mechwarrior abilities, some new weapons and in both cases new eras of play. Both books ease you into these new eras of play so the complexity is limited, while connected to future resources you may be interested and will seem familiar after playing through these two stories. I recommend doing them in order, starting with The Sword and Dragon.

Moving into the deep end

If you play one or both campaign scenarios you will have gotten a basic understanding of the campaign rules for Battletech and may start looking towards both building your own force and testing that force in the context of other campaigns. In fact if you played Battletech the PC game published by Paradox Interactive, you may have found these two campaign scenario rules familiar and that’s because there is a lot of connection with how campaign rules for the boardgame and the PC game work.

Still I think it’s still best to stick to exclusively Battletech combat, but you may at this point be comfortable enough with the existing rulesets to start imagining the construction, customization and design of your own Battlemechs and your own Battlemech forces with their own backstory, history and with a desire to run them in a campaign either of your own creation or one of the challenging campaigns that Catalyst Game Labs has come up with. And so you should.

From this point I can recommend a couple of the core rulebooks that work in unison and are dynamic enough to be used in part or as a whole. The first is the Battlemech Techmanual. With this book you will have detailed rules for constructing or customizing Battlemechs first and foremost which is kind of one of the more fun things you can do with Battletech. Creating your own mechs or customizing existing mechs is really the starting point of creating a piece of Battletech history of your own. Now this book also gives you the rules for creating all of the other types of mixed units of the game and at some point you may use those as well, but this book is well worth just the content that applies to Battlemechs.

Next you may want to consider Battletech Campaign Operations, after all once you start creating and customizing your own mechs you will no doubt want to put them to the test and or combine them into their own lance or even add them as part of larger force in a campaign. The content of Campaign Operations you will already be somewhat familiar with as you have already used parts of the rules in the Starter Book campaign scenarios assuming you are following along with this guide. This expands campaign rules to completion and gives you the rules for force creation and the many details around getting ready for a campaign either of your own creation or one of the many published ones. This book includes many custom rules that you can start including in your game like special mechwarrior abilities, featured in the core box sets (see mechwarrior cards). Having the core rules for running campaigns really is getting into the advanced form of the game, while you can still maintain that Lance versus Lance core gameplay.

After acquiring, reading and applying these books for the game you are no doubt going to be looking to exercise the many available options to actual gameplay. By the time your through here you will likely have customized mechs, created some of your own, created a force, unique Mechwarriors, maybe even defined some core narratives about your force like what house they work for, or perhaps they are pirates or mercenaries. This is all well and good, but now you want to start using what you have constructed as much of what is in these two books is prep work.

This is where my final recommendation of Part II of this guide comes in and that book is Battletech: Total Chaos.  

Battletech: Total Chaos is a two prong book. First it is a review of some information you have already learned in the Starter Books and the Battletech Campaign Operations book. The information here is added here because strictly speaking you could just use this book in the same way you did the Starter Book, in many ways its self contained but with the Techmanual and Campaign Operations book, you can tackle the many campaign scenarios available here with your own created forces and manage them throughout the campaign. Which brings me to the second prong of this book, the campaign scenarios.

There are several here and really its really a pure gold mine of content designed to provide you with hundreds of hours of gameplay in unique battles populated by some of Battletechs greatest hits of history. This book is like a dozen starter books in one, though the scenarios are more challenging, more dynamic and in many ways more complex.

One issue with this book and really with most Battletech books that deal with campaigns and scenarios is that they make a lot of assumptions about what sort of other content you might have in your possession. For example maps. Maps is something you really want to acquire as those 2-3 that you have that came with the starter and core set are not going to be enough to replicate the scenarios present in this book. You will want to acquire more maps and really map acquisition is something of a thing with Battletech. They aren’t readily available and there are many of them that you need so often you will have to proxy or use estimated (similar) maps as the ones called for in scenarios. Suffice to say you want variety. Thankfully paper maps work just fine with Battletech, in fact, most players will eventually prefer them simply because they take up less space on your shelf. Acquire as many as you can get your hands on and try to get a variety of locals and regions so you have variations. There are many fan created maps, google is your friend in this case.

Ok that concludes part II of our guide, I hope it has been helpful. In part III, we will continue our guided tour of Battletech into more complex and higher level play, as well as explore some setting books to fill out your collection.

I have developed a great love-hate relationship with Battletech The Game of Armored Warefare. On the one hand its an amazing tactical simulation of giant robots fighting it out in a science-fiction future (what could possibly be more awesome than that). On the other hand it is miniatures board game franchise that can only be described as a complete cluster-fuck of jumbled information, literally stacks of books with little to guide you through the material you might want or need to play the games countless levels of complexity. Now blaming a game for having a lot of content is not something I want to do, I love content, but it’s quite tough to know how to navigate it all and its to this order of acquisition and absorption of material this guide is dedicated to. I want to help new players come to terms not just with what the material is, but what is a good order in which to acquire and read it.

In short, once you get your starter set or your box set, you will begin to explore the games option as all good gamers do and there is much to explore, 35 years of books, miniatures and content. You will get very little instruction or guidance from Catalyst Game Lab the current overseer of the franchise. There are some basic overviews, but very few quest arrows if you get my drift.

As I have recently gone through the very painful process of deciphering the games very cryptic codex of books and content, I thought I would use the white space on my blog to pass on that knowledge in hopes that the next person to come along trying to figure out how Battletech works beyond the basic sets might find the experience a little less painful.

The Starter and Box Sets

The first place any new gamer should start when it comes to entering the world of Battletech is the Starter and Box set for the game. There really is NO OTHER OPTION. If you can’t get the box set due to unavailability (a very likely scenario), do yourself a favor and wait for a reprint. Entering the world of Battletech in any other way will be an infuriating and very disappointing experience. In fact, one of the key issues with the franchise is that aside from the starter box and core set, everything else in the entire codex library is made for not expert players, but veteran masters. There is very little in the way of intermediate entry points between the box set and the remaining line of books. In essence you go from elementary school football on the playgrounds, to the NFL Superbowl.

That said, the Core Box sets of which there is currently two (Starter and Core), will teach you to play the game on the most basic level possible, which in the case of Battletech is the Mech vs. Mech or Lance vs. Lance (4 mechs vs. 4 mechs) game. This gives you the foundation you need to understand Battletech and by playing these sets of scenarios you will get a taste of what is possible as well as the general groove of the game. It should be enough to come to the conclusion as to whether or not Battletech is for you, but it should be noted that the core set is to Battletech, what finger painting is to art. A humble beginning, just the tip of the iceberg if you will. This rabbit hole goes very deep.

In Battletech the ERA in which you play (The time period in the game world) makes a huge difference to the game. The current core set is based in the year 3025, a period known as “The Succession Wars”, the Third Succession War to be exact. This is important if you care about cannon plot, but it’s also critical to the balance of the game.

One thing that is not really mentioned anywhere is that the Succession Wars in which the core box is set, is a time period when the technology level is relatively low which means the mechs have basic types of weapons. As the Era’s progress, so do the types of mechs and weapons available, which means that a Heavy Mech in the succession wars era is a very different beast than one in some future era.

When you are starting, that is just something you want to keep in the back of your mind and is also a consideration when choosing which expanded products you will purchase to support your game.

Its also important to note that the miniatures of the game are “rough estimations” and not exact units. Another words, they are playing pieces and while there are specific miniatures you can buy to represent specific battlemechs, generally this is a hobby preference and not a requirement. In reality in the game of Battletech there are literally hundreds if not thousands of unique units, Battletechs and much more and as you progress to higher tiers of play you will realize that unlike other miniatures, its not possible to collect “the set” or “be a completionist”. What mech you have is on your Battlesheet more than what miniature is on the table representing that mech. Think of it more like a role-playing game. If you have a mage elf, any mage elf miniature will do as a representation.

As such a Locust and a Jenner are similar enough that they are interchangeable mini’s and you will find that even if you collect miniatures you will very often resort to using proxies like this or more often cardboard stand ups or for convenience which notably come with your box set and you will likely find yourself printing out or acquiring more to facilitate your game. I guess the point here is that Battletech is a boardgame first and a miniature game second, the miniatures are fun 3d representation on the board but, this is a tactical game and you will spend far more time reviewing your battlesheet (your battlemechs character sheet).

Taking Your First Steps Beyond The Box Set

The Battletech universe is an extraordinary and rich setting with countless unique events, wars, people and places represented by 35 years of books that have been written for the game. Taking your first step outside of the core set can be daunting, but in effect you have two main paths. Rules or Story.

The Rules path which I will talk about a bit later is defiantly worth considering as the expanded rules for Battletech are exponentially expansive driving deeper and deeper, to a point of extreme excess, yet resulting in a very fulfilling enrichment of the game.

That said, I strongly advise you go the path of story first and the reason is simple. All of the rules material generally assumes that you have a strong working knowledge of the Battletech universe and I really wish someone had told me that when I started. You won’t find a word printed in any manual that doesn’t make a lot of assumptions about your understanding the setting, in fact, Battletech has a crap ton of terminology and concepts, without the background of the setting its increasingly difficult to decipher the material so as a first step I strongly recommend exploring and absorbing the Battletech universe first.

For that I recommend you start with the Battletech: Universe core book. This roughly 50 page book will take you through the history of humanity in the stars from their humble beginnings as explorers of space to the year 3067. It will explain core concepts, technology, the organizations and much of the terminology of the game. This is not a complete history of the Battletech universe (far from it) but it will catch you up and give you the necessary background to take the first steps into what is a much larger world. More importantly it will bring you to where you are with your box set history wise in great detail which I think will both enrich your experience for the games you are playing and make choosing where you go from here much easier.

If you want to go further down the story rabbit hole, I would recommend the individual house books though I would consider this a luxury and not really a necessity. The material in the core set and that of the Universe book give you a fairly good feel for the houses, these house books really are just icing on the cake. These books give additional details on the history of the Battletech universe, but they do so from the perspective of the different major factions of the game world which includes some of the key conflicts of the game involving the houses. Many of these conflicts are further detailed out in focused resources so if you find one you like, odds are you could play through that conflict in a campaign using one of these focused books (more on these focused resources later).

House books also bring in some rules, which if you have followed this guide so far should largely be ignored for now, but may become handy if you decide to for example represent one of the houses in a campaign. You will also find a lot of information about the preferences and structure of the different kind of units house uses, which plays more to the tone and cannon of armies you might be constructing later if and when you get into running campaigns.

Taking The Next Step

Once you have played a few matches with the core rulebook you may start to envision the creation of your own mechs, making alterations to weapons systems for your favorite or looking for some unique scenarios, perhaps even getting into running the game in campaign mode as the quick rulesbook from the core set talks about briefly. In Battletech there is a book for everything and the detail on any given subject is extensive and while you might see it as a fork in the road from this point, I don’t believe it really is.

The goal of your battletech experience should be that of a gradual layering of content, rules and expansion so that you can get your head around the games extended material, but if you take the wrong fork you will find yourself reading books that reference material from other books you haven’t read yet (a common practice in Battletech) and making the assumption that you have. This, in a way, is part of the problem with the Battletech franchise as a whole, it makes a lot of assumptions about what you may have read so far.

The next real step to take is to get the Battletech Manual. You might be tempted by other core rulebooks, most notably Battletech: Total Warefare but as you have just learned how to play Battletech with Battlemechs, dragging the rainbow of other units from Protomechs, to Aerospace units and all the rules weight that comes with these combined arms rulesets works under the assumption that you are already crystal clear on the advanced rules of the game. Total Warefare presents these rules to you, but in my opinion, it does so with equal measure, giving as much weight to less exciting units like ground forces and tanks as it does to the unit that made the game famous, Battemechs. To me, Total Warefare is something for consideration later down the line and may indeed never make it on your plate. The Battletech manual on the other hand, I would consider an essential book to playing the core game.

The Battletech Manual is really just an extension of and the complete rulebook for Battlemechs you have already learned and as such I think its the next logical step.

In the Battletech Manual you will find complete rules as they exist for running Battlemech scenarios & fights, including all of the expanded equipment from the large array of Eras as well as more thorough and exhaustive rules for the game as a whole. After familiarizing yourself with this book and playing it using the full rules a few times you will have leaped into the larger world that is Battletech from a logical point and much of what you might read after this book will make a lot more sense.

I don’t think its unfair to say however that once you have the Battletech manual and the Universe Book, you may already have everything you will ever need to enjoy the game. All books from this point are generally very advanced and work towards creating larger and more grandiose experiences, but simultaneously pulls away from the core of the game that you have learned to play with the core set and this book (Battletech Manual) as well as the star of the show, Battlemechs.

Its really a question of how much complexity and detail you really need to enjoy the game and how far you want to expand your experiance. For most people I would say the adventure from here isn’t one of exploring the rules, but rather exploring the setting which coincidentally would continue to add optional rules, but would not necessarily change the feel and track of the game as you have learned it to this point. I guess what I’m saying is that, for a couple of friends who want to get together and have robot fights and that is exciting, adding anymore of the core rulebooks is really not going to improve that type of experience any further. Enhancing that experience might come in the form of finding interesting scenarios and battle situations instead or perhaps more relevant would be to add more story and setting information to your table to give the fights some relevance and context in the scope of the worlds setting.

Expanding Your Horizons

After getting the Battletech Manual and getting even more intimate with the core rules of the game you will have probably generated a few questions. One I’m certain off is trying to come to grips with the difference between “The Boardgame” and “Alpha Strike”. After all you got those Alpha Strike cards in the core set and you don’t use them in the board game.

I don’t think it’s a decision point as you could very well play both, but there are two conceptual differences between the board game and the Alpha Strike way to play the game of Battletech and a plethora of rules differences.

The first is that Alpha Strike does not use a hex grid map and is instead played on custom terrain like a more traditional miniature game. Secondly Alpha Strike allows for larger forces to be used in a game of Battletech while not increasing the time needed to play. The Boardgame is typically a Lance vs. Lance (4 vs. 4) fight, while Alpha Strike can handle a lot more in the same time scope. The sacrifice here is some of the details of tactical combat, things are a bit more abstracted.

For the remainder of this article I will work under the assumption that you want to play the boardgame given that I have no experience with Alpha Strike, I can’t comment one way or the other on its qualty. What I do know is that I enjoy the detail and smaller focus of the boardgame and this is how I choose to play it and as such, its what I feel comfortable offering advice on.

None the less should you choose to play using Alpha Strike rules, I would imagine much of the advice up to this point would apply just the same and potentially moving forward it may very well continue to do so.

To me the next logical step for exploring Battletech is to create some context for the fights you are having. Scenarios and one shots are fun, but given enough of them you are eventually going to find that they feel a bit repetitive and in a way the entire Battletech franchise is built around the idea that players will be exploring new challenges on a regular basis. Many of the books created for Battletech make this assumption and as such offer unique challenges and experiences. The only real question is where to start.

Personally I think before seeking out scenarios and unique source books there is one additional stop that should not be missed. I strongly suggest picking up a Technical Readout Book, in this case The Succession Wars: Technical Readout which will introduce you to a whole bunch of new Battlemechs in the era your box set is based as well as giving you more narrative food for the mechs you have already been playing with. The Succession War Technical Readout book is a great resource that really does nothing to add rules weight, yet it offers many new options and lots of narrative flavor, aka context.

You will no doubt find new mechs you want to try as well as alternative versions of mechs you already have and so naturally the next thing you will be asking yourself is “hey, where do I get the record sheets for these mechs”.

The answer is simple. You can simply photocopy and print the blank mech sheet that comes with your box-set and copy the information from the Technical Readout or you can pick up a 3rd party tool designed to provide you with every record sheet for every mech ever released as well as the ability to create your own. Sounds good right. You can download the tool and I highly recommend it as a major time saver. What I don’t recommend is buying record sheets, this is just pointless, its like paying for someone else to fill in a character sheet for you, its madness! Save your money for something more useful.

That concludes the first part of this article. Look for part II coming to you soon where we will tackle some more advanced topics and resources available for Battletech the game of armored combat.